Vincent Cao, who has worked as a waiter at various Chinese restaurants throughout New York City since 2001, has become expert in the ways that local businesses evade minimum wage laws. Restaurants, says Cao, typically “pay $300 a month in … Continue reading
Complaining about the subways is the God-given right of New Yorkers, especially when fares are on the rise or service is on the decline, which seems to be always.Offering ways to fix the subways, though, is generally reserved for pundits … Continue reading
Karen Gregory is still puzzled by the events of “the day the syllabus went crazy,” as she calls it. The Queens College instructor, searching for something to spark discussion on the first day of her Introduction to Labor Studies class … Continue reading
With the NBA lockout almost ready to swallow the regular season, I look at the evidence for what the impact will be on local economies in NBA cities. The answer: not a whole heckuva lot. After another fruitless round of … Continue reading
With unemployment still through the roof, are job training programs just preparing people for jobs that don’t exist? As the economy threatens to sink into a double-dip recession, pressure is growing for federal, state, and local governments to do something … Continue reading
Nouriel Roubini takes to Twitter to debunk last week’s rosy employment report, and I look at what it all means for New York City’s job picture: Between the stock market nosedive and the S&P downgrade (based on a $2 trillion … Continue reading
Next up fo New York City after the defeat of a paid sick leave bill: a proposal to require decent wages for employees at development projects that get city subsidies. The battle lines are all too familiar: A worker-rights bill … Continue reading
A multi-year campaign to require that all employees in New York City receive paid sick time (which I first wrote about last fall) was quashed in October by city council speaker Christine Quinn. What happened, and what does it mean … Continue reading
Home health care aides are both the fastest-growing job sector in the economy, and the last job anybody would want: Though unemployment remains north of 9 percent in the “post-recession” city economy, there are a few bright spots for New … Continue reading
My first article for the relaunched City Limits, about the doomsday budgets proposed for New York city and state, is up. (It’s actually the second article I wrote for them, but is running first — I blame the suits at … Continue reading