Only in America

In November, the voters of Sea-Tac approved a ballot measure that would have raised the local hourly wage to $15 an hour. This past Friday, in response to a lawsuit backed by the airlines and the restaurant industry, the King County Superior Court ruled that the measure could only apply to the 1,600 people who work at hotels and car services outside the airport. That cuts out 4,700 people who work within the airport itself, which is technically a separate jurisdiction belonging to the Port of Seattle and is not subject to the voters’ desires.

Working at Sea-Tac wasn’t always quite such a hard way to make a living. Just ask Ahmed Jama, 26, who says he started in fast food restaurants there since he was 16.

Like most workers at the airport, he holds multiple jobs, since most employers don’t give anybody full-time work (to say nothing of health benefits — Jama says he declared bankruptcy when he was 20 years old because of medical bills for a heart condition). So for about 30 hours a week, he’s a dispatcher for the aviation services firm Huntleigh USA, which means he coordinates dozens of wheelchair pushers who arrive to meet disabled people at their gates. After 10 years, he still makes $10.05 an hour, and feels like he’s going backwards — he wants to go to school to become a medical technician, but working 60 hours a week doesn’t leave time for class.

Here’s what happened to make planning for the future impossible: The airlines have contracted out more and more of the jobs for which they used to pay people decent salaries with benefits. While Alaska Airlines employees overall make an average of $73,500 per year, those of the airlines’ contractors make an estimated $20,176.

“That’s the new hustle, subcontract everything. Cut the salary, cut the benefits, and CEO pay goes up,” Jama says, taking a break from his spreadsheets and walkie-talkie in SeaTac’s airy welcome lobby. “And you see all these companies come underbid each other. So companies that used to pay vacation pay, or parking, a new company will come in and say ‘we don’t pay anybody anything, give me the contract.’ And they’ll get the contract, and it’s a steep decline in working conditions and morale. Each company is just out doing the bare minimum.”

Map of the day

According to the number-crunching program at WordPress.com, this blog attracted about 150,000 views from 193 countries during 2013.

Chart of the day

As Steven Rattner explains,

Not only did trends of recent years continue in 2013 – particularly the diverging fortunes of the rich and everyone else — but in some ways they accelerated. The stock market, as measured by the Standard & Poor’s index, was up a stunning 32 percent (through Dec. 27). Corporate profits rose to a record $2.1 trillion. Meanwhile, incomes remained nearly flat and jobs tallies grew slowly. Through Oct. 30, earnings were up just 1.4 percent, an even smaller increase than in 2012.  The only relative bright spot for the average American was housing; thanks in part to the aggressive efforts by the Federal Reserve to hold down interest rates, sale prices of homes were up by 13.3 percent in September, compared with a year earlier.

That “bright spot” is, of course, only bright if someone happens to be selling a house they actually own—which they may be doing in order to move somewhere to find a job they don’t have. . .

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Wolves of Wall Street*

OK, the movie isn’t very good. (The Wolf of Wall Street is basically Goodfellas goes to Wall Street, with more cocaine and less violence, in which Scorcese focuses on the low-hanging fruit of penny-stock huckstering rather than on the real, much-more-powerful culprits behind the financial crisis.) But that doesn’t mean there aren’t wolves that need to be exposed: the academics who are bought and paid for by Wall Street.

Charles Ferguson, in the Inside Job, did a fine job shining light on some of the the better-known economists—R. Glenn Hubbard, Larry Summers, Frederic Mishkin, and so on—who have been willing to be paid to play in the debates surrounding financial deregulation.**

Around the same time, Reuters [pdf] conducted a study of academics who present themselves as disinterested experts at U.S. Congressional hearings but who have industry ties they don’t reveal. Thus, for example, roughly a third of the 82 academics who gave testimony to the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee between late 2008 and early 2010 (as lawmakers debated the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s) did not reveal their financial affiliations in their testimony.

More recently, both The Nation and the New York Times have carried out similar studies—of academics who reap the rewards of defending one or another practice developed by Wall Street firms to manipulate financial markets for enormous gains.

As it turns out, it was Elizabeth Warren, the modern-day Leonard Horner, who sounded the alarm back in 2002 about the emerging market for scholarly data, “as journalists, lobbyists and legislators search for facts to pepper their public statements and better influence public opinion.” In her own area of bankruptcy law, she cites the example of the Credit Research Center located at Georgetown University that was taking money from the consumer credit industry to produce studies supporting the credit industry’s political positions. What happens is that the kind of studies issued by such centers acquire an academic legitimacy but the data they report are considered “proprietary,” belonging exclusively to the industry funders who decide what data are released and what data are held private.

Warren’s conclusion?

The market for data threatens the role that social science research can play in policymaking. When data become a commodity—purchased, packaged, and sold to a willing public under a university imprimatur by those who profit from its distribution—then empirical work becomes little more than cheap ad copy. When that happens, the value of every kind of research academics do declines sharply. Like it or not, our collective worth is on the line.

When that happens, all of us—inside and outside the academy—fall prey to the wolves of Wall Street.

 

*I reserve the right to change the title of this post, since I’m going to see David O. Russell’s American Hustle later today. If I do, I’ll disclose the fact that I knew Russell back when he was in college.

**Partly as a result of that negative exposure, the American Economics Association was forced to consider developing a code of conduct it has never had. Instead, it adopted a very limited disclosure policy [pdf], according to which the only rule is that “Every submitted article should state the sources of financial support for the particular research it describes.”

Follow-up. . .

As it turns out, I did go to see American Hustle, which is terrific—superior (in my humble opinion) to Scorcese’s film. Russell has managed to capture a nation of small-time con artists (not unlike the characters in such TV series as The Sopranos and The Wire), who both deserve our affection (in the earnest manner in which they reinvent themselves and try to “do the right thing”) and represent a distraction from the real culprits (the big-time con artists whose activities have actually put people out of work and driven them into poverty and have deprived them of much-needed social benefits, like food stamps and unemployment compensation).

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Chart of the day

source

Under the emergency federal program ending today, jobless workers were able to receive unemployment insurance payments for up to 73 weeks, depending on their state. Without the federal program, the percentage of unemployed workers who are receiving any type of jobless benefit is projected to drop to a record low of 26 percent by the end of the year.

Cartoon of the day

Special mention

Map of the day

source

Thus, for example, Illinois, with an official unemployment rate of 9.2 percent, has 64,300 workers who will lose unemployment insurance benefits as of 1 January and 89,1000 more workers who will lose benefits in the first half of 2014. Right now, 73 weeks of unemployment benefits are currently available; after 28 December, only 26 weeks will be available.

A full-screen map is available here.