Downsizing the News And Pretending to Increase Quality
     Executive management at the Allentown Morning Call recently laid off more than two dozen persons from its newsroom, most of them veteran reporters drawing higher salaries. Management plans to cut 35–40 positions, according to a letter sent by publisher Timothy Johnson. The cuts are about one-fourth of the news staff. The remaining reporters are being told to write more stories under the same deadline constraints. Coverage of local meetings has been put into secondary importance; bureaus have been combined. The Morning Call is not alone. [ more ]

Labor Pains: Unions, the Mass Media, Economy, and
an Anti-Worker Administration

Once a year, I and a few dozen other reporters and columnists write a Labor Day story. And, like most Americans we don't remember our history.

We don’t remember that the Knights of Labor created the first Labor Day in 1882 and that Congress made it a national holiday in 1894. [ more ]

Productive Unemployment
      Recent Department of Labor studies report that American workers are "the most productive"ever. That's because not only are they are doing so much more to compensate for their fellow workers having been laid off, but because they live with the fear if they don't work even harder they, too, may be laid off, or lose promotions, in an economy that is going as far South as our manufacturing plants. [ more ]

The Right Thing to Do
            Aaron Feuerstein is a 70-year-old Orthodox Jew, but to his 3,200 employees, most of them Christian, he might just as well have been Santa Claus.
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Unfair Labor Practices
      "Excuse me," I politely asked when no one looked up, "but do you have any 'Union Yes' buttons?"
      It seemed to be a reasonable request since the AFL-CIO had begun a multi-million dollar "Union Yes" campaign, I was at a booth for the regional labor council, and this was one of the largest local fairs in the country, one that would record more than 650,000 admissions in eight days. [ more ]