Monthly Archives: July 2009
Research Shows Union Jobs Are Safer
The Have and Have Nots
How American Labor Law Denies a Quarter of the Workforce Collective Bargaining Rights
The right to organize and bargain collectively under the protection of law is the bedrock upon which workers are able to form or join a labor union. American labor law has not kept pace with the changing nature and face of the modern workplace and increasingly excludes more and more workers from this legal protection. Increasing numbers of employees have a supervisory aspect or capacity of their work. More and more immigrants join the workforce, especially in the agricultural sector, and more people have been classified as independent contractors, whether by choice or by an employer’s decision. As these changes take place, American labor law denies these workers their legally-protected right to form unions and collectively bargain by either defining workers as not employees or by expressly excluding them. Read the rest of this entry
Advancing the Middle Class
Over the last thirty years, working members of Alaska’s and the nation’s families have worked longer hours, harder, and smarter. The result has been a huge increase in productivity. According to government statistics, from 1980 to 2008, nationwide worker productivity grew by 75%. This is impressive, but American workers never saw most of it in their wallets. Inflation-adjusted average wages increased by only 23%. Workers were compensated for less than a third of their productivity gains.
110 Alaskans Lose Health Insurance Every Week
110 Alaskans Are Losing Their Health Coverage Every Week, as the Steady Rise of Health Care Costs Drives More and More Working Families out of the Market
These Alaskans are part of a national trend that will cost an average of 2.3 Million Americans their Health Coverage each year between 2008 and 2010.
Rising like a deadly tide, escalating health care costs will have caused 17,360 Alaskans to lose their health coverage between January 2008 and December 2010. In that same period, the number of Americans without health coverage is expected to climb by an estimated 6.9 million.
