Supreme Court to consider throwing out Wal-Mart sex-discrimination lawsuit
Posted: December 6, 2010 Filed under: Articles, Gender Leave a comment »The Supreme Court said Monday it will consider whether to keep alive the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in U.S. history.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40530474/ns/business-us_business/from/toolbar
Murder Defendant’s Tattoos Covered for Trial
Posted: December 6, 2010 Filed under: Articles, Class, Race Leave a comment »A judge agreed to have a suspect’s tattoos, which include a swastika, covered up so they cannot influence the jury.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/us/06tattoo.html?_r=1
Not Mad: Group of Bed-Stuy men, We Make Us Better, escort pedestrians in the wake of robberies
Posted: December 1, 2010 Filed under: Articles, Gender, Not Mad Leave a comment »They’re not part of a political club, they don’t come from any one church and they’ve never been particularly active in the community – until now.
After a spate of recent muggings and robberies, a group of 20 Bedford-Stuyvesant men started escorting people home as they got off the train and are walking through the neighborhood reaching out to young men.
“We’re not the Guardian Angels, we’re not armed,” said Kareem Varlack, 35, a field technician for Verizon and a founding member of the group We Make Us Better.
“We’re about encouraging males to be involved, because you don’t see men in their 20s, 30s and 40s involved in the community anymore, so we’re trying to bridge that gap.”
Once a week – on random evenings – the men walk subway riders home from the Utica Ave. train station. They also sponsored a neighborhood outreach walk earlier this month, stopping to talk to young men hanging out on the corners.
“I’ve been here now 15 years, and I never walk around,” said co-founder Thomas Simms, 41, who works in finance.
“I’ve never done any kind of marching or activism. I deal with the swim team parents at the Bed-Stuy YMCA, that’s as far as I go
The Baseline Scenario: How Are the Kids? Unemployed, Underwater, and Sinking
Posted: November 22, 2010 Filed under: Articles, Jobs, Money Leave a comment »This guest post is contributed by Mark Paul and Anastasia Wilson. Both are members of the class of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
In some cultures asking how the kids are doing is a colloquial way of asking how the individual is faring, acknowledging that the vitality of the younger generation is a good metric for the well-being of society as a whole. In the United States, the state of the kids should be an important indicator. Young workers bear the significant burden of funding intergenerational transfer programs and maintaining the structure of payments that flow in the economy. Today, the kids’ outlook is almost as bleak as the housing market; they are unemployed, underwater on student debt, and out of luck from a reluctant political system.
Currently, even after a slight boost in jobs growth, unemployment for 18-24 year olds stands at 24.7%. For 20-24 year olds, it hovers at 15.2%. These conservative estimates, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics U3 measure, do not reflect the number of marginally attached or discouraged young workers feeling the lag from a nearly moribund job market.
The U3 measure also does not count underemployment, yet with only 50% of B.A. holders able to find jobs requiring such a degree, underemployment rates are a telling index of the squeezing of the 18-30 year old Millennial generation. While it appears everyone is hurting since the financial collapse, young adults bear a disproportionate burden, constituting just 13.5% of the workforce while accounting for 26.4% of those unemployed. Even with good credentials, it is difficult for young people to find work and keep themselves afloat.
If companies are unwilling to hire bright young college graduates even at a relatively low salary and minimal benefits, will they ever be willing to hire anybody at all?
Jobs aren’t the whole story. Recent college graduates, those in the labor force with the freshest batch of knowledge and skills, are currently underwater and sinking fast with unprecedented student loan and personal debt. Average student debt for the class of 2008 was $23,200, an increase over four years of about 25%, meaning that students are knee deep in negative equity between their educational investment and actual earnings.
