Ask The Headhunter Hits E$con Homer

Ask The Headhunter: Unemployment -- Made in America by Employers | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS:

... Human resources executives run around in their corporate offices with their eyes closed, throwing billions of dollars at applicant tracking systems (ATSes) and job boards like Taleo, Monster.com and LinkedIn, and they pretend no one can see they are dancing in circles buck naked. HR keeps talking about a talent shortage, but the only talent shortage is in the HR offices. HR executives need to learn how to match up the 3.9 million vacancies with some of the 25 million under-employed.

What's going on? The economy is certainly one factor, but businesses, the media and the federal government continue to ignore the structural problems in our employment system. I'll tell you what I think the main problems are...

Another highlight (but read the post, too):

The Other White Minority

Update: Please read the comments.

Appalachian Americans: The Invisible Minority - Yahoo! Voices - voices.yahoo.com:

Appalachian-Americans are not generally discussed in multicultural textbooks or thought of as a distinct cultural group, yet they exhibit major cultural differences when compared to the common social construct of 'white America'. For this reason they continue to be marginalised, even in a time when acceptance of ethnic minorities and ideals of a pluralistic society are the norm...

...Coal companies hired thugs to intimidate both miners and outsiders who might bring attention to exploitation that bordered on slavery. Union members' houses "were raided by dozens of machine-gun-carrying deputies. Miners were beaten and murdered..." (Rorrer, n.d.)...

...The centuries-old stereotype that anyone with an Appalachian accent possesses a "natural stupidity," is still perpetuated by the media. Television shows like "Beverly Hillbillies", "Green Acres" and "Hee Haw" have been described as "the most intensive effort ever exerted by a nation to belittle, demean and otherwise destroy a minority people within its boundaries" (Bower & Growick, 2003). In one night of reruns, hillbillies are shown being conned into buying the White House, cuddling a talking pig, and rising from a corn patch "to cark the sickest jokes on TV..." (Bower & Growick, 2003). ...

These excerpts are only part of the article, which is long, detailed, and well-cited.

 

New Union Blood

White-collar workers are turning to labor unions - latimes.com:

The next wave of union protesters isn't blue collar.

It's lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, helicopter pilots, judges, insurance agents and podiatrists.

These white-collar workers are not exactly the picture of the labor movement, but they are becoming a more essential part of it as they turn to unions for help in a tough economy as bosses try to squeeze out more profits...

Occupy Gets Its Due

Harry Reid Occupy - What Occupy Did to 2012, What It Will Do to 2013 - Esquire

Here's a word that hasn't popped up in the various post-mortems of the election so far: Occupy.

From the start, it's been my opinion that the very least you could say about the movement was that people were yelling at the correct buildings. And, I agree with Todd Gitlin in that the first iteration of the movement pushed things about as far as it possibly could. But its effect on the election just passed could not be more profound, and it should not be ignored — though it likely will be — by the rest of the people trying to make sense of What It All Means. Occupy changed the national dialogue. Willard Romney's surreptitiously taped comments about "the 47 percent" would not have had the resonance they did had the Occupy movement not gotten the country talking about the 99 percent and the one percent. It created a new rhetorical paradigm that simply would not have been there had it not been originally shouted at the correct buildings. And it was that new paradigm that triumphed Tuesday night...

Lies From Fox

Even their own story shows that it is misleading. Union Red Tape in N.J. Causes Alabama Recovery Crew to Head Home | Fox Business

A Burning Question For Democrats

What every Democrat should be asking: why aren’t our representatives fighting for workers the way French Minister Mountebourg is fighting for French workers? « The Confluence

How Job Cuts Should Be Handled

Read the entire post and see how job adjustments should be handled.

Big Pharma and the power of a union « The Confluence

...There you go, folks.  If you want to stand up to the bonus class and save your jobs, you need to get a union and the government behind you.  Or maybe just the government behind you.  You don’t need to work 24/7 like a maniacal drone on crack, cranking out work and trying to impress everyone working like crazy, singing, “I really need this job.  Oh, God, I need this job” to guys on Wall Street who don’t give a shit anyway.  No, you have your union representatives negotiate a contract that makes it extremely painful for the company to drop its commitment to you...

No Headline Necessary

By: The Pragmatic Progressive Page

Fake Liberals

From a Fake Union Organizer, an Anti-Liberal Scheme - NYTimes.com

...This is the anatomy of a political sting.

Nothing this fellow said was true. Public records reveal that his real name is John M. Howting. He is active in the conservative movement and does not want to organize a union. His company — for which he built an elaborate Web site — and its officials do not exist. Ms. Byer-Ettinger suspects that he secretly recorded their conversation.
For several years, young conservatives have made a cottage industry of going undercover and trying to goad people working at perceived liberal institutions — like Acorn, NPR and Planned Parenthood — into saying something stupid. Trained by well-financed foundations, these dirty tricksters pose as pimps, sex traffickers and Muslim activists and record conversations surreptitiously. Then they release videos that have often been heavily edited...

Leno Gets It

You know your spin is losing traction when even Jay Leno sees through it, so the Kochroaches and others must be fuming at Leno's put down last night. Leno mocked the contention that (paraphrasing here) teachers, cops, and firemen are the "new elites." If that's the case, he said, then a part-time minimum wage worker at Wal-Mart must be the "new middle class." Welcome to the new Republican economy.

Blaming Unions

Are public unions our convenient economic scapegoats? - Fortune Management:

"'...Unionized workers didn't sow the seeds of the economic downturn, deregulation of the financial industry did,' says Robert Bruno, a University of Illinois professor of labor and employment relations. 'We've suffered billions in losses because of greed, gross mismanagement and illegal activity in the financial industry.'

'Unions are an easy target because the largest cost in a state budget is always labor,' says Bruno, who studies employee and union issues. 'Why are we scapegoating teachers? Is the American love affair with capitalism so irrational that it knows no bounds?'

Joseph Slater at Toledo's law school agrees: 'It's easy to paint a portrait of public workers as overpaid, not working very hard and being fat cats on the tax dollar. But there's no correlation between collective bargaining and the state budget crises...'"

Comment on the above post by Ryan:

 "Huh. Take away rights from workers, blame the middle class for the deficit, put the money back into the pockets of the rich. Sounds like the Republicans are back in charge. To the person that said that liberals will be the death of this country - you can think that if you want, but Republican economic policy (deregulation, tax cuts for wealthy and business, curtailing worker rights, and eliminating social programs) has been killing this country ever since Reagan took office. Those economic policies are coming home to roost in a fatally corrupt financial sector and a government more worried about self-preservation than the will of the people."

Painful joke making the rounds:
‎"A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'"