NYT metro reporter Gina Bellafante critiques Mayor Bloomberg’s claims of job creation in New York City:

Despite job growth in certain knowledge-class and service sectors, unemployment has been rising. On Thursday, the State Labor Department reported that the city’s unemployment rate climbed to 10 percent in June, exceeding the national figure by close to two percentage points. The unemployment rate in the city is now nearly twice what it was five years ago and has been running higher than the figures for Atlanta, Boston, Houston and Chicago.

While it is indeed a very good time to be moving to New York with a Stanford M.B.A. and a business plan to create the Twitter of 2014 (as suggested by the barely post-adolescent tech entrepreneur Josh Miller when he stood next to the mayor at a press event in May), it is a far less auspicious moment to be someone who already lives here and is looking for cleaning work, say, in the offices of the Twitter of 2012.

Bellafante reports that low-wage workers in New York are battling high unemployment and dwindling purchasing power. In the 1960s and ’70s a full time job at minimum wage was enough to lift a family above the poverty line, but that is no longer the case, according to a recent by a local social justice organization. Today’s full-time minimum wage worker supporting a family of three makes just 82% of the federal poverty threshold.

[Photo credit: Shawn Hoke, Creative Commons.]

• Rumors are flying in the wake of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Gawker media reporter Adrian Chen explains why “clues” linking the shooter to the online community 9gag are probably internet pranks   
• Joe Atkins of the Jackson Free Press takes us inside the UAW’s high-stakes battle to unionize Nissan in Mississippi. Hillman trustees Bruce Raynor and Danny Glover are there.
• Katha Pollitt of the Nation takes Jason DeParle to task for his sentimental paean to marriage as a path to economic stability. “Do we really need a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to tell us that a woman with a college degree and a good solid marriage is better off than a college dropout raising three kids alone?” she asks
• Greg Ousley killed his parents 19 years ago, at the age of 14. Prison officials in Indiana hope he’ll be paroled in a few years. Should he be? 
• “These are my guys forever.“ John Gravois reports on an innovative new program that places disabled veterans in family homes

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Gary and Patty Quarles lost their only son, Gary Wayne, in the Upper Big Branch mine explosion. Earlier this year, they negotiated a multi-million dollar settlement from Massey Energy, the company whose negligence and greed killed Gary Wayne and 28 other men.

At first, the Quarles were determined to sue, because they knew that’s what their son wanted. They didn’t have to guess. He told them so before he died. But in the end, Massey came up with an offer that Patty Quarles felt she couldn’t refuse, for the sake of her two grandchildren, whom Gary Wayne had entrusted to her care.

None of these sorries made [Patty Quarles] feel better. And the financial settlement, perhaps the biggest sorry of all, brought its own burden.

On one hand, as many miners did, her son had explicitly talked about suing the coal company if anything ever happened to him. After his divorce, he changed his beneficiaries to his two children and, as he wrote on the legal form, “Mom,” with her legal name in parentheses.

Her son’s decision told her that he trusted her to handle things right, that he wanted to take care of his children, of his dad and of her. And this was what she carried with her into the final mediation at the golf resort, when she was almost blind with a migraine headache, the blackout curtains in the hotel room drawn.

She thought about his wishes, about her grandchildren having a future outside coal mining, about her husband, who was still sitting over there humming to Ralph Stanley.

“I wanted it over,” she said. “I wanted it over so bad.”

“At the same time,” she said, and now Patty Quarles was crying, “this is your mom saying this is what your life’s worth. Like your mom has sold you out. . . . When the lawyers said 3 million I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. I wouldn’t have settled. I wouldn’t have settled for one red cent.”

And then she did.

She is legally prohibited from saying how much the settlement was. But she can say that when her husband saw the amount, she thought he was going to pass out. And that when she finally agreed to it, she felt anything but better.

“  ‘Gary Wayne, well, this is what you was worth,’ ” she recalled thinking, and in that sense, the settlement has inflicted pain on top of pain.

Stephanie McCrummen’s story is a devastating portrait of grief, doubt, and the special love between parents and their adult children. It’s one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

As horribly as the Quarles are suffering, they fared better than most of the survivors of workers killed on the job. There are over 4000 such fatalities each year, and most families never see a cent of compensation.

Gary and Patty continue to lobby for tougher mine safety regulations in the hope of protecting other miners.

[Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein, all rights reserved.]

Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon takes a critical look at the claim that labor is an effective counterweight to conservative super PACs:

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reignited a battle over money in politics when it reported that labor unions have been spending about four times more on political activity than was previously understood. Using public disclosure forms unions filed with the Labor Department, the Journal concluded that unions have spent over $4 billion on political advocacy at all levels of government since 2005.

“The result,” the Journal explains, “is that labor could be a stronger counterweight than commonly realized to ‘super PACs’ that today raise millions from wealthy donors, in many cases to support Republican candidates and causes.”

Four billion in seven years sounds like a lot of money, but lets put it in perspective. Seitz-Wald points out that if you stack organized labor up against all sources of corporate money in politics, business outspends labor by a margin of about 15-1. 

The WSJ claim is disingenuous for another reason. Conservative groups are already doing everything they can to undercut unions’ abilities to spend dues on political activity. So, regardless of what they may have done in the past, their future as a counterweight to the Republican cash machine is far from certain.

[Photo credit: Blue Robot, Creative Commons.]