Tag Archives: jobs

The Wealth Gap Is…

Posted on by
Reply

…narrowing? How can that be? All those tax cuts and all those economic moves of the prior administration—which ended just 6 months ago—were playing to the favored rich. Weren’t they?

No.

A fading pandemic and heating US economy appear to be paying off for lower-wage workers.
New jobs at restaurants, hotels, stores, salons, and similar in-person roles accounted for about half of all payroll gains in June, according to the Labor Department. And workers in those industries are seeing larger raises than other employees.

They’re also seeing actual jobs, with those raises being from zero to paychecks.

Most of that, too, is in those roughly half the States who’ve lifted most or all Wuhan Virus-related restrictions and mostly or fully reopened their economies.

Go figure.

You Didn’t Build That

Posted on by
Reply

The Progressive-Democrats are continuing their attack on American citizens being successful. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) has populated her Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth.

The past several decades have shown with devastating clarity the marked imbalance between the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers….

Never mind that the last four years before the present Progressive-Democrat-run administration and Congress has seen a marked decrease in the disparity in the financial fortunes of CEOs and workers, as workers got bigger pay raises, in per centage terms, than have the CEOs, significantly closing the gap. Never mind, either, that that decrease in the financial fortunes gap also has been markedly potentiated by the historic lows in minority and women unemployment as those especially on the bottom rungs of our economic—financial fortune—ladder saw marked increases in their wages: they got actual jobs, they became workers.

Pelosi went on:

The devaluing of work has had a negative impact on consumer confidence, job creation and economic growth….

Never mind that the only ones devaluing work, and through that negatively impacting consumer confidence, are Progressive-Democrats with their government (not economic) policy of paying people not to work. Never mind, either, that Job creation has been so anemic under this Progressive-Democrat government that there are millions more jobs available than there are workers willing to take them—especially in the low-skill milieus—because Progressive-Democrats insist on paying those least fortunate to not work, to continue being the least fortunate.

Pelosi’s wonderful select committee? It’s chaired by Congressman Jim Himes (D, CT) and populated with Progressive-Democrats like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D, WA), Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D, OH), Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D, WI), Congressman Vicente González (D,TX), Congresswoman Angie Craig (D, MN), and Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D, CA).

It’s hard to find farther left members, even for the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Pelosi to Americans: you didn’t build that. You’re not going to, either, without Government.

A Question

Posted on by
Reply

…was asked.

What do you think is the most effective way for companies to support diversity initiatives?

…and answered, by yours truly.

Stop carrying out diversity initiatives. Those are just unserious virtue-signaling nonsense.

Instead, businesses (among other entities) support and/or carry out their own training programs, and they should support K-12 charter, voucher, private school education, so as to build over time a population of qualified adults that is reflective of the population at large.

From that diverse population of qualified individuals, then select and hire based on merit rather than on virtue signals.

An Illegal Offering?

Posted on by
Reply

The Biden administration intends to lease some Federal lands in the waters roughly between Long Island and New Jersey, ostensibly to build a wind farm there.

The problem with that intent is this:

The proposed “competitive lease sale”…the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) [an arm of the Interior Department] is seeking feedback on several mandates tied to the sale, including the requirement “to create good-paying union jobs and engage with all stakeholders and ocean users[.]”
The “announcement of new proposed lease stipulations puts a priority on creating and sustaining good-paying union jobs….”

And there’s the problem. In addition to President Joe Biden’s (D) administration picking and choosing winners and losers in this enterprise—unethical at best, and completely out of bounds for the government of a free nation—the openly stated requirement for union jobs is illegal to the point of unconstitutional.

Picking winners and losers: the lease sale is, by design, not at all a competitive offering. Open shop companies—companies that are not unionized—are deliberately excluded from even bidding on the contract. That also creates artificially inflated costs to us taxpayers for any of these leases through that lack of competition and through the unions getting a free hand to raise their wage demands.

Illegal, unconstitutional: those non-union companies are denied their statutory rights to competitively bid at all for these Federal contracts. Beyond that, those non-union companies are denied equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied an opportunity to compete at all, much less on an equal footing, for participation in the contracts.

All non-union employees of those companies, individually and severally, are denied their equal protection under the 14th Amendment by being denied any opportunity to earn a paycheck under those contracts solely on the basis of their not being union members.

Some Words on Timidity

Posted on by
Reply

RR Reno, editor of First Things, had an interesting op-ed about why he isn’t interested in hiring graduates of our Ivy League schools. His disdain wasn’t so much for the woke activists effectively running those schools as it was for the rest of the pupils (my term; his more generous one was “students”) there [emphasis added].

Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.

The same applies to existing CxOs of our businesses who show themselves too timid to speak against the woke, or against anything else in which they do not believe. If they’re that timid, how can the companies they run be expected to compete—domestically or globally?

Those meek, acquiescent pupils? Look at the example set for them at those schools: the meek, acquiescent persons of the schools’ administrations, who have spent the last several years, if not their professional lives well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up against their woke activist pupils. That studied [sic] timidity doesn’t excuse the silent pupils’ own timidity (their peers provide a different example), but those…administrators…with their example make their timid charges’ paths that much harder.