https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16152372
A slowing economy is not the only problem that Chinese policymakers face.
With a dramatic rise in the number of those in higher education, many graduates are finding it tough to get the right job.
In the last decade, the number of students leaving university has increased almost six-fold.
While there are plenty of low-skilled jobs around, there are not enough jobs for graduates in the major cities, as Martin Patience reports from Beijing.
By Stephanie Taylor Christensen
A boss can literally, make or break your career. Here are five ways to spot the bad ones before they become yours.
A great boss can make you feel engaged and empowered at work, will keep you out of unnecessary office politics, and can identify and grow your strengths. But a bad boss can make the most impressive job on paper (and salary) quickly unbearable. Not only will a bad boss make you dislike at least 80% of your week, your relationships might suffer, too. 
A recent study conducted at Baylor University found that stress and tension caused by an abusive boss “affects the marital relationship and subsequently, the employee’s entire family.” Supervisor abuse isn’t always as blatant as a screaming temper tantrum; it can include taking personal anger out on you for no reason, dismissing your ideas in a meeting, or simply, being rude and critical of your work, while offering no constructive ways to improve it. Whatever the exhibition of bad boss behavior, your work and personal life will suffer. Merideth Ferguson, PH.D., co-author of the study and assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at Baylor explains that “it may be that as supervisor abuse heightens tension in the relationship, the employee is less motivated or able to engage in positive interactions with the partner and other family members.”
There are many ways to try and combat the effects of a bad boss, including confronting him or her directly to work towards a productive solution, suggesting that you report to another supervisor, or soliciting the help of human resources. But none of those tactics gurantee improvement, and quite often, they’ll lead to more stress. The best solution is to spot a bad boss—before they become yours! Here are five ways to tell whether your interviewer is a future bad boss.
1. Pronoun usage. Performance consultant John Brubaker says that the top verbal tell a boss gives is in pronoun choice and the context it is used. If your interviewer uses the term “you” in communicating negative information ( such as, “you will deal with a lot of ambiguity”), don’t expect the boss to be a mentor. If the boss chooses the word “I” to describe the department’s success—that’s a red flag. If the interviewer says “we” in regards to a particular challenge the team or company faced, it may indicate that he or she deflects responsibility and places blame.
2. Concern with your hobbies. There is a fine line between genuine relationship building, and fishing for information, so use your discretion on this one. If you have an overall good impression of the potential boss it may be that he or she is truly interested in the fact that you are heavily involved in charity work, and is simply getting to know you. On the other hand, the interviewer may be trying to determine whether you have too many commitments outside of work. The interviewer can’t legally ask if you are married, or have kids, so digging into your personal life can be a clever way to understand just how available you are.
3. They’re distracted. The era of email, BlackBerrys and smartphones have made it “okay” for people to develop disrespectful communication habits in the name of work. Particularly in a frenzied workplace, reading email while a person is speaking, multi-tasking on conference calls and checking the message behind that blinking BlackBerry mid-conversation has become the norm of business communications. But, regardless of his or her role in the company, the interviewer should be striving to make a good impression—which includes shutting down tech tools to give you undivided attention. If your interviewer is glancing at emails while you’re speaking, taking phone calls, or late to the interview, don’t expect a boss who will make time for you.
4. They can’t give you a straight answer. Caren Goldberg, Ph.D. is an HR professor at the Kogod School of Business at American University. She says a key “tell” is vague answers to your questions. Listen for pauses, awkwardness, or overly-generic responses when you inquire what happened to the person who held the position you are interviewing for, and/or what has created the need to hire. (For example, if you are told the person was a “bad fit,” it may indicate that the workplace doesn’t spend much time on employee-development, and blames them when things don’t work out).
You should also question turnover rates, how long people stay in given roles, and what their career path has been. All of these answers can indicate not only if the boss is one people want to work for, but whether pay is competitive, and employees are given a career growth plan.
5. They’ve got a record. Ask the potential boss how long he or she has been at the company, in the role, and where he or she worked before coming to it to get a feel for his or management style, and whether it’s what you respond to. For example, bosses making a switch from a large corporation to a small company may lead with formality. On the other hand, entrepreneurs tend to be passionately involved in business, which can be a help or a hindrance, depending on your workstyle.
Goldberg also recommends searching the site eBossWatch, where you read reviews that former employees have given to a boss. If you’re serious about the position, she also suggests reaching to the former employee whose spot you are interviewing for, and asking for their take on the workplace. (LinkedIn makes this task easy to do). The former employee’s recount may not necessarily reflect your potential experience, but it can help you to determine whether his or her description of the job and company “jibes” with what the potential boss said.
An ominous trend picks up speed: the middle class is shriveling. In 1980, 60% of Californians lived in middle-income families. By 2010, only 47.9% did, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a non-partisan research organization. Main culprits: declining incomes and disappearing jobs. 
From 2007, when the recession began, through its end in 2009, family incomes across the spectrum dropped over 5%. But then, instead of going into recovery mode, they continued to go south for another 6% through 2010—the end of the timeframe of the study. Given the astronomical cost of living in California, the study defined a middle-income family as one that earned between $44,000 and $155,000 in 2010.
But the declines weren’t spread evenly across the income spectrum. Families whose incomes were in the top 10% saw their incomes decline 5%. Those at the bottom 10% of the spectrum, the poorest families in California, saw their incomes plummet by 21%.
In a further indictment of income inequality in California—something that is clearer than daylight if you walk or drive around with your eyes open—the upper 10% enjoyed incomes that were higher than those of their counterparts in the rest of the US, while the lowest 10% earned less than their counterparts elsewhere. And income inequality between to top 10% and the bottom 10% doubled since 1980, to where in 2010, the top end earned 12 times as much as the bottom 10%.
Family income is a factor of wages, hours worked, underemployment, and unemployment. The main culprit for the loss of family income during and after the recession was unemployment which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, peaked at 12.5% from September through December 2010. It has since edged down but still hovers at 11.7% (preliminary, October 2011).
However, the BLS percentages of unemployment are a form of statistical hocus-pocus that distorts and understates the actual unemployment problem. Here are the raw numbers of employed people in California:
Peak employment in California occurred, according to the BLS, in January 2008, when 17,023,322 people were working. At the trough in August 2011—that’s correct, August 2011, that’s not a typo—only 15,830,729 people were working. During that period, 1,192,593 jobs had evaporated. Where the heck is the jobs recovery?
Maybe it’s in the future. Maybe it has started a couple of months ago. But there are certainly no signs of a jobs recovery in California before September 2011—and even that may turn out to be a fluke.
And if there actually is a jobs recovery that would raise family incomes? The PPIC warns:
If previous post-recession patterns repeat themselves, it is likely that lower-income families will recover much more slowly than those at the high end, potentially worsening income inequality that is already at a record high.
A thriving economy based on the American model requires a thriving and growing middle class. However, the current conditions—a shriveling middle class and rising income disparity—mark the transition to a banana republic.
Meanwhile, corporate tax dodging in California and elsewhere in the US puts the finger on the strenuously hushed-up Basic Flaw In The Tax Code.
Source: https://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2011/12/9/the-shriveling-middle-class-in-california.html
Every military strategist and war time general knows never to attack an empire head on. You destroy it from the inside out. You cut off supply lines (sanctions), cause civil unrest or civil war by funding both sides (Sunni and Shiite in Iraq), and instill economic destruction and slavery with usery (interest on top of interest to make freedom from debt impossible). 
This financial situation we are in is no accident. How can it be? With the supposed best and the brightest Harvard and Yale educated minds making life changing decisions on our behalf, how can they be wrong so often? How can they be so ignorant or naive as not to learn from the past? How can the state of our country and many others around the world be an “accident”? The answer of course is, it can’t be.
If you overspend and have problems paying your bills during a particular month and one of those bills goes into collections, do you do the same thing next month? No, you make sure you don’t repeat that same mistake. Guess what? There is a really good chance you never even went to Harvard or Yale, and you figured that out all by yourself. Imagine that?
Obama’s brilliant answer to this problem was to put the very bankers that caused this situation in charge of the banking industry and to impose (I’m trying not to laugh as I type this) “unprecedented regulatory reform” over Wall Street.
Roosevelt did almost the exact same thing after Hoover left office as to “ensure nothing like this would ever happen again”. But yet here we are “again” albeit with one great difference. That difference is the peoples’ ability to be self sufficient. In the late 20′s and 30′s, people had the ability to farm, to manufacture useful items with their hands, to barter. Their dollars were backed in gold. That was until 1934 when the government ordered all citizens to surrender their gold in the name of “stabilizing markets“. Coincidentally, gold spiked $15 per oz. after the confiscation. Nice profit, too bad it wasn’t in the hands of the people. Most people posses none of those skills, so what will they do?
I understand that its hard to accept the idea of our current situation as being one of intent, but it’s time we do. The sooner we come to this realization, and accept it, the easier it will be to deal with what’s coming.
In the global race to see which industrialized nation will lead the way in the implementation of the most oppressive police state the world has ever known, Australia has been making silent but steady gains for years. With those aware of the march toward totalitarianism usually preoccupied with the developments in the United States and the UK, Australia can often go overlooked. Yet, not to be outdone, the land down under has managed to enact carbon taxes, militarize police, end gun ownership, and rival even England in terms of forced political correctness. Although Australia might not be the leader of the pack, it refuses to be left out.
Every now and then, there are signs that Australia is attempting to take a brief lead over both of its fascist national comrades. For instance, in an article published in the Sunday Telegraph on December 4, 2011, Rosie Squires describes how many Australian employers are introducing a fingerprinting program in order to monitor employees and “save costs.” 
The new fingerprint scanners will be taking the place of time clocks, trust, responsible hiring, and, apparently, competent supervisors. No longer will the employees of companies such as Qantas, Dan Murphy’s, Breville, and Unomedical be able to clock in and out of work in the traditional manner. In order to prevent employees from “arriving late or slacking off,” the workers will now be forced to render some of their most private information to their employer via the new scanners.
The new technology, PeopleKey, will be used not only to clock employees on their way in and out, but also to monitor their progress over the course of the workday, as well as other potential incidents of “slacking off” like using the bathroom or daring to engage a fellow employee in conversation.
A spokesman for Dan Murphy’s, a chain of liquor stores, stated, “Like many major retailers, Dan Murphy’s has found electronic clocking in and out to be a reliable method of recording staff hours, as well as enabling store managers to know which team members are on site for health and safety purposes.”
He continues, saying, “Staff who are significantly late may have the time deducted from their pay or, at the manager’s discretion, can choose to make up the time.”
RailCorp, another company who is implementing PeopleKey, has actually achieved an agreement with employees (more likely “representatives” of the employees) for the use of the new program in exchange for a pay raise.
In the case of RailCorp, another spokesman stated,
When it is in place, staff will verify their attendance by way of a swipe card and finger scan. The scans themselves are stored as mathematical algorithms rather than images.
This initiative will streamline and simplify our time and attendance processes, eventually eliminating the need for staff to manually record their time at work on paper timesheets or in attendance books.
This will result in reduced administration requirements and more accurate payments to staff.
Frank Bruce, the CEO of PeopleKey, is quoted by Rosie Squires as saying that many of his clients have purchased the finger scanning system as a way to crack down on “buddy punching,” a situation where workers clock in for their fellow employees.
Bruce said, “In some instances employees are not honest and some businesses have problems monitoring attendance.” He also indicated that PeopleKey has “about 1500 installations in Australia” although he did not disclose any of the locations or clients.
Of course, the employees shouldn’t worry. After all, private companies would never share, sell, or otherwise use private information that could be worth vast amounts of money. They never have in the past, right?
Not only that, but, if the employees have nothing to hide, why should they be concerned about the scanners? They shouldn’t be slacking off or coming in late to begin with, right?
There’s nothing wrong or illegal about private companies forcing their employees to give this information over to them on condition of employment — if they don’t want to give it up, they can always work for someone else. They can let the free market handle the issue, right?
Unfortunately, this is the attitude that is held by a great many Australians, British, and Americans who are being constantly reminded through their media and their government that they, too, will soon be scanning their fingerprints in order to access basic services or necessities . . . like food.
The ability to rationalize oppression using the arguments about having nothing to hide, free markets, and corporate morality should never be underestimated.
I have written numerous articles dealing with the technocratic society being ushered in gradually with each passing day. I have recently written about the introduction of vein scanners already popular in Japan and awaiting introduction to the United States, as well as the Google Wallet smartphone app being used by New Jersey Transit.
Indeed, the technologically enhanced police state has been covered at length not just by my own work, but that of many others. What hasn’t been covered, however, is the resistance to such a society.
Unfortunately, although it is growing, the resistance to the technocratic control system is still terribly small when compared to the vast amount of people who are willing to accept it.
Regardless, the resistance must begin to take shape quickly. Dissenting voices need to speak up and they need to do it now. These voices need to be heard, and in order for that to happen they are going to have to speak loudly and forcefully. If they don’t, there might not be much hope left. Time is running out and the scientific dictatorship is gaining steam with every day that we remain silent.
Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/12/australia-embraces-technocracy-with.html#more
With Christmas three weeks away, an undercover investigation has revealed the bleak realities of life in Chinese toy factories serving a market worth £2.8bn a year in the UK alone.
Big brands such as Disney, Lego and Marks & Spencer pay only a fraction of the shop price of products to the factories that make their toys. Last summer – as factories geared up to cope with demand for the Christmas period – investigators spent three weeks in the industrial cities of Shenzhen and Dongguan. In some cases, they found that employees:
■ worked up to 140 hours overtime a month;
■ were paid up to a month late;
■ claimed they were expected to work with dangerous tools and machines without training or safety measures;
■ had to work in silence and were fined up to £5 for going to the toilet without permission.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of the long hours and poor wages was how it tore families apart, separating mothers and fathers from their children for all but a few days a year. Many workers were too afraid to speak to the investigators from human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom), but two women did agree to talk on condition that their names were changed.
Wang Fengping, 27, has two daughters, seven and five. They live a 10-hour train journey away from the On Tai Toys factory. She and her husband earn £200 a month making toys for Disney and others, but cannot afford to bring the children to the city. Instead, the girls are cared for by their grandparents. Wang calls them two or three times a week. The younger one always asks her when she is coming home. “Very soon,” Wang always replies.
The reality is that they will meet only once a year, at Chinese new year. She keeps her spirits up by telling her workmates stories of how well the girls are doing at school. Sometimes she sings them songs the girls have learned at school and then sung to her down the phone. “Our family will not die from hunger, but cannot be fed with this wage level,” she said.
Ma Hui, 25, works for the Hung Hing Printing Group, making items for M&S, Lego and Disney. She has a two-year-old daughter, whom she had to leave behind when the child was just three months old in the hope that she could earn enough to one day return home to set up her own business and reunite the family. She, too, only sees her child once a year and has hung a picture of her daughter on the dormitory wall next to her bed.
Sacom accuses big global brands of failing to pay the factories enough, with workers suffering because factories undercut one another in an attempt to secure contracts. The report also criticises the industry’s own regulator for failing to clamp down on rights abuses.
Spokeswoman Debby Chan Sze Wan said: “In the run-up to Christmas, toys are a popular choice as presents for children. They probably bring joy to consumers and the toy companies, but the workers cannot afford toys or books for their beloved children.
“The hardship of workers is due to the exploitation in the global supply chain. If the brands do not raise the unit price and change their purchasing practices, no structural change in working conditions in the toy industry is feasible.”
Investigators targeted three factories, including On Tai Toys Company, which manufactures for Disney and a number of other international brands, and Hung Hing. All the factories are certified as decent toy manufacturers by the International Council of Toy Industries, which is supposed to police ethical standards in more than 2,400 factories that employ an estimated 1.7 million people worldwide. But Sacom has accused ICTI of permitting “rampant labour rights violations” in factories it has certified.
At the Hung Hing factory the researcher found that the 8,000 workers put in up to 100 hours of overtime a month, far in excess of the legal maximum. Workers say they have to sign a document agreeing to work additional overtime on top of the legal maximum. The basic wage was £132 a month (up to £250 with maximum overtime payments) but wages were paid up to three weeks late.
Workers complained of inadequate training with the factory machines and last year one worker died when he fell into a machine. They said there were frequent injuries and concerns over the chemicals used. There were also complaints about the standard of the dormitories, where water for washing and flushing toilets is turned off at 10pm.
At the On Tai Toy Company the researcher found that most of the 1,500 workers were aged between 30 and 50, though around 300 students are drafted in to help cope with the peak season.
The researcher spent three weeks in the factory and found workers put in up to 140 hours of overtime every month, nearly four times the 36 hours a month legal limit.
Basic pay is £110 a month, but wages were paid a month late, in breach of labour law. During the peak summer season workers could make up to £240 a month, including overtime, but that falls to £140 during low season.
A typical working day during the peak season starts at 8am and does not end until 10pm. Workers routinely put in six-day weeks, but if the factory is busy there are no days off.
Workers complained that they were banned from talking to one another on the production line and were fined up to £5 if they went to the toilet without applying for an “off-duty” permit. They reported regular burns from soldering irons and electric shocks from old hair dryers used to set glue, along with concerns about the effect on their health of unmarked chemicals they have to work with. The law requires the chemicals to be identified and for workers to be instructed in what to do in case of an accident. Up to 10 workers share each 20 square metres dormitory room, which is fitted with bunk beds. Dozens share the toilet and the outside of the building is piled deep with rubbish, which is home to rats.
In response to the Sacam researchers’ allegations, Disney said: “The Walt Disney Company and its affiliates take claims of unfair labour practices very seriously, and investigate any such allegations thoroughly.”
Lego said the investigation into working practices at the factory had raised very serious issues, which it took very seriously and which it had asked its licensing partner, Dorling Kindersley, to investigate.
“Ensuring respect for workers’ rights is very important to the Lego Group and all our partners agree to adhere to a strict set of guidelines – our code of conduct. The Lego Group requires all of its licensing partners to give a written assurance that their vendors, too, comply with the Lego Group’s code of conduct, and to audit their suppliers on an annual basis. Adhering to the code of conduct is something that we prioritise in our engagement with our partners. It appears that in this case the code may have been broken and we are addressing this urgently. Once we have the full facts we will take decisive action.”
Dorling Kindersley said that it was deeply concerned by the allegations and had contacted Hung Hing to express its view: “We have strict ethical sourcing standards covering all the issues identified by this investigation. The allegations, if true, would demonstrate a breach of these standards.” It said the factory had recently been audited, but that would now be reviewed, adding: “Our terms of business are absolutely clear, that any supplier in breach of our ethical standards is required to change their practices or face termination.”
A spokesman for Marks & Spencer said: “We are a very small customer of the Hung Hing Printing Group – less than 0.5% of its business. We take any allegation that suggests a breach of our strict ethical standards very seriously and work closely with all our suppliers, including this factory, to ensure they adhere to our strict standards.”
Hung Hing responded with a four- page letter from general manager Dennis Wong in which it admitted that workers could be asked to do overtime of up to 92 hours a month in July and August. The letter said that last month overtime ranged between 23 and 77 hours. The company said workers who refused to do the extra hours were not penalised.
It blamed late payment of wages on the complexity of calculating the rates for more than 8,000 workers, and argued this was a standard industry practice. It insisted that workers did receive safety training, but warned that individual managers would be held responsible for future lapses and would have pay deducted.
The company said that providing water to the toilets after 10pm was wasteful and that barrels of water were available for workers to use to flush.
Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/chinese-toy-factories-christmas-disney
The UK is experiencing the worst disruption to services in decades as more than 2 million public sector workers stage a nationwide strike, closing schools and bringing councils and hospitals to a virtual standstill. 
• Disruption across UK as many services come to virtual halt
• Airports, schools, rail services and hospitals affected
• Reform of public sector pensions is at heart of dispute
The strike by more than 30 unions over cuts to public sector pensions started at midnight, leading to the closure of most state schools; cancellation of refuse collections; rail service and tunnel closures; the postponement of thousands of non-emergency hospital operations; and possible delays at airports and ferry terminals.
The TUC said it was the biggest stoppage in more than 30 years and was comparable to the last mass strike by 1.5 million workers in 1979. Hundreds of marches and rallies are due to take place in cities and towns across the country.
Pickets began to form before dawn at many hospitals, Whitehall departments, ports and colleges.
The strikes have been called over government plans to overhaul pensions for all public sector workers, by cutting employer contributions, increasing personal contributions and, it emerged on Tuesday, increasing the state retirement age to 67 in 2026, eight years earlier than originally planned.
Union leaders were further enraged after George Osborne announced that as well as a public sector pay freeze for most until 2013, public sector workers’ pay rises would be capped at 1% for the two years after that.
In Scotland an estimated 300,000 public sector workers are expected to strike, with every school due to be affected after Scottish headteachers voted to stop work for the first time.
The UK Border Agency is braced for severe queues at major airports after learning that staffing levels at passport desks will be “severely below” 50% despite a successful appeal for security-cleared civil servants to volunteer.
“We will have the bare minimum to run a bare minimum service,” said a Whitehall insider. Many major public buildings and sites, including every port, most colleges, libraries, the Scottish parliament, major accident and emergency hospitals, ports and the Metro urban light railway around Newcastle and Sunderland will be picketed.
At Holyrood, Scottish government ministers and MSPs in the ruling SNP, the Liberal Democrats and Tories are expected to cross picket lines to stage a debate on public pensions; Labour and Scottish Green party MSPs will join the protesters.
Here are some of the actions across the country:
• In London up to 2,000 schools will be shut or affected, and ambulance crews will strike, there will be pickets in Whitehall, at universities, hospitals and a TUC regional march through the city from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the embankment.
• In Scotland union leaders including Rodney Bickerstaff, general secretary of Unison, will march through central Edinburgh to a mass rally outside the Scottish parliament, with protests at Edinburgh castle, a major march and rally attended by Scottish union leaders in Glasgow, where civil servants will picket MoD and tax offices. There will be marches and protests in Dundee, Inverness and Aberdeen.
• In southern and south-west England and Wales unions will hold marches and rallies in towns and cities including Brighton, Southampton, Bristol and Exeter, while a New Orleans-style marching band will lead a march through Cardiff.
• In the north-west up to 25 Cumbrian schools may open, the Mersey tunnel is expected to be closed, while in Liverpool protesters will be urged to sound car horns, blow vuvuzela horns, clap and shout at 1pm in an action dubbed “One Noise at One”.
• In the Midlands union general secretaries including the TUC leader Brendam Barber and Dave Prentis of Unison will lead a rally at the Birmingham Indoor Arena, while marches will be held in Nottingham.
• In the north-east of England, Metro services will be severely hit and the RMT rail union leader Bob Crow will address a rally.
• In northern England marches are due to be staged in Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield.
• In Northern Ireland there will be no train or public bus services, Belfast’s passport office will be closed along with leisure centres and schools. The main march will be through central Belfast.
The TUC said the strike would also include tens of thousands of border agency staff, probation officers, radiographers, librarians, job centre staff, courts staff, social workers, refuse collectors, midwives, road sweepers, cleaners, school meals staff, paramedics, tax inspectors, customs officers, passport office staff, police civilian staff, driving test examiners, patent officers, and health and safety inspectors.
Unions and employers have struck local deals to avoid disruption to emergency operations and essential medical services at hospitals, mental health units and residential care units for children. Emergency rotas have been introduced by mental health social workers with union agreement.
The Prospect union has exempted staff from strike action who work in 100 essential defence posts, including intelligence analyst posts at British bases in Afghanistan and civil servants supplying frontline troops.
Steve Jary, the national secretary of Prospect, which represents thousands of MoD staff, said: “These people are not the Whitehall bureaucrats of popular imagination. It is ironic that this important work by staff who risk their own lives in supporting the UK’s armed forces only comes to light in a situation like the industrial action.”
Dean Royles, the director of the NHS Employers organisation, which represents NHS trusts in England and Wales, said the unions had agreed to protect emergency services but he warned patients they might still experience significant delays that could spill over into Thursday.
“The absolute priority of everyone in the NHS must be to ensure that patients are safe and we avoid unnecessary distress too patients,” he said. “We believe robust plans will be in place for the people who need urgent care but those needing non-urgent care may experiences delays.”
The Local Government Association, which represents English and Welsh councils, said it was “working tirelessly” to minimise disruption to essential services, and to protect services for the elderly, vulnerable and young. Social workers were operating emergency rotas, children’s residential centres were being staffed as fully as possible and service updates would be posted on council websites.
Source: https://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/30/public-sector-workers-strike-uk
The nation is experiencing the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Princeton economist and former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Blinder, calls the current crisis a “national jobs emergency.”
The official unemployment rate in September was 9.1 percent - nearly twice the rate a decade ago - leaving 14 million people out of work. 
It’s not just the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. The American economy has been underperforming for years. Business Week calls 1999-2009 “The Lost Decade for Jobs” as private-sector employment grew by a paltry net 1.1 percent - the lowest increase for any ten-year period since the 1930s.
The original version of President Obama’s increasingly embattled jobs plan aimed to provide a much-needed extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut for working Americans, but outlined only scarce measures to dent the catastrophic rate of unemployment. What we need today is a massive jobs program like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched by President Franklin Roosevelt. The WPA put millions of people back to work in the midst of the Great Depression, restoring their dignity, putting money in their pockets and quite literally saving lives.
The crisis is much worse than most of us think. According to the US Department of Labor, the underemployment rate is 16.5 percent, if you count part-time workers who want full-time jobs and discouraged workers who have simply stopped looking. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the number of long-term unemployed, meaning those unemployed for more than six months, hovers at a postwar record level of 45 percent. All these figures are much higher for black and Latino workers.
No one is insulated. Workers at every educational level have seen their unemployment rates double since 2007 - high school graduates, college graduates and even those with graduate degrees. The severity of the crisis has overturned conventional wisdom that higher education is a cure for joblessness. The unemployed do not need more education - they need work.
What Did Roosevelt Do That Obama Is Not Doing?
In the winter of 1933, with unemployment reaching 25 percent, Roosevelt established the Civil Works Administration, an emergency jobs program that put 4.2 million unemployed to work within six months. He also started the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ a half-million young men with minimal skills in useful work in the nation’s parks, forests and rangelands. Meanwhile, Roosevelt launched the Public Works Administration, which funded long-term infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, dams and public buildings.
The WPA followed in 1935, employing 8.5 million more between 1935 and 1943. It put those men and women to work on projects requested by state and local governments, such as roads, schools, sewers and airports, and operated local arts, educational and media programs.
Once the New Deal was launched in 1933, the US economy began to grow again by leaps and bounds - at a rate of nearly 10 percent per year. By 1937, production had doubled and the unemployment rate had dropped by half. By 1941, before the war began, the economy was back where it would have been had the Depression never happened. With the wartime build-up, mass unemployment became a distant memory.
To tackle our current unemployment crisis, the federal government should spend $500 billion a year over the next three years on emergency jobs programs like those of the New Deal. The first step would be to give every state and local government the funds to restore their budgets. The loss of 680,000 teaching, police, transit, and other public-sector jobs over the last three years has contributed measurably to the downturn.
The second step would be direct programs to create new full-time jobs for the unemployed - at the median wage of $16.27 an hour - in areas where the need is obvious: in schools (e.g., teachers, school maintenance and enrichment programs); human services (e.g., child care, home care and health care); and energy conservation (e.g., retrofitting homes and public buildings).
To this should be added a third step: financing large-scale public works programs to build schools, bridges, a “smart” electrical grid, zero-emission buses, high-speed rail, wind farms and affordable housing. The pathetic state of our national infrastructure has been decried for years by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives the country a D grade, and the United States ranks 32nd in the world in infrastructure, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
A substantial increase of government spending for public works will create expanded opportunity for youth, women and minority workers to enter state-certified apprenticeship programs in the construction trades and to earn a middle-class income.
How to Pay for Such a Jobs Program?
First, the federal government can run temporary deficits. While the federal deficit is relatively high at 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, it is still dramatically lower than the peak of 30 percent of GDP during World War II. Contrary to popular thinking, government spending in a recession can lower the deficit by taking people off the unemployment roles and putting money in the hands of ordinary people to bolster consumer demand, which stimulates business and returns more tax revenues.
But since we are worried about the current federal deficit and the budget woes of state and local governments, we must heed investor Warren Buffett’s call to “stop coddling the rich” by raising taxes on millionaires and closing corporate loopholes.
The upper 1 percent’s share of national income increased from 9 percent in 1976 to 24 percent in 2007, according to a report by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Nearly half of total income went to the upper 10 percent in 2007, compared to 33 percent 30 years earlier. The top income tax rate on the highest earners was 70 percent between 1940 and 1980 - when the economy was performing much better than it is today - and now it is just 35 percent.
Moreover, corporate profits increased at an annual rate of $1.6 trillion in 2010 - a record for the postwar period. The Tax Policy Center reports that federal revenue from corporate taxes has dropped by half over the last 60 years, while corporations like Verizon, Bank of America and General Electric pay essentially no taxes due to loopholes in the tax code.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 5.6 percent surcharge on incomes exceeding $1 million, as proposed by the Obama administration, will raise $40 billion a year. Ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the upper 2 percent, set to expire in 2012, will generate more than $80 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Economists Robert Pollin and Dean Baker estimate that a 0.5 percent transaction tax on the transfer of stocks and securities will yield $175 billion annually from the largest financial institutions and speculators. The Center for Tax Justice calculates that federal tax revenue will increase by $365 billion a year if corporate tax loopholes and subsidies are eliminated.
Republicans oppose taxing the rich, just as they did in the 1930s. It will take popular mobilization by labor, faith, civil rights, women’s and youth organizations to overcome such resistance - just as it did then. Occupy Wall Street may be the beginning of a movement for a new New Deal. Collective action worked in the 1930s and it could work again now.
Source: https://www.truth-out.org/jobs-crisis-and-new-new-deal-america/1321046261
Some of the country’s best-known multinational corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad. 
So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009.
Some of the same companies that do not report their jobs breakdown, including Apple and Pfizer, are pushing lawmakers to cut their tax bills in the name of job creation in the United States.
But experts say that without details on which companies are contributing to job growth and which are not, policymakers risk flying blind as they try to jump-start the hiring of American workers.
“It’s an important piece of information that the American people should have,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Should you listen to the kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when their record and their model indicates they’ve cut jobs? . . . Or should we talk to people who actually do create jobs in the United States?”
As the country faces an unemployment crisis, President Obama, lawmakers and business lobbyists have all touted the country’s biggest companies as critical to creating jobs.
The head of Obama’s jobs council, General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt, said during a tour of a company plant in Greensboro, S.C., that firms should be ready to answer questions from the public.
“If you want to be an admired company, you better know, you better have accountability, and you better think through where the jobs are,” he said.
GE breaks out its employment numbers in company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2010, about 46 percent of GE’s 287,000 employees worked in the United States, compared with 54 percent in 2000.
But many firms, including some whose executives have counseled Obama on the economy, do not put their number of U.S. workers in their annual reports.
IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano has met a number of times with the president, most recently in July at a lunch with other executives to talk about jobs and the economy. IBM stopped giving its U.S. head count in 2009.
“We just made a policy that we would only break out global head count,” said company spokesman Doug Shelton.
Data from before 2009 showed IBM rapidly shifting workers to India. Dave Finegold, dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, estimates that 2009, when the company stopped sharing its U.S. employment figure, also marked the first time the company had more employees in India than the United States. Finegold based his number on reports from the media, third-party groups and former employees who have tried to track the number.
“IBM can do as it wishes, and the rest of us have to guess,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator for Alliance@IBM, a group trying to unionize IBM workers.
You won’t find Procter & Gamble‘s U.S. head count in its filings, either. When initially asked for the number, company spokesman Paul Fox wrote in an e-mail: “We do not track nor report U.S.-specific jobs numbers vs. jobs overseas.” After it was pointed out that P&G’s chief executive, Bob McDonald, had cited such figures in a Cincinnati Enquirer op-ed piece, Fox acknowledged the company did track that data. The number of U.S. employees is 35,000 out of 127,000 total, or 28 percent.
Other companies that do not reveal their job breakdowns include Hewlett-Packard,AT&T, Apple and Pfizer, which stopped reporting the number in its SEC filings in 2000.
The latter two are part of a coalition of companies pushing for Congress to give them a tax break on money they have parked overseas, saying that any money brought back to this country would spur hiring.
There is no law requiring companies to reveal publicly where their employees are based. Companies can choose to include the breakdown of jobs here and abroad in their SEC filings for the benefit of shareholders. But they are required by law to report the numbers to the Commerce Department, which compiles a yearly report on total employment by U.S. multinationals.
Ray Mataloni, a staff researcher at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, said the government gets the numbers only with the agreement that it will not disclose firm-level data. “I don’t think it’s a question of companies feeling like they’re hiding dirty laundry by not giving this information out,” Mataloni said. “I don’t think they really have anything to hide, but I don’t really know the logic of why that’s something they don’t just put in their annual report.”
A few companies expressed worry about their competitors knowing too much about their operations.
Scott N. Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, said it’s because of the politics. “Outsourcing has become a lightning rod, and the media coverage they’re likely to get is unfavorable,” Paul said.
For chief executives of multinational companies who are used to answering only to their shareholders, the country’s jobs crisis has uncomfortably switched the political spotlight onto their decisions about who they employ and where. It has also thrown into relief the fact that when U.S. multinationals chase profits and hire workers anywhere in the world, they become less tied to any one country, including this one.
Immelt acknowledged last month that the health of a company such as GE is now less connected to the U.S. economy, but he added that companies including GE “got carried away” with outsourcing. “I’m a GE leader first and foremost,” he said. “At the same time . . . I work for an American company.”
Comment: Another legitimate grievance of the 99%. It is mockery when the corporate elite sneer that the OWS protesters should “get a bath, and get a job” when they know perfectly well the jobs are already outsourced to their serfs overseas.
It may seem obvious that all workers are entitled to a work environment free from sex discrimination and to the wages guaranteed to them by law. But for labourers who come to this country to work temporarily under the H-2B visa program, the ability to enforce these basic rights is often out of reach. 
This was the case for three of our clients who came to North Carolina from Mexico to work in the seafood processing industry. According to allegations they made in charges of discrimination and a class action lawsuit, they were limited by their employer to picking crab meat, while men were given a range of other work, and were given much more work than the women. In addition, our lawsuit claimed that their employer paid both men and women H-2B workers less than the wages promised to them, and failed to reimburse them for the travel and visa expenses they incurred, as the H-2B program requires.
This week, a federal judge approved a settlement agreement in which the women’s employer agreed, not only to pay its workers damages for the way they were treated, but to change the way it does business. The seafood processer will institute a non-discrimination policy, reimburse its workers for visa and travel expenses from now on, offer jobs on a gender-neutral basis, offer training to workers who want to learn how to do different tasks, provide outside independent training on non-discrimination, and keep a record of who does which jobs. A consent decree will allow the plaintiffs and the court to monitor the company’s compliance for three years.
Such a robust settlement agreement is necessary, because immigrant and migrant workers, especially women, are vulnerable to abuses and discrimination. Agreements like this one send the message to employers that guestworkers – who often are not treated like guests – are entitled to the same protections on the job as other employees, including the right to be free from sex discrimination in the allocation of work.
Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights-womens-rights/rights-we-take-granted
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