socialist-economics

The carceral state and the labor market https://www.epi.org/blog/the-carceral-state-and-the-labor-market/ Mass incarceration is a core feature of contemporary society in the United States. According to the most recent available data, more than 2.1 million people are housed in America's local jails and state and federal prisons (BJS 2020b; BJS 2020c). Expressed as a share of the population, 639 of every 100,000 people in the country are in prison or jail, the highest incarceration rate, by a substantial margin, among the world's rich democracies ( Figure A ) and three times higher than the rate that prevailed in this country prior to the 1980s ( Figure B ). Figure A Figure B Incarceration is not just massive–it is also highly racialized. Relative to whites, the incarceration rate is almost twice as high for the Latinx population, almost three times as high for Native Americans, and more than four times higher for African Americans ( Figure C ). 1 Figure C In many important respe...

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Portside < moderator@portside.org > Date: Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 8:34 PM Subject: Last Night Was Joe Biden's Moment. May There Be Many More. To: < PORTSIDE@lists.portside.org > Last Night Was Joe Biden's Moment. May There Be Many More.     Joan Walsh April 29, 2021 The Nation Scranton Joe, once the neoliberal Senator from Delaware, translated left ideas into unthreatening but inspiring language Wednesday night. Which is a ...

Fact Sheet: Executive Order Establishing the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment https://portside.org/2021-04-26/fact-sheet-executive-order-establishing-white-house-task-force-worker-organizing-and

China Says Top Level IP Protection Drafts Near Completion https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-25/china-says-top-level-ip-protection-drafts-near-completion  -- via my feedly newsfeed

Biden's Vision of Millions of Well-Paying Jobs in Clean Energy Is Far From Reality by Saijel Kishan <p>Labor groups say wind and solar developers have deterred unionization, which is holding down wages.</p> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/biden-s-vision-of-millions-of-well-paying-clean-energy-jobs-is-far-from-reality?sref=woWS9Szx Working as a construction supervisor one winter, Steven Morones would wake up at 4 a.m. and drive two hours to a Wisconsin cornfield. There, he and the rest of the nonunion crew spent their day assembling a sprawling network of steel I-beams for solar panels to be mounted on. Threading bolts while wearing thick gloves often proved impossible, so when the temperature dropped as low as -13F, his bare hands would stiffen painfully. While his body battled the elements, Morones's mind was beset by a constant worry: that his $25 hourly wage just wasn't enough to pay his bills. "I was always stressed with the day-to-da...

I view this problem as the essential structural challenge that capitalism CANNOT solve. What Pandemics Mean for Robots and Inequality https://blogs.imf.org/2021/04/19/what-pandemics-mean-for-robots-and-inequality/ From car manufacture to self-service checkouts, we all see how automation can transform the world of work—with lower costs and higher productivity on one hand, and more precarious employment for people on the other.  But the COVID-19 pandemic added fuel to the fire. The rise in telework, for example, is hurting low-wage workers and  increasing inequality . More broadly, if the pandemic accelerates the pace of automation, then we may face a jobless recovery for low-skilled workers. Our recent IMF staff  research  suggests that such concerns are justified. Low-skilled workers are more at risk of displacement by robots than high-skilled workers, which reinforces existing inequality dynamics. We focus on one form of automation, industrial robots, and analyze the effect of past ma...