Your occasional reminder that Labor Day properly falls on May 1st.
It’s actually been a day without drama at the new apartment. On Saturday, we finally tracked down the leak that was causing the flooding beneath my apartment: It was a kitchen sink drainpipe. Yesterday my landlord finished battling through getting parts to mate up with very old plumbing—apparently it matters that some of it is brass—to fix it.
Meanwhile, Verizon came out, yes, on a Sunday, to fix his extension line. My landlord likes this guy a lot better.
The previous technician who had disconnected the extension line to run my fiber optic Internet connection wasn’t very communicative. That’s just how some folks, especially in technology fields are, and you can’t really hold it against them, but my landlord knows just enough to be dangerous and expects a different communication style.
Abortion
Sarah Jones, “Texas Is What a Real Mob Looks Like,” New York, September 1, 2021, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/texas-6-week-abortion-ban-is-what-a-real-mob-looks-like.html
Robert Barnes et al., “Supreme Court refuses to block Texas law banning abortions at six weeks,” Washington Post, September 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/texas-six-week-abortion-ban/2021/09/01/e53cf372-0a6b-11ec-a6dd-296ba7fb2dce_story.html
Daniela Santamariña, “What abortion policy would look like in the U.S. if Roe v. Wade fell,” Washington Post, September 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/11/abortion-rights-roe-v-wade/
Felicia Sonmez, “Sen. Collins repeatedly asserted that Kavanaugh considered abortion rights settled law. The justice’s decision on Texas’s restrictive law suggests otherwise,” Washington Post, September 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/abortion-collins-supreme-court-kavanaugh/2021/09/02/b6de0b98-0bfa-11ec-a6dd-296ba7fb2dce_story.html
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, “Why Texas’s Abortion Law May Go Too Far For Most Americans,” FiveThirtyEight, September 2, 2021, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-texass-abortion-law-may-go-too-far-for-most-americans/
Kathleen Parker, “The Supreme Court rides to Biden’s rescue,” Washington Post, September 3, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/03/supreme-court-rides-bidens-rescue/
Associated Press, “Lyft, Uber lash out at legal threat from strict Texas abortion law,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, September 4, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/texas-abortion-ban-lyft-uber-fight-back-1.6165045
Chantal Da Silva, “Texas judge grants restraining order against anti-abortion group, temporarily preventing lawsuits,” NBC News, September 4, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-judge-grants-restraining-order-against-anti-abortion-group-temporarily-n1278509
Caroline Anders, “Texans seeking abortions have options — but they’re very limited,” Lily, September 5, 2021, https://www.thelily.com/texans-seeking-abortions-have-options-but-theyre-very-limited/
Joe Manchin
Daniel Boguslaw, “Joe Manchin’s Dirty Empire,” Intercept, September 3, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2021/09/03/joe-manchin-coal-fossil-fuels-pollution/
Afghanistan
Rachel Pannett, Haq Nawaz Khan, and Siobhán O’Grady, “Panjshir Valley, last resistance holdout in Afghanistan, falls to the Taliban,” Washington Post, September 6, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/06/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-updates/
Work
Joe Napsha’s story[1] is of a sort that can be reliably predicted to provoke my fury. I responded to him directly in email:
I saw your recent story on the so-called “labor shortage.”
I have not been able to find a real job since the dot-com crash in 2001. It does not matter what level job I apply for or with what level of education. In that time, I returned to school, finished a bachelor’s degree, did a Masters, and a Ph.D. nothing I do makes any difference, even now.
So I absolutely do not want to hear about how employers can’t find workers.
The claim of a “labor shortage” has been well documented to rest on an unwillingness to pay a living wage. This is a factor you conspicuously excluded. It further neglects biases in hiring that continue to afflict me, for example.
I mostly voice-dictated it since I was working on my smartphone; typographical errors may be attributed to Google’s speech recognition system.
I addressed this crap in a blog post entitled, “About that alleged ‘labor shortage.’”
Sarah Chaney Cambon and Danny Dougherty, “States That Cut Unemployment Benefits Saw Limited Impact on Job Growth,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/states-that-cut-unemployment-benefits-saw-limited-impact-on-job-growth-11630488601
Heather Long, Alyssa Fowers, and Andrew Van Dam, “Why America has 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings,” Washington Post, September 4, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/04/ten-million-job-openings-labor-shortage/
Joe Napsha, “Western Pa. business owners lament: Where have all the workers gone?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 5, 2021, https://triblive.com/local/regional/western-pa-businesses-owners-lament-where-have-all-the-workers-gone/
- [1]Joe Napsha, “Western Pa. business owners lament: Where have all the workers gone?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 5, 2021, https://triblive.com/local/regional/western-pa-businesses-owners-lament-where-have-all-the-workers-gone/↩