My oldest got a JOB today and I want to share how I feel about this event with the rest of you!!

This spring and summer there was a bit of a employment boost due to our once a decade counting of the nation. For many it came at just the right time as the benefits available from unemployment are fairly minimal and the census paid the enumerators (the folks doing the actual door-to-door work) $16.95 an hour. A couple of months on the census also was long enough that many of these folks will be able to file new claims and restart the clock on benefits.

This is all to the good, that is until State unemployment rules kick in. You see, many states don’t look at your last job to calculate what you will receive in benefits. Places like Colorado look at the last year of wages to determine your benefits. One formula takes the highest wages from two consecutive quarters and divides that by 26 then multiplies it by .6. This gives a benefit of 60% of wages, capped at $445. Or they look at the whole year, divide by 52 then divide that by 2 to get the weekly benefit.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

This is not a bad method, when the economy does not have millions of people who have been unemployed for more than six months and many of that group being unemployed for a year or longer. For those who had been out of work for a year or more, the census job while good money and an important boost also has put them out of the running for a good benefits check.

538 Ways to Live, Work, and Play Like a Liberal

It has been 368 days since my company of 10 years laid me off. I could be bitter about it, I suppose, but having had access to the financials, I knew how bad things were and knew that on that day I was just one of 30% of the workforce who would be told they no longer had a job. I was annoyed that I was on the block, having two projects in the previous 12 months that were returning 1.8 million and 2.2 million to the bottom line, but none of that matters when they ask for your keys, credit card and ID badge.

I went out the door with a plan. By the time I had packed up my office I knew I needed to go by a new suit, a new computer and call everyone in my card file. I had a nice little severance package worth two months of my salary and I was going to be employed before that ran out. It was the old company’s loss, not mine. I contacted recruiters, signed up on every job board available, and worked my network like a mad man.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Whatever our situation, we need allies to work successfully for change. We need people to talk with, brainstorm ideas, lift us up when we’re down, and build power by acting together. Many of us involve ourselves in local and national political issues, but what about our workplaces? How do we shift these contexts to help create a more just and sustainable world? Unionization is one key approach. But whether or not our workplaces are unionized, we need to find engaged allies if we want to make a difference.

Our Mother stands violated in the name of our constant thirst for ROI. Toxins bleed into the womb from whence we crawled millions of years ago on our way to the canopy, from which we would in turn descend many millions of years later still.

When one is looking at a statistic it is always worthwhile asking if the statistic is really measuring what you want to know. Take for example, a rating of dangerous jobs. In most of these lists you will find the number of deaths per 100,000 workers per year. This is an important statistic, since dying for your job is something we can all agree is something that is to be avoided. Still does it tell the whole story?

Mine workers have a 34.8 per 100,000 fatality rate in the United States (in 2008 the last year that statistics are available) with a serious injury rate of 6.5 per 100 workers per year. Those are really high numbers (though mining is only the fourth most dangerous job behind logging, commercial fishing and strangely enough farming), but they do not tell the real story.

When we look at labor statistics we are not looking at the cost to the worker over the long haul. It is of immediate importance for making the work place safer that we focus on deaths and injuries that result in time off, obviously we want to do all we can to reduce the instance of these kinds of events. Yet we are not really counting the long-term cost of working in America.

What the Upper Big Branch disaster really means.

From workers at a Verizon call center, to immigrants in the fish-
processing industry to nurses at the Boston Medical Center and then to a plant where workers made machinery for the paper industry, Tom Juravich channels the workers voices to provide a vivid account of the degradation of workers in America.Plus, Michael Moore submits an alternative with is examination of coop cab drivers.

The president of my company does a small thing that makes us more than just a collection of workers. Could other companies benefit from this kind of gesture?