"Is she O.K.?" a customer asks.
"My mom?" asks Kristy, the waitress.
"Yes," the customer replies.
"No."
Since Sunday, the front page of the New York Times has been featuring
a portrait in five parts of Elyria, Ohio (pop: 55,000), seen mostly through the lens of a local diner.
(Second link is to a full multimedia feature, but direct links to the five individual articles can be found within.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 18, 2012 -
42 comments
This summer, Gawker began soliciting and publishing a weekly series of first person essays submitted by their readers: "
True Stories." They include ten stories (to date) from struggling, unemployed Americans:
Hello from the Underclass.
(Those who dislike Gawker's interface can find direct links to individual essays within.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 7, 2012 -
20 comments
Just how many applications does a company recruiting on Craigslist have to wade through? It turns out that in 24 hours, for a basic full time job with benefits, the answer can be as high as
653.
posted by ChrisR
on Jul 26, 2012 -
71 comments
During the presentation of tough new austerity measures at the Spanish parliament, and more specifically of a cut in unemployment benefits (with unemployment currently standing at 24%), and as her fellow conservative MPs clapped,
Andrea Fabra yelled "Fuck 'em all!". Hilarity has predictably
ensued...
[more inside]
posted by Skeptic
on Jul 13, 2012 -
50 comments
The Enduring Consequences of Unemployment. It is perhaps no surprise that "....workers who lost jobs during the recession of the early 1980s were making 20 percent less than their peers two decades later." Or that unemployment is also bad for your health.... "lA worker laid off at age 40 could expect to die at least a year sooner than his peers." What frames the issue starkly though is that unemployed people gradually lost the ability to read.
[more inside]
posted by storybored
on Mar 29, 2012 -
83 comments
In a new working paper provocatively entitled
Law Deans in Jail, Emory law professors
Morgan Cloud and
George Shepherd
examine the widespread reports of lying by law schools and their administrators, and the publication of these fabrications by U.S. News, and explain how the reported conduct could constitute federal crimes, [specifically] mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering.
Advisory: 77-page PDF; click on the link on the top-left to download the full paper. [
Abstract].
Previously.
Previouslier.
[Via the always trenchant Margaret Soltan].
posted by Sonny Jim
on Mar 13, 2012 -
45 comments
Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.
The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie in the London Review of Books.
posted by klue
on Jan 21, 2012 -
91 comments
Although
ATM's has been recently identified as playing a part in high unemployment, Switzerland's
Anti PowerPoint Party believes the country loses approximately 2.1 billion Swiss Francs (2.5 billion $USD) through the use of PowerPoint. If they can obtain the signatures of 100,000 voters as needed under Swiss law the group can call for a national referendum to ban the use of PowerPoint and other presentation software throughout Switzerland. Edward Tufte (and
others) also had a
problem with PPoint...
posted by wallstreet1929
on Jul 6, 2011 -
56 comments
Where Young College Grads are Finding Jobs. Government has been the main hirer of young college grads over the past year . And why not? Government jobs are safer, they pay well, and have better benefits than the private sector. The next biggest hirer of young college grads is the broad category entitled professional and technical services, which includes such industries as law, accounting, computer systems design, and management consulting. These industries as a whole have not been expanding, or expanding only slow–but they have been shifting towards better-educated workers.
Then comes the distressing category: Hotel and restaurants.
posted by storybored
on Oct 5, 2010 -
101 comments
The recession is hitting Ohio's former steel towns hard. As other areas of the country start to revive, the recession's full force is still on display
here. Since January 2008, another 10,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, according to recent Ohio employment figures. "There were other places that were dirtier, but you didn't get shocked every 15 minutes," Tomlin says with resignation. "This is what people around here without union jobs have to do to survive."
posted by VikingSword
on Dec 17, 2009 -
56 comments
It sounds like a George Lopez joke. “Times are so bad that I saw an Anglo day laborer standing outside Home Depot the other day.” Except it’s true.
posted by Joe Beese
on Nov 11, 2009 -
31 comments
How green was my valley: California's economic meltdown The fields of wheat, cotton and cantaloupe that sustained his family for three generations are gone. The land is a mess of fallow fields, cracked earth and swirling dust. (PDF - By some estimates, 12.8% of the United States' agricultural production (as measured by dollar value) comes from California, and the majority of that is in the Central Valley).
However, his particular scene of devastation, Mr. Allen argues, has nothing to do with the credit crisis, the housing crash or the downturn that has California in a vice grip.
It has to do with a seven-centimetre-long, semi-translucent, steel blue fish known as the Delta smelt. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu
on Jul 24, 2009 -
76 comments
Unemployment: good for the heart and the soul.
"In studies over the past 10 years, Ruhm has consistently found death rates decline during recessions and rise when the economy expands. If unemployment rises 1 percent, he estimates the death rate will fall by about half a percent."
posted by dersins
on Apr 27, 2009 -
38 comments
