The movement to increase the minimum wage, and to tie it legislatively to the cost of living, is growing. The obscenity of low-wage employment among adults – full-time employment that does not offer a living wage – is increasingly apparent. As Arindrajit Dube pointed out in The New York Times: the evidence suggests that around half of […]
“Free Labor,” from Abraham Lincoln – in Wisconsin
Abraham Lincoln, in his so far unending prescience and wisdom, actually offered some thoughts on the nature of labor and capital in of all places Wisconsin – at the annual meting of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, in Milwaukee, on September 30, 1859. A brief passage from it, bolded below, is quoted often and can […]
Profiles in Anti-Unionism
I wrote on Friday, highlighted in the commentary at Texas Insider of former Reagan speech writer Clark S. Judge, about the kind of fundamental dishonesty on display in the arguments of those advocating a roll back of twentieth century social progress in worker’s rights and labor conditions. I expanded here on the comment I left […]
Meet the Opposition to Labor Rights
I was going to post today (and will another day) on a number of rhetorically sly and fallacious argumentative ploys I’ve encountered lately, but you may have noticed that I am singularly focused these days on the GOP’s reactionary assault on labor rights and working people. It is a critical moment in U.S. social history, […]
The Political Lexicologist: Overreach THIS
What’s the difference between technical jargon and mind-numbing, unthinking cliché? Why, it’s that while I, on occasion, may resort to the former, you, of course, invariably use the latter. In the arid world of politics, however, we are richly blessed with language that is oppressively both and of which the citizenry is the object of […]