Wreck and Salvage: Kafka
362 Times as Rich
“Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country,” said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day…is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation.”
The History of Labor Day, U.S. Department of Labor
What happened? Some say it started in the early 80s after Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air-traffic controllers for striking — something they had no legal right to do — and thereby legitimized a wave of corporate union busting. Others blame it on a more pervasive “greed is good” aggressiveness that engulfed corporate suites starting right about then.
There’s no question that, ever since, and with ever greater alacrity, companies have fired workers for trying to form unions, even though that’s illegal, and have used or threatened to use permanent replacements if workers go on strike — which is legal but was rare before the 80s.
Robert B. Reich | August 31, 2007
What Happened to Labor Day?Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups – United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies – have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their special exclusive CEO pension funds. They further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.
Barbara Ehrenreich, August 30, 2007
“It’s Not Easy Being Ultra-Rich”The UFE and IPS report can be found here.
Maps of War
This is from the Maps of War site, developed (somewhat mysteriously) by ” a Flash-Designer hobbyist and professional history- buff,” who hopes to help us “place today’s war headlines into a greater historical context.”
Not every map is as elaborate (or successful) as her/his “Imperial History” of the Middle East, but the Maps are a great idea and worth a visit now and again. (It did make me feel dumb, too. Who were the Sassanid or the Seljuk?)
Social Explorer: Coles County, Illinois
Social Explorer is a premier U.S. demographics website. Our online tools help you visually analyze and understand the demography of the United States through the use of interactive maps and data reports. Our primary product is a web-based application that creates fast, intuitive, and visually appealing maps and reports. Our software gives anyone with an Internet connection access to census data that was previously the domain of social science experts.
One of my favorite teaching websites is the American Fact Finder, which is the online portal for official U.S. census data. The AFF is an embarrassment of riches, but as such it is also intimidating for some students. I was happy to hear about the Social Explorer, then, which draws on Census data to create a much simpler, easier to navigate set of data.
The freely available information is limited– they sell data to various organizations to make money– but nevertheless extensive. You can zoom in on a map to see the demographic composition of your town or neighborhood. You can contrast 1950 data to 2000, too, and see how radically the population has aged (in 1950, 5-10% were 45-49; in 2000, the lower two thirds of the county included a population that was 25 to 35% aged 45-54). Or, in Coles County, Illinois, where I live, you can see the way the population clusters around two towns, Mattoon and Charleston, surrounded by relatively empty farmland.
Zoom in further and you can see how, according to 2000 census data, the small Black population is concentrated in two pockets: on the west side of the county (around and west of Mattoon: .5 to 5%), and then in Charleston, around Eastern Illinois University (5 to 10%). Interestingly, the small Asian population is concentrated on the east (around the university and east of Charleston: 5 to 10%); and the small Hispanic population (5 to 10%) is equally distributed around the county. The majority white population is somewhat thinner along the corridor that connects Mattoon and Charleston (75 to 90%) than in the surrounding countryside (95 to 100%).
This is a long standing pattern: it’s not until the 1990 census that the minority population registers at all in any significant way. Perhaps not surprisingly, Charleston has the wealthiest neighborhoods, largely clustered around the university ($40 to $45,000) and then farther east ($30 to $35,000). Mattoon has a pocket of relative wealth surrounding the country club ($30 to $35,000). Most of the county, though, particularly to the west, is relatively poor ($20 to $25,000). I imagine that these numbers have risen in the last seven years, although perhaps not as fast for every group.
I was listening to an interview with Michael Yates on the Progressive Magazine pod cast the other day, and he talked about how little most of us know about the ethnic and economic make up of our communities. We just don’t see poverty anymore; the rich are walled off; ethnic groups live in isolated enclaves. The Social Explorer is a great corrective tool.