By Jim Dou­glas (AvStop) A Com­pass Air­lines flight atten­dant, rep­re­sented by the Asso­ci­a­tion of Flight Attendants-​​CWA (AFA-​​CWA), was ter­mi­nated on Thurs­day after pub­licly reveal­ing she qual­i­fied for foods stamps. Despite a full-​​time sched­ule, flight atten­dant Kirsten Ari­ane­jad was recently fea­tured in a local tele­vi­sion inter­view announc­ing that she had been approved for food stamps...
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By Steven Hill (LA Pro­gres­sive) Dur­ing and before the cur­rent eco­nomic cri­sis, few coun­tries have been vil­i­fied as an eco­nomic bas­ket case so much as Japan: it’s been hard to find any ref­er­ence to the coun­try with­out some men­tion of its allegedly scle­rotic econ­omy, its zom­bie banks, its defla­tion and slow eco­nomic growth. This...
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By Eliz­a­beth Weise (USA Today) Last week in a series of morn­ing TV inter­views, Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion Com­mis­sioner Mar­garet Ham­burg told con­sumers that they should reject over-​​easy eggs and avoid “runny egg yolks for mop­ping up with toast.” Carol Tucker-​​Foreman, an assis­tant sec­re­tary of agri­cul­ture under Pres­i­dent Carter who’s worked on food pol­icy at...
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By Vivek Wad­hwa (TechCrunch) This is not some­thing that tech exec­u­tives pub­licly admit, because they fear being sued for age dis­crim­i­na­tion, but every­one knows that this is the way things are. Why would any com­pany hire a com­puter pro­gram­mer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh...
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By James Lam­ont in New Delhi and Joe Leahy in Mum­bai (FT) Call cen­tre work­ers are becom­ing as cheap to hire in the US as they are in India, accord­ing to the head of the country’s largest busi­ness process out­sourc­ing com­pany. High unem­ploy­ment lev­els have dri­ven down wages for some low-​​skilled out­sourc­ing ser­vices in...
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By Son­ali Kol­hatkar (Alter­net) Lured by the promise of greater pro­duc­tion, farm­ers are pres­sured into mort­gag­ing their farms to pur­chase genet­i­cally mod­i­fied seeds, pes­ti­cides, and fer­til­izer from Amer­i­can com­pa­nies like Mon­santo. Since GM seeds are patented by Mon­santo, their repeated use each year requires con­stant licens­ing fees that keep farm­ers impov­er­ished. One bad yield...
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By Geoff May­nard (Express UK) A mas­sive 63 per cent of women and 75 per cent of men said they would rather have a man in charge at work. Both male and female work­ers believe male bosses were less likely to get involved in office pol­i­tics, eas­ier to rea­son with and rarely had mood swings....
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If the rich really wish to create a better world, they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods...
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By Paul McDougall (Infor­ma­tion­Week) Despite Pres­i­dent Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-​​tech jobs in the U.S., a fed­eral agency run by a hand-​​picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 mil­lion pro­gram to train work­ers, includ­ing 3,000 spe­cial­ists in IT and related func­tions, in South Asia. Fol­low­ing their train­ing, the tech work­ers will be placed with...
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(ThinkProgress) This past Tues­day, Rep. Zach Wamp (R-​​TN), who is also a lead­ing can­di­date for the GOP nom­i­na­tion for gov­er­nor, joined a con­fer­ence call with the right-​​wing National Fed­er­a­tion of Inde­pen­dent Busi­ness (NFIB). When the sub­ject of extend­ing unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits arose, Wamp com­plained that giv­ing peo­ple unem­ploy­ment insur­ance was “cre­at­ing a cul­ture of depen­dence...
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