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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Unions

1. 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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2. 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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3. March 1, 2011 05:47 PM

   USA Today’s Ham-fisted Public Workers Story

   By Ryan Chittum

   USA Today runs a poor story this morning that says its analysis finds that government workers make more in total compensation (wages plus benefits) than private-sector workers in forty-one states. And so it does, but this is a case when stats are very misleading. Amazingly, USA Today doesn't take into account factors like education that account for the differences in...

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4. 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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5. February 23, 2011 08:07 PM

   Audit Notes: A Mirror For Scott Walker, SPJ Outraged at Blogger, Foreclosures

   By Ryan Chittum

   Steven Pearlstein goes into his columnists' bag of tricks to show how crazy Governor Scott Walker's agenda would be if a Democrat tried to pull it: One old trick is to suggest a thought experiment that asks readers to consider the mirror image of what is going on. In this case, you'd be asked what the reaction would be from...

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6. March 29, 2011 07:58 PM

   Audit Notes: Banks Mislead, The South and Unions, Shareholder Capitalism

   By Ryan Chittum

   Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law and Credit Slips calls out the banking lobby for an "incredibly dishonest" attempt to mislead people into thinking debit-card interchange fees haven't been going up: Here's the slight-of-hand (sic): while the text of the ABA report make very clear that it is referring to debit cards, the graph shows average debit + credit interchange rates...

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7. 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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8. August 26, 2011 07:37 PM

   Audit Notes: Murdoch and American Politicians, UAW, Labor’s Bulletin Board Win

   By Ryan Chittum

   Does Rupert Murdoch interfere with his news outlets? Does a bear, well, you know... The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece of reporting on that, even if it's fifteen years old. And shows how bigtime Democratic politicians in the U.S. have played footsie with Murdoch: In 1996, the teenage son of a prominent political figure in Washington, D.C., got...

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9. December 2, 2011 07:55 PM

   Audit Notes: Reproducibility, Daily Show, Boeing Settlement

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal has a very good page-one story today reporting on how most peer-reviewed medical studies can't be reproduced by other researchers. Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can't be validated by others,...

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10. February 22, 2011 07:46 PM

    Audit Notes: Watchdog Blogging, Union Power, Stadium Economics

    By Ryan Chittum

    The blog Gin and Tacos makes a fantastic catch on Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker's effort to take away the right to organize from most of the state's public unions and cut their pay. Buried in the bill is language that would allow Walker's administration to privatize state-owned power plants on terms only a Russian oligarch could love: with or...

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11. May 12, 2011 11:04 AM

    Australian Media CEO’s Embarrassing Memo Mistake

    Confirming eighty-two firings with “track changes” in place

    By Joel Meares

    What could be more embarrassing to a reporter than the incident from a couple of months ago when The Washington Post accidentally published a first draft of a writer’s story online with the editor’s notes included? This. A May 12 memo sent from new-ish CEO Greg Hywood to staff of Australian company Fairfax Media’s two big broadsheets—The Sydney Morning Herald...

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12. June 15, 2011 08:18 PM

    Organizing via Facebook in the Age of Union-Busting

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times's Steven Greenhouse has an interesting report today on a group of Walmart workers who are organizing—just not in the traditional sense. The vehemently anti-union Walmart crushes any attempt to unionize (at least in the U.S. and Canada), so a group called OUR Walmart is starting a social networking presence intended to pressure Walmart for better wages...

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13. February 28, 2011 01:03 PM

    PolitiFact Shows A Fox Host Is Wrong, But Hedges Its Verdict (UPDATED)

    By Ryan Chittum

    For an organization whose reason for being is to judge what's a fact and what's not, PolitiFact sure has a funny idea of what "true" means. Or "Barely True," as it says. Audit commenter Thimbles points to a PolitiFact piece on Fox Business Network anchor Eric Bolling. Bolling told a whopper on air, and PolitiFact is good to point out...

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14. September 23, 2011 01:48 PM

    ProPublica Shines a Light on Secret Gerrymandering Money

    By Ryan Chittum

    Every ten years, politicians get together in statehouses and redraw congressional districts to squeeze their opponents and entrench themselves in power. And they get scads of corporate and union money (but mostly corporate money, it seems) to do it. Redistricting makes it extremely difficult to unseat some incumbents and effectively takes lots of elections out of the hands of voters....

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15. August 24, 2011 12:25 PM

    Steve Brill’s Blinkered View of Education

    By Felix Salmon

    If you don’t have the time or inclination to read Steve Brill’s book on education reform, then his bombastic op-ed on the subject is a pretty good alternative. And similarly, if you didn’t read Diane Ravitch’s 4,400-word review of “Waiting for Superman” in the NYRB, then her 1,000-word response to Brill captures the heart of her argument. Reading them side...

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16. March 7, 2011 02:24 PM

    The WSJ Overreaches On Wisconsin Democrats Story

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal went A1 with a big scoop this morning that "Democrats to End Union Standoff" in Wisconsin. Big news! Problem is, some of the Democrats said immediately that the story was wrong, and its main source quickly walked back what the Journal says. Here's what the Journal wrote: Sen. Mark Miller said he and his fellow Democrats...

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17. March 17, 2011 01:35 PM

    The Newspaper Guild Calls for HuffPo Boycott

    By Lauren Kirchner

    The Newspaper Guild of America, which represents 26,000 media workers across the country, has called for a strike of unpaid writers against The Huffington Post. The Guild is joining the art publication Visual Arts Source, which represents fifty artists and had also called for a boycott several weeks prior. According to the Guild’s website: [The Guild] is committed to fair...

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18. March 1, 2011 03:13 PM

    The NYT’s Incomplete Article on State Pension Plans

    By Felix Salmon

    Steven Greenhouse has a long article in today's NYT about an attempt by the states to deal with their "strained" pension funds by moving to defined-contribution pension plans. Here's the lede: Lawmakers and governors in many states, faced with huge shortfalls in employee pension funds, are turning to a strategy that a lot of private companies adopted years ago: moving...

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19. June 9, 2011 12:38 PM

    Walmart’s Unions

    They do exist—outside the U.S.—as a Washington Post story shows

    By Ryan Chittum

    It's well known that Walmart is viciously anti-union. It's not much known is that the company is much more accomodative to organized labor in other countries that have more labor-friendly policies. The Washington Post is good to report on that difference, showing that Walmart stores have unions in the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, China, and South Africa. Why does...

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