taxi time

"Take me home and I'll get the money, he said, and I wondered if I could get the meter over $100. Turns out I could not. I pulled up in front of his house at $96.50, taxi time. You know what happened, of course: he disappeared into his house and the lights went out after about five minutes."

~~ from Rick & Jack in Croatia by Rick Harsch

in academic news

 From Temple to Texas State, universities continue to celebrate their employees.

Meet the Working Class

It's hard to make ends meet.

ten million

We're only missing ten million jobs.

Labor Day Weekend 2020, brought to you by covid19

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 52% of American adults under 30 live with their parents, and the number of households headed by 18 to 29-year-olds declined by 1.9 million (12%). At the same time, the August 2020 jobs report shows that workforce participation rose to 61.7% from 61.4% while unemployment declined from 10.2% to 8.4%. It's worth noting, perhaps, that 29 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment compensation although the $600 extra per week expired at the end of July. Happy Labor Day!

a check that would never be repaid

"We eat hotdogs and sauerkraut for lunch. After lunch, my father calls the telephone company and explains to them that he cannot pay his debt. He gets angry over a misunderstanding and berates the customer-service rep. He owes ninety bucks for last month plus three hundred from the winter, but he yells at the lady because before they said he could pay the ninety to keep the line and now she’s telling him three ninety or nothing. But he holds neither sum so the point is moot, and bankruptcy leaves one bitter or quarrelsome. He hangs up and bitches about those corporate mothers. When you lose your phone, you lose call backs from prospective employers too. I listen and despair and resist the urge to write him a check that would never be repaid."

~~ from "My Father's Great Recession" by Alex Kudera

austerity triplex (conforming loans only, please)

And here's the "real news" from Germany where a political leader, representing the more marginalized citizens, states, and pardon my possible paraphrase, that "austerity is the ideology of the ruling class." As you might imagine, it's the poor who go with less or without under such policies, and the video considers how German businesses are also hurt when citizens in Greece and Spain have little to no spending power beyond that which will go to the most basic necessities.

Back home, a recent year's worth of Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs-growth reporting was revised upward by almost 400,000, and although that is but a small dent in the supposed 23 million without work, or without as much work as they'd like, it is somewhat ironic that the "year" reported on seems almost entirely contained within the period where there was intense gridlock and a blocked jobs bill in Congress. Here's an excerpt from the Forbes article:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is out with its annual update to benchmark unemployment numbers (for the more cynical among you, the BLS does this every fall so this is not a number being ‘timed’ for the election), and the numbers reveal that 386,000 more non-farm jobs were actually created between March, 2011 and April 2012 than what had been originally reported.

The figures represent a variance from the previous data of 0.3 which sits right at the norm for annual benchmark adjustments which are typically up or down by 0.3 percent.

As a result of the revision, the Obama administration can now claim a net job increase of 125,000 rather than what had previously been believed to be a net loss of 261,000 jobs.

Of course, it remains a muddle, but it still feels like things are bad and not improving, or not improving fast enough, for millions and millions of workers throughout Europe and America. And, in some countries and counties, of course, they seem to be getting worse.