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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Labor

1. November 21, 2011 08:20 PM

   BW Oversells Its Story on Americans and Dirty Jobs

   By Ryan Chittum

   This Bloomberg BusinessWork cover story from last week on "Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs" takes an uneven look at the issues surrounding cheap immigrant labor and what happens when states pass strict anti-illegal-immigrant laws. Uneven because there's some good reporting here. But ultimately it oversells its case, in that way magazines are wont to do, by using inflated stats...

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2. April 11, 2011 07:54 PM

   LAT on the U.S. As Low-Wage Offshoring Destination

   By Ryan Chittum

   Where does Ikea build a plant when it wants to offshore work to pay poverty wages, bust unions, force mandatory overtime, and generally slave-drive their workers? The quote of the day goes to Bill Street, a union organizer in Danville, Virginia, on that: "It's ironic that Ikea looks on the U.S. and Danville the way that most people in the...

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3. November 9, 2011 01:41 PM

   NYT on How Unions Are Learning From Occupy Wall Street

   By Ryan Chittum

   The New York Times reports on how the American labor movement, whose membership and power have crumbled over the last few decades, is getting something of a second wind from the Occupy Wall Street protests. The picture I get from this report by Steven Greenhouse, one of the few labor beat reporters left in the mainstream press (props, NYT), is...

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4. November 11, 2011 03:48 PM

   The Morning Call Revisits Amazon’s Work Conditions

   Allentown workers baked in the summer, froze in the winter

   By Ryan Chittum

   Remember that Morning Call investigation a couple of months ago into an Amazon sweatshop outside Allentown, Pennsylvania? The paper showed that the company endangered temp employees in a warehouse where temperatures sometimes hit 110 degrees all while issuing difficult-or-impossible-to-meet productivity standards in order to keep from hiring them full time. It turns out Amazon's climate-control problem was year-round. The paper...

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5. September 23, 2011 07:52 PM

   The Morning Call’s Amazon Sweatshop Probe

   An excellent investigation exposes poor conditions at a big Pennsylvania warehouse

   By Ryan Chittum

   What's going on with labor in Pennsylvania? It was just last month that foreign students working at Hershey's for the summer went on strike over poor labor conditions. Now, a huge investigation in the Allentown Morning Call shows Amazon treating its local warehouse workers like dirt—and endangering their health. Spencer Soper's terrific piece of reporting goes around the company, which...

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6. April 10, 2012 11:37 AM

   The Seattle Times Takes On Hometown Amazon

   A tough series on the dark side of the booming local company

   By Ryan Chittum

   Here in Seattle, Amazon is growing like crazy, adding thousands of jobs and building several skyscrapers just off downtown, something that will add hundreds of construction jobs. But at what cost? That's what The Seattle Times asks in a tough, excellent four-part series that riffs off the company's logo to go "Behind the smile in Seattle." I'm particularly interested in...

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7. May 18, 2011 12:25 PM

   WaPo Short-Arms a Promising Piece on Factory Jobs

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Washington Post gives us an interesting but blurry snapshot of the economy, looking at how the news about manufacturing, which is one of the few sources of real growth, isn't necessarily all that good. This is the dominant story on page one—welcome placement for such a piece—but it really could have used a few more days of reporting. The...

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8. December 2, 2011 11:49 AM

   WSJ Gives Minimum Info on Front Group

   An astroturf group gets a hit on the minimum wage

   By Ryan Chittum

   Here's how The Wall Street Journal framed its report yesterday on several states raising the minimum wage next year: Small businesses, already on a tight budget, are looking for new ways to cut costs as they brace for minimum wage increases in several U.S. states next month. The Journal's first anecdote is from a Vermont businessman who was one of...

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9. February 24, 2011 09:45 PM

   WSJ Slips Up on a Union Story

   And its misses tilt toward the anti-labor side

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's page-one story yesteday on the union battle in Wisconsin erred on a few points, all of which skew coverage against the union side. First the paper misleads readers by implying that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker campaigned on taking away collective bargaining rights from government workers: Several of the new governors ran campaigns promising to go after...

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10. August 14, 2012 06:50 AM

    A critical eye on the ‘skills gap’

    The Free Press, Star Tribune, and USA Today ask questions

    By Ryan Chittum

    There's no shortage of uncritical reporting on the notion that employers, and particularly manufacturers, can't find enough qualified workers even in a time of high unemployment. Last week, even the auto industry was complaining about not being able to find enough qualified workers. A Crain's Detroit Business headline said, "Auto leaders at Management Briefing Seminars still lament shortage of labor...

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11. June 3, 2011 01:06 PM

    A Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down (UPDATED)

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Nation has a scoop—or had, actually—from Wikileaks cables showing that the Obama administration pressured Haiti not to raise its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour, or five bucks a day. The magazine posted the story the other day and has now pulled it, saying it will repost it next Wednesday "To accord with the publishing schedule of Haiti...

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12. April 5, 2011 02:11 PM

    A Triangle Shirtwaist-Like Disaster, Buried By the U.S. Press

    Outsourcing tragedies while paying a sliver of what our workers made 100 years ago

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Consumerist has a fascinating post asking whether we've really eliminated our Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disasters or if we've just outsourced them. It turns out that a sweatshop in Bangladesh that made clothes for The Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, JC Penney, Target, and others, suffered an eerily Triangle-like disaster just a few months ago: When we noted the 100th anniversary...

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13. February 10, 2011 06:00 PM

    AOL Settled with Unpaid “Volunteers” for $15 Million

    Why the HuffPost bloggers won’t be so lucky, and why that matters

    By Lauren Kirchner

    When AOL acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million this week, we at CJR wondered, among other things, whether the thousands of bloggers who have contributed free writing to The Huffington Post would continue to do so after the sale, or whether they’d feel slighted at being left out of the profits. We also asked what the merger meant for...

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14. August 16, 2011 08:20 PM

    Audit Notes: Banker’s Good FHA Work, FBI’s Small Fry, Michael Barone

    By Ryan Chittum

    The American Banker's Jeff Horwitz has another excellent report on the Federal Housing Administration and its former commissioner David Stevens, who took a bold spin through the revolving door earlier this year to become CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. Two weeks ago, Horwitz and Kate Berry wrote about Stevens's coziness with his future employers while he was at the...

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15. August 22, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Newsweek standards, Luddite fallacy, crowdfunding scams

    Everyone but the magazine fact checks Niall Ferguson

    By Ryan Chittum

    Paul Krugman asks: We know what Ferguson is going to do: he’s going to brazen it out, actually boasting about the deftness with which he misled his readers. But what is Newsweek going to do? Not much, apparently. Dylan Byers of Politico talks to Newsweek about its fact-checking process amidst the demolition of Niall Ferguson's cover story: "We, like other...

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16. June 6, 2012 11:53 PM

    Audit Notes: Amazon turns on the A/C, Fairfax’s taxes, Ponzify

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Morning Call's Spencer Soper follows up on his Amazon sweatshop investigation, and reports that the company has since spent a whopping $52 million installing air conditioners in its warehouses: Donna Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at theUniversity of California, Riverside, said media exposure about working conditions likely prompted the investment. The company faces intense competition...

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17. June 8, 2012 07:57 PM

    Audit Notes: Decline of Labor Edition

    Unions, inequality, and billionaires versus organized workers

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New Yorker's John Cassidy writes a smart post on the aftermath of labor's big defeat in Wisconsin and what it shows about "America's Class War: Billionaires Against the Unions." Exploiting public concerns about debts and deficits that have resulted from an economic downturn largely brought on by Wall Street malfeasance, Republican politicians, backed by wealthy individuals and corporations, are...

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18. August 21, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Fake or real Jeff Jarvis?, Wolf on Ryan, robots and labor

    Replacing copyright with something called "creditright"

    By Ryan Chittum

    This may seem like a Fake Jeff Jarvis post, but it's real-life Jeff Jarvis: Creators don’t need protection from copying. That’s futile. Copying can’t be stopped. Thus copying is no longer a way to exploit the value of creation. People don't need protection from stealing. That's futile. Stealing can't be stopped. So what do creators need protected? What are their...

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19. July 3, 2012 08:04 PM

    Audit Notes: Glass-Steagall II, beyond paywalls, warehouse work

    The FT comes out in favor of hiving off investment banks

    By Ryan Chittum

    This is important: The Financial Times editorial page comes out in favor of a Glass-Steagall II that would once again separate investment banking from commercial/retail banking: The clash between retail and investment banking has always been evident. What is now clear, however, is that the hard-charging, revenue-seeking investment banking culture predominates when they are pushed together. The more herbivorous retail...

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20. May 25, 2011 07:44 PM

    Audit Notes: Marketers’ Memories, Labor’s Last Legs, Fortune in Afghanistan

    By Ryan Chittum

    Over at Wired, Jonah Lehrer looks at how marketers invade our heads: A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing...

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