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 […]
A Memory
I awoke today in the shadowy dim light of the pre-morning, and as I will, I lingered, to feel my body’s not-yet awakening, its comfort still in the homey impresses of the bed, the dawning recollection of its minor aches while my mind reached weakly, moment by moment, to crawl out of its foggy depths. […]
Centenaries and Memory
Today is the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirt Factory fire in New York City, a signal event in the history of the American worker, and one that is drawing a remarkable degree of attention from a world so far from the one in which it occurred. This past December was my father’s hundredth birthday. […]
“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 […]