In New York City, more people are punching the clock at work and going home to homeless shelters, the Times reports:

On many days, Alpha Manzueta gets off from one job at 7 a.m., only to start her second at noon. In between she goes to a place she’s called home for the last three years — a homeless shelter.

“I feel stuck,” said Ms. Manzueta, 37, who has a 2 ½-year-old daughter and who, on a recent Wednesday, looked crisp in her security guard uniform, waving traffic away from the curb at Kennedy International Airport. “You try, you try and you try and you’re getting nowhere. I’m still in the shelter.”

Fifty thousand people live in New York City’s shelter system. The working residents are predominantly female, working low-wage jobs in security, home health care,  and retail. Their plight is a dramatic illustration of the widening gap between wages and rents in New York City. 

Remember how that bridge collapsed in Washington State back in May, dumping drivers into the Skagit River, and severing Interstate 5? How many bridges in the United States would you guess are at serious risk of a similar collapse? 7,795, according to a review by the Associated Press, including the Brooklyn Bridge:

An Associated Press analysis of 607,380 bridges in the most recent federal National Bridge Inventory showed that 65,605 were classified as ‘‘structurally deficient’’ and 20,808 as ‘‘fracture critical.’’ Of those, 7,795 were both — a combination of red flags that experts say indicate significant disrepair and similar risk of collapse.

A bridge is deemed fracture critical when it doesn’t have redundant protections and is at risk of collapse if a single, vital component fails. A bridge is structurally deficient when it is in need of rehabilitation or replacement because at least one major component of the span has advanced deterioration or other problems that lead inspectors to deem its condition poor or worse.

Engineers say the bridges are safe. And despite the ominous sounding classifications, officials say that even bridges that are structurally deficient or fracture critical are not about to collapse.

Each day, over 29 million drivers cross bridges that are both fracture critical and structurally deficient. They are found in all 50 states. Many of these bridges have spans with sufficiency ratings less than the Skagit River bridge. A bridge that scores less than 50 out 100 points for sufficiency may be eligible for federal funds for repairs. The AP found 400 bridges with sufficiency rating of less than 10, and “[t]he Brooklyn Bridge was among the worst.”

[Photo credit: ravi, Creative Commons.]

Hillman Judge Harold Meyerson on the future of the AFL-CIO and Sidney Hillman’s legacy of organizing workers whom others considered unorganizable:

During the floor debate yesterday on a resolution expanding the AFL-CIO’s commitment to take the workers excluded from labor law’s protections into its ranks—domestic workers, taxi drivers, day laborers, and the like—one delegate to the union’s quadrennial convention likened the proceedings to the 1935 AFL convention, when a sizable group of unionists wanted the Federation to expand its ranks to include factory workers. The more conservative Federation leaders, including its president, William Green, believed that unions should represent only workers in skilled trades—carpenters, masons, plumbers, and so on. But John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers and Sidney Hillman of the Clothing Workers believed that there were millions of factory workers who would flock to unions if given the chance. [Prospect]

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Sidney:

Lewis and Hillman’s motion to organize factory workers was put to a vote and lost. They were not happy. Indeed, Lewis decked Big Bill Hutchinson, the president of the Carpenters, and stormed out—to form the CIO, a labor organization pledged to organize factory workers and that organized millions of them over the next couple of years.

The AFL-CIO is revisiting many of the same issues the AFL tackled in 1935, when immigrants, workers of color, and women sought to join a predominantly white, male union movement. The good news is that in 2013, the AFL-CIO is welcoming these workers with open arms. The survival of the labor movement demands it.

Sidney would be proud. 

[Photo credit: Joseph_a, Creative Commons.]

You can find anything through Yahoo these days, even a free kid. Or, at any rate, you could until Reuters exposed a Yahoo message board where fed up adoptive parents and adoption hopefuls were simply swapping kids amongst themselves with no oversight from social workers or the courts. The board was part of a larger trend known as “rehoming,” which is takes its name from pet rescue programs.

Many of the “rehomed” kids are overseas adoptees whose parents don’t want them anymore. To learn more about the grim phenomenon of human trafficking in the guise of international adoption, check out Kathryn Joyce’s new book, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption.”