From HuffPo:

Extended unemployment benefits Congress put in place at the outset of the Great Recession didn’t discourage people from taking jobs, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Princeton University economics professor Henry Farber and San Francisco Fed economist Rob Valletta found that extended benefits might have encouraged people to continue to look for work longer so that they could remain eligible for benefits. While the longer searches for jobs could have boosted the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point, the compensation didn’t make the long-term jobless unwilling to work.

“It did not reduce the job finding rate,” Farber told HuffPost. He added the benefits probably helped the economy, however, not to mention the individual people who otherwise might have had no income. “These are people who spend the money you give them.”

The findings are similar to 2011 research by Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley.

From The NYT:

Across much of the country, sealing or clearing a criminal record after a wrongful conviction is a tangled and expensive process, advocates and former prisoners say. It can take years of appeals to courts and pleas to governors to wipe the slate clean. Even then, many felony convictions remain on federal databases and pop up during background checks or at traffic stops.

Aside from the practical challenges — a criminal record can impede big things like finding housing and employment, and smaller things like getting a hunting license — people who have been exonerated say they feel unfairly marked, branded with a scarlet letter from a justice system that should not have locked them up in the first place.

“It was destroying my life,” said Sabrina Butler, who was sentenced to die in Mississippi for the 1989 death of her infant son, then exonerated in 1995. “It’s always there.”

Clearing a criminal record can take years and cost thousands of dollars in legal fees, and differs widely state to state. Many require that defendants return to court to prove their innocence, a higher hurdle than showing that charges were dismissed or a conviction was overturned. In some states, a governor’s pardon is needed. It can be a complex process, which advocates say is made even more difficult by a lack of support services for the exonerated.

Ms. Butler said she realized her arrest was still on the books after she failed a criminal-background check while trying to buy a shotgun. She said she applied for jobs at restaurants and retailers, and was turned down every time. After she petitioned the state, her record was expunged last July — 17 years after she was released.

From ThinkProgress:

[T]he movement … grew from an anti-drug campaign into an industry with its own trade association, after several moneyed interests like Hoffman-La Roche, the maker of Valium and sleeping pills, got into the business:

The company established one of the first major drug-testing labs in America and won an early urine-testing contract with the Pentagon, leading to $300 million in annual sales by 1987. The following year, Hoffmann-La Roche stepped up its sales efforts with the launch of a major PR and lobbying campaign to “mobilize corporate America to confront the illicit drug problem in their workplaces.” The drug manufacturer called its new campaign “Corporate Initiatives for a Drug-Free Workplace.”

Before long, with the help of a New Jersey–based lawyer named David Evans, Hoffmann-La Roche was organizing workshops around the country to convince employers to set up drug-testing programs. In an interview with The Nation, Evans likened his role to that of “a doctor coming in to talk about how to set up a medical device.” During that first campaign, 1,000 employers signed up.[…]

The drug-testing industry took aim at lawmakers as much as employers. Hoffmann-La Roche, for instance, worked “with federal and state government officials,” according to a press release issued by the PR company hired to market the campaign. Lerner told the press that the drug company also envisioned a “grassroots strategy” to prevent states from passing laws to decriminalize marijuana.

By 2006, 84 percent of American employers were reporting that they drug-tested their workers. Today, drug testing is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry. DATIA [Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association] represents more than 1,200 companies and employs a DC-based lobbying firm, Washington Policy Associates. Hoffmann-La Roche’s former consultant, David Evans, now runs his own lobbying firm and has ghostwritten several state laws to expand drug testing. Most significant, in the 1990s Evans crafted the Workplace Drug Testing Act for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), of which Hoffmann-La Roche was a paying member. Laying out protocols for workplace drug testing, the bill—which has been enacted into law in several states—upheld the rights of employers to fire employees who do not comply with their companies’ drug-free workplace program.

Over the past decade, lobbyists like Evans have focused on what a DATIA newsletter recently dubbed “the next frontier”—schoolchildren. In 2002, a representative from the influential drug-testing management firm Besinger, DuPont & Associates heralded schools as “potentially a much bigger market than the workplace.”

Because this drug testing tends to capture marijuana more than other drugs, proponents of the movement have increasingly demonized marijuana use most of all. Robert Dupont, who served as drug policy director under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, had advocated decriminalizing marijuana and its use a “minor problem” before he became a “drug-testing management” consultant. Then in 1978, he declared marijuana “in many ways” the “worst drug of all the illegal drugs,” later explaining in a PBS special that, “I realized that these public policies were symbolic—all that really mattered was you were for [the decriminalization of marijuana] or you were against it…. I think about it as a litmus test.”

Now, with fewer and fewer employers implementing drug tests because they have shown “no demonstrable return on investment,” the industry has turned to another lucrative market: those receiving public assistance and unemployment benefits.

Last Monday, in what became a heated exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Mee Moua, executive director of the Asian American Justice Center, defended programs allowing families to immigrate together to the U.S. (Courtesy of the DOL)

From In These Times:

Today, despite the strides women have made in high-skill fields (most professional workers are now women), they are still heavily underrepresented in “guestworker” programs for professional immigrant workers, which skew heavily toward the vaunted, notoriously male-dominated science and tech (STEM) fields. For example, the controversial H1B visa program for professional temp workers, long touted as a spigot for STEM talent, brought in about 350,000 immigrant men but fewer than 140,000 women in 2011. Meanwhile, lawmakers are weighing proposals to sharply limit family-based visa programs–which make up about 65 percent of authorized permanent immigration–alongside plans for expanding the prized professional visas. As Pramila Jayapal points out at Colorlines.com, men tend to hold professional visas, intended to anchor household “breadwinners,” while women are overrepresented among family visas, which can chain their legal status to an authorized (male) worker.

These biases are no political accident, but a symptom of the privileging of corporate demands over community needs. Immigrant women’s labor, whether it’s in the household, off the books, or on payroll, is fueling the economy. But because it doesn’t seem to directly contribute as much to corporate bottom lines, it’s overlooked.

Beyond the economics, a more fundamental, unspoken question lies at the heart of the immigration debate: Does Washington place a higher premium on capital or social equity? Any real conversation about the latter would be forced to begin with migrant women, who live at the intersection of multiple injustices. Though many male immigrant workers suffer labor abuses, gender inequality adds an extra layer of vulnerability to the working lives of migrant women.

Working-poor migrant women are concentrated in informal sectors such as cleaning and caretaking. Some low-wage jobs, like home health aides and other domestic workers, are virtually synonymous with “immigrant woman of color.” Not coincidentally, those sectors have historically been excluded from critical federal labor protections, such as overtime pay and safety regulations. Jobs traditionally worked by women have not only been culturally devalued as mere “women’s work,” but also legally degraded by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which for decades categorically excluded women of color serving as domestics in private homes. In other sectors, such as industrial farming, women make up a significant minority of workers and endure myriad, hidden gendered abuses, from health disparities to sexual assault in the fields.

Marginalized by the law and the economic hierarchy, a migrant nanny might have virtually no recourse against a boss who sexually harasses her, fearing that she’ll lose both her job and her visa status if she reports him. Or she might be pressured to stay with an abusive partner who threatens to have her deported if she tries to escape.

(h/t: Jessica Glynn)

From NYT:

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

That gulf helps explain why stock markets are thriving even as the economy is barely growing and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

With millions still out of work, companies face little pressure to raise salaries, while productivity gains allow them to increase sales without adding workers.

“So far in this recovery, corporations have captured an unusually high share of the income gains,” said Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “The U.S. corporate sector is in a lot better health than the overall economy. And until we get a full recovery in the labor market, this will persist.”

The result has been a golden age for corporate profits, especially among multinational giants that are also benefiting from faster growth in emerging economies like China and India.

From Spotlight on Poverty:

The FMLA was the first piece of federal legislation intended to help workers manage their commitments to both their employers and their families, and Clinton campaigned on a pledge to sign the law. Unfortunately, 20 years have passed since that historic moment, and no additional work-family legislation has made its way onto the books. And while the FMLA was an important first step, there is still work to be done, especially for low-wage workers. Now is the time to extend the legacy by providing paid leave for all working Americans.

The Family and Medical Leave Act allows some individuals the right to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in order to recover from a serious illness or injury, provide care to a newborn, newly adopted, or newly placed foster child, provide care to a seriously ill family member, or to deal with a qualifying exigency resulting from a family member who is an active duty member of the armed services. While the FMLA does not guarantee income while on leave or provide any form of wage replacement, it does ensure that benefits such as health insurance are continued while the worker is away from his or her job.

Because FMLA leave is unpaid, many are unable to benefit from the policy even when they are covered by the law and experience a qualifying life event, such as the birth of a new baby or the serious illness of a loved one. According to Department of Labor data released this month, which details both employers’ and employees’ experiences with FMLA, about half of those who needed leave but did not take it said that they kept coming to work because they could not afford to take unpaid time off.

Many individuals who take leave are able to receive at least partial pay while they are out, most often by utilizing a combination of sick leave and vacation days. But about a third of those who take FMLA leave do not receive any pay while they are out. These individuals are disproportionately likely to be low-wage workers who have decreased access to workplace benefits like paid family leave, paid sick leave, and paid vacation.

From ThinkProgress:

Throughout the 2012 presidential election, Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray used his employees as a political tool to try to defeat President Obama. Murray allegedly forced miners to attend a pro-Romney rally without pay and to contribute to Republican candidates. He announced layoffs at mines in Ohio and Utah, claiming that Obama’s “war on coal” has cost jobs and hurt his business.

But months after blaming Obama for layoffs, Murray Energy is looking to hire back workers. Alec MacGillis reports this includes mines in Ohio and Utah, which had announced layoffs in the days following the election. At the time, Murray claimed the “drastic time” forced “survival mode layoffs”:

“It’s opened back up…they’re hiring people,” said Gary Parsons, a former superintendent at the mine who worked there for five years before being laid off with the announcement of the shutdown last summer. Parsons himself has not been called back, and is planning simply to retire early, but he said he had talked to several locals who were taking steps to get hired back on. He said he did not understand why, after the big headline-making closure last year, things were perking up at the mine. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “They said they was going to close the mine down.”

…

Company officials maintain the rehiring is part of a reclamation project that can go on for several years, but they may have up to 43 people working at the Ohio Red Bird West operation after originally laying off 56.

From The Nation:

On Black Friday, hundreds of Walmart workers protested the superstore’s unfair labor practices and “Always Low Wages” policy. While Walmart’s bottom-line business model has made the Walton family billions, their employees in California were 40 percent more likely to need public assistance. Walmart is not only slashing prices on flat-screen TVs—they’re suppressing wages and costing tax payers millions of dollars. Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry checks the numbers to see why the Walton’s “Live Better” math—which claims their low-price model benefits all families—doesn’t quite add up.