Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper. […]

More Railroad Workers Information

I am not the only one who sees issues with the way railroad workers are on call 24/7 with any time off being canceled or workers being subject to penalization if missing the call. Biden could have pushed harder to resolve this labor issue. Just like siding with financial issues, Jow Biden sided with Railroad […]

America’s Missing Workers, Who Are They?

Before you start chattering at me about this and that detail, let’s get an understanding. I am supply chain and manufacturing or manufacturing and supply chain. If there was a job opening in either and with appropriate pay, I was more than likely in. Companies hiring me usually did so because they had a problem. […]

How is the working-middle class doing? Real average non-supervisory wages

Real average hourly wages and real aggregate payrolls for October  – by New Deal democrat With yesterday’s report on October consumer prices, we can take up two of my favorite measures of how the working/middle class is doing – real average non-supervisory wages, and real aggregate payrolls. Real average wages for non-supervisory workers declined -0.1% […]

Solutionary Rail – A people-powered campaign to electrify America’s railroads . . .

Solutionary Rail – “A people-powered campaign to electrify America’s railroads and open corridors to a clean energy future“ I was wandering around the internet when I came across the Solutionary Rail site. I was looking for something in particular and was not able to find it. The site itself gives the detail on why railway […]

The labor market closes out 2021 on the best note yet

The labor market closes out 2021 on the best note yet The final economic data in 2021 was this morning’s report on initial and continued jobless claims. And the good news for workers continued. New claims declined back under 200,000 to 198,000, the best pandemic showing except for November 20’s 194,000, and December 4’s 188,000. […]

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I — Introduction

Disposable time as a common-pool resource I — Introduction About a decade ago, I wrote a short piece about “labour power as a common-pool resource” that got picked up by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and led to me being invited to a conference on the commons in Berlin put on by the Heinrich […]

Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VII: Capital volume 1, chapters one and three

EconoSpeak: Socially Ambivalent Labour Time VII: Capital volume 1, chapters one and three. Sandwichman, July 30, 2021 Afterword to the Second German Edition [of Das Kapital, Buch 1] (1873): I must start by informing the readers of the first edition about the alterations made in the second edition. One is struck at once by the clearer […]

Four measures of labor market losses in the pandemic

Four measures of labor market losses in the pandemic Below is a graph of 4 ways of measuring the downturn in the labor market due to the pandemic: 1. Payrolls (blue) – this is the headline jobs number from the establishment survey2. Civilian employment (green) – this is the equivalent number from the household survey.3. […]