Information is power. Our mission at Portside is to seek out and to provide information that empowers you -- that empowers the left. Every day we search hundreds of sources to connect you with the most interesting, striking and useful material. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.
Even though the economy is adding more jobs, there's increasing evidence that many of those new positions don't offer the kind of wages and benefits required to get ahead. Americans are working but aren't earning enough to gain economic stability.
Our government’s and corporate media’s failure to capture the true extent of unemployment creates a distorted narrative about work that feeds bewilderment and self-recrimination.
The future of work means fewer hours spent working.
Millennials are already in debt and without savings. After the next downturn, they’ll be in even bigger trouble.
Mainstream measurements create an artificially low unemployment number. Alternative methods are necessary to get a better picture of what is really going on in the labor market.
Aspects of the report are disturbing. Over the last year, the black unemployment rate has risen 0.2 percentage points to 6.7 percent and the white unemployment rate has dropped 0.4 percentage point to 3.1 percent. The rise is all among black men.
Automation often seems like a scary new problem, but it’s neither entirely scary nor entirely new.
One in 10 Bay Area residents earns too little to cover the cost of living; of those, 62 percent earn too much to qualify for food stamps.
One of the most remarkable demonstrations of the deep-seated radicalism of “ordinary people” has been all but forgotten, even by historians: namely, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.
This assault on typical workers’ bargaining power in recent decades has indeed made it harder to spark wage growth. But this doesn’t mean that you give up—it means you try harder!
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