Twelve Chicago parents, grandmothers, and community organizers ended a 34-day hunger strike this week over the fate of Dyett High School — but the underlying fight over what kind of school will actually reopen in the Bronzeville neighborhood is far from settled. A School District’s Decade of Disinvestment Walter H. Dyett High School had served…
Mexican police stormed into a neighborhood of striking farmworkers in Baja California’s San Quintín Valley this week, firing rubber bullets at residents fleeing through dirt streets and beating people inside their own homes — an escalation that came as talks between strike leaders and growers remain deadlocked nearly two months into one of Mexico’s largest…
California’s labor movement notched two significant wins within days of each other this month — a new state law targeting employers who steal wages from workers, and a Los Angeles County vote setting the region’s minimum wage on a path to $15 an hour. Going After “Deadbeat Employers” The state legislature approved SB 588, described…
California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.9 percent in July, the state’s Department of Finance reported — running two and a half percentage points above the 9.4 percent national rate, and underscoring how much harder the recession has hit the country’s most populous state than the country as a whole. A Silver Lining Buried in a…
The U.S. economy shed 467,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week — a sharper monthly loss than economists had hoped for, and evidence that the labor market’s brief signs of stabilizing the previous month hadn’t yet translated into a durable trend. A Step Back After a Step Forward BLS Commissioner…
The unemployment rate most Americans hear on the nightly news — 8.5 percent, as of last month — tells only part of the story. A second, far less publicized government measure paints a considerably bleaker picture: 15.6 percent, the highest that broader measure has registered since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in…
California’s legislature has passed a bill ending a 78-year-old carve-out in labor law that has left farmworkers waiting longer than nearly any other category of employee to earn overtime pay — legislation that took two attempts, a failed vote, and a tense last-minute standoff to finally clear the Assembly. A Carve-Out Dating Back to 1938…
Something doesn’t quite add up in this year’s economic data, and economists studying it aren’t shy about saying so. The unemployment rate has been falling — meaningfully, by nearly a full percentage point over the past year. Economic growth, by contrast, has stayed sluggish and uneven, nowhere close to the pace textbook models say should…
Behind this month’s national unemployment rate — 9.7 percent, the highest since 1983 — sits a set of numbers considerably worse for some Americans than the headline figure suggests, and a demographic pattern that would only get starker as the year wore on. The Headline Number, and What It Doesn’t Show The national rate on…
The math doesn’t seem to add up, and economists are the first to admit it. In January, the U.S. economy lost 20,000 jobs. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, dropped — from 10.0 percent down to 9.7 percent. Ordinarily, those two numbers move together, not in opposite directions. A Drop Economists Themselves Call “Inexplicable” The Economic Policy…