Today, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate tracked up in 26 states and the District of Columbia between July and August. Maryland and Florida saw statistically significant increases of 0.2 percent, with slight changes in 25 other states.
Via Felix Salmon, Reuters writer James B. Kelleher has a great, long-form story on unemployed industrial workers and the fate of manufacturing in Michigan. He profiles Scott Stevenson, a blue-collar worker who feels his generation is living more poorly than his parents’. He has been unemployed for years. He More…
Good data from Veronique de Rugy at the National Review:
[Nevada] has a 14.3 percent unemployment rate, the highest in the country, and it has so far received $561.55 per person in stimulus funds. That’s a little more than half of the average stimulus per person received by the state
With midterms fast approaching, most eyes are trained towards Congress and the question of which party will grab a majority of seats. But, as the New York Times points out today, the battle for statehouses around the country may have a far greater lasting effect.
That’s because Republicans, if More…
In July, a 30-inch oil pipeline burst in Battle Creek, Mich., near a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. The cracked pipe leaked an estimated million gallons of oil into the water, and at the time, Enbridge Energy, the Canadian company that owns the pipe, promised a complete cleanup and rigorous More…
An investigation by the Michigan Messenger, TWI’s sister publication, has found possible labor-law abuses and definite safety concerns in the cleanup of a major oil spill in the Kalamazoo River in south-central Michigan. After the Messenger story went online, the company contracting for the cleanup job fired More…
Undocumented workers are working nearly 100 hours per week in unsafe conditions to clean up the Enbridge oil spill in Battle Creek, Mich., according to an investigation by our sister publication, The Michigan Messenger. The workers were bused in by a Texas company to clean up the spill, working 12- More…
A recently released convict describes how the foreclosure crisis changed the economy in prison:
[B]lack market prices were suddenly going through the roof. The price of a deck of smokes tripled. There was an actual economic reason about this.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on the challenges facing Democrats because of the dire economy they inherited, and the slow pace of job growth. The unemployment rate will probably tick up or hold steady until the November elections. The economy is not producing enough jobs to More…
Following an hour of contentious debate, the Republican National Committee voted this afternoon at their summer meeting in Kansas City to adopt changes to its 2012 presidential primary calendar. The measure received 103 votes out of the 144 members voting, just clearing the two-thirds majority threshold required for passage.
Under More…
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