"Joe Hill" - Paul Robeson
Okay, Happy Labor Day sounds bitterly ironic without my intending it to be.
Sorry for neglecting things -- it is kind of a weekend of endings and beginnings -- we buried my mother-in-law's ashes in suburban Philly on Saturday and now have driven up to Worcester, MA, where the lad is going to be doing an internship for the year. Worcester looks to be like a lot of former industrial cities in the 100-200,000 population range -- depressed and lacking a clear direction to get out of it. We stopped in Hartford, CT for lunch and that appeared to be much the same.
The New York Times had several good pieces today in its Sunday Review section, the best of which was by Robert Reich, laying out the crisis of the American middle class and the ways in which our drift towards plutocracy and the primacy of finance over the last thirty years have culminated in disaster for the overall economy. Ryan Avent makes the case for denser cities as a means of helping the economy -- something I wish the well-heeled citizenry in DC (and I don't mean politicians) would understand. And Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer advance the idea that happier workers actually enhance the productivity of companies, a notion that is apparently hard for most managers to understand.
Krugman continues to beat the drum for changing the conversation in Washington back to jobs and away from deficits. He acknowledges that nothing Obama proposes is likely to pass, but advocates that the President find the tone and content most likely to get Washington to focus on the critical need for job creation. The Times editorial board weighs in with the specifics they would like to see the President propose, even if the Republicans will stymie him at every turn.
In the end, reasonable people tend to believe that we have a crisis, that there are steps that could easily be taken to alleviate that crisis, and that there is no chance of such steps being enacted given the nature of today's Republican Party. It's really a hell of a situation for a country to be in.
Update: I forgot to link to this wonderful piece in the Times Magazine about iron workers in NYC. My firm represents several iron worker local unions and they are a rare bunch. One of the things that comes across so nicely in this article is the love of the work that characterizes the trade. I had a client several years ago -- now a quite high ranking union official -- who described to me coming back from college and doing iron work for the summer and falling in love with it and never going back to school. (Several of my clients worked on the building of the World Trade Center and loved the experience -- one guy I knew took his one week of vacation post 9-11 and spent it doing clean up at the site.) It is the kind of work that engenders a sense of both independence and brotherhood -- an intoxicating combination. As someone with a healthy fear of heights, I am slightly in awe of the nerve this work takes. The piece also fits nicely with the one I linked to above about happy workers being more productive -- people who feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in what they do tend to be that way. Anyway, happy labor day to all the union iron workers out there.
What say you?
