Alex Kudera's Blog, page 129

to hat not

"A global trade-policy shift in 2005 allowed Chinese factories to flood the U.S. market with hats made by workers paid a fraction of the $15-an-hour average wage Bollman's nonunion workers received. The Adamstown factory had made many inexpensive store-brand hats sold by discount retailers.

"Bollman lost a $4 million Walmart account to the Chinese. Others followed.

"The dropping of trade quotas proved devastating. Domestic hat manufacturing had held about 20 percent of the U.S. market prior to that. Today, it is 5 percent, said Nate Herman, vice president of international trade for the American Apparel and Footwear Association."

Read more at Philly.com

fight for your long weekend. . .

. . . and have a peaceful one regardless.

I hope to see everyone around the holidays, if not sooner.

November Readings

  I'll be presenting Fight for Your Long Day in Washington D.C. on Sunday November 17 at 10:30 a.m. as part of the SEIU Local 500 Conference on the crisis in higher education. And then, back in Clemson the following Thursday at 7 p.m., I'll be reading as part of Loaves and Fishes Writers' Harvest.

Will the newest addition to the Clemson family bring canned goods to support hungry children in the Upstate?

(Please ignore our comma splices, missing apostrophes, and other tie-poe's if you happen to peruse our welcoming comments. Go Tigers!)
 

from "Education Preserves Class Inequalities"

"Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor’s degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points."

full-time work

According to a metric tracked by Gallup since 2011, less than 44 percent of American adults have a full-time job. Although it will always be a goal to increase this percentage, to encourage employers to understand why the stability of full-time work benefits both worker and company, it's also beholden on all of us teaching career-prep college courses to make students aware of this and teach strategies for navigating the world of contingent or permanent part-time employment.

Meanwhile, CNN just "broke the news" that the "U.S. economy added 204,000 jobs in October, more than analysts expected. Unemployment rate rose to 7.3% from 7.2%." Such substantial job gains coupled with a rise in the unemployment rate indicates that there are many more millions of people who'd gladly work were there opportunity to do so.

the middle wages

New statistics are out for 2012 that show the median American worker earns about $27,500 in net compensation as reported on W-2 forms. I assume this is the middle person of working age who, in fact, works. That is, this is the middle person of our roughly 153 million workers and not the median wage of all Americans of working age.

So, as best I understand it, these figures do not include people whose work is not construed as work. Those who aren't counted would include stay-at-home spouses; graduate students with teaching and research assistantships; everyone who lives off income from social security, stock dividends, or bank interest; and so on.

An interesting statistic is that 40 percent of all workers earn less than $20,000, and you don't have to live in New York City or pay a student loan or heating bill to know that living on less than twenty grand a year, before taxes and other deductions, is challenging. When adjusted for inflation, the median worker's income is down $4 from 2011 and at its lowest since 1998.

Mike Pulley's Writers' Harvest

At a time when many lower-income Americans are feeling the pinch, Mike Pulley's Writers' Harvest returns to Clemson University on Thursday, November 21 at 7 p.m. This will be my third year reading at this canned-goods benefit for hungry children in the Upstate, and it feels like our percentage of food-insecure citizens is on the rise. Or maybe it just always feels this way as the cold season approaches. . . I knew a bit about holiday poverty as a child although I have no recollection of ever feeling hungry or "poor" in any permanent sense of the word.

Atticus Books on adjuncts

Dan Cafaro slapped down more of his mouth where his money is, and added a nice post on adjunct advocacy with relevant links to the Atticus Books blog. Many, if not most, Atticus titles focus on how the less secure American working person navigates the arduous task of surviving in our "culture of late capitalism," "neoliberal economy," or whatever else you'd prefer to call it. His latest publication, a novel in stories called  Sidewalk Dancing , appears to have an intriguing multi-ethnic, transnational premise.

united states of contingency

Beyond academia, it's in the news, too, and increasingly common among millennials. (I've no statistics on how the writers of all the latter hyperlink's articles were paid, if in fact it was by "exposure," cold hard direct deposit, or any other means.)

44 redux

In a post on Dan Fante's Point Doom, I mentioned being the same age as the narrator, and now it's as if my age is chasing me around the web. Recent findings?

The prison guard featured in a story about the most unequal place in America is 44. He works a night shift in Louisiana for $8.50 an hour.

The guy who learns the vast comic collection he has saved since childhood is worth about $500 is also 44, and now he has to find alternative funding to pay for his kids' college educations.

And the suspect in the Anderson Hall assault on an adjunct is 45.

So, to an extent, it's my age, even in food stamps lost, that's hitting me over the head on this first of November, and it doesn't feel like a good time to be a mid-forties male in America.

I better write fiction quickly from now on. . .