The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 says quite clearly: employers must treat pregnant women exactly as they would any other worker with a similar short-term impairment. If you allow a man with a heart attack paid short-term leave, then you must permit a woman who’s required to be on bed rest a similar paid leave. If you permit a cashier who broke her leg to do the job sitting, then you must similarly accomodate a pregnant woman who’s been told... Read more
Courtesy instapundit.com, a link to a story in USA Today, “Rams, police differ on apology story for players’ Ferguson protest“: St. Louis County police and the Rams are at odds Monday night over whether a team official apologized for the “hands up-don’t shoot” gesture performed by five players before Sunday’s game. . . . [St. Louis Ram’s executive vice president and chief operations officer Kevin] Demoff told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he did not apologize for... Read more
I had written before, in the post-election postmorteming that everyone was doing, that the Republicans should offer a deal with Obama, a minimum wage boost in exchange for enforcement-oriented immigration provisions. Of course, things got messier with Obama’s unilateral action but my core thought is still the same: the minimum wage boost, with tweaks, is a reasonable concession to make to Democrats in exchange for some other goal. Yes, I know that there will be winners and losers with a... Read more
So says the “Buttonwood” columnist at the Economist, which everyone is now tweeting. This is based on a freshly-published book, Falling Short: The Coming Retirement Crisis and What to Do About It, by Charles D. Ellis, Alicia H. Munnell and Andrew D. Eschtruth ($27.50 for a 168-page book? Not on my wishlist.) Back when I started blogging, everyone was all about state and local unfunded pensions as “the other pension crisis,” that is, because Social Security is the first “pension... Read more
From Friday’s Tribune, “Minimum wage poses predicament for service agencies“: As Democratic lawmakers renew their push to raise the state’s minimum wage [to $10 in 2015 and $11 by 2017], there’s a key sector of employers that finds itself stuck in the middle — nonprofit groups that care for some of the state’s most vulnerable, including the elderly and disabled. That’s because while they’d like to pay their workers more, many of those agencies receive the bulk of their funding... Read more
Remember VoucherCare? No — not the pejorative label used by Democrats to criticize the Paul Ryan plan for Medicare, but my Obamacare-alternative from one of my very first posts. OK, it’s not a surprise that no one read it when I was pretty much writing in a vacuum (except for an early, and generous, Ann Althouse shout-out). Anyway, I had said that, to avoid the perverse incentives of the existing structure of the subsidies, I’d just have tax-funded vouchers for... Read more
Once again, a few impressions of Detroit after our visit there over Thanksgiving. Growing up, “downtown Detroit” meant pretty much exclusively the Riverfront, which consisted of the Renaissance Center (so named because, in 1977, the city was supposed to be reborn — not quite the success it was hoped to be) and Hart Plaza, site of various ethnic and other festivals in the summer — perhaps because Mom and Dad just didn’t care much about the concept of a “downtown,”... Read more
Just an observation from our travels in The Mitten: At a Kohl’s, at Noodles & Company, at Subway, at Meijer, what’s striking is this: the labor force is native-born American — which is not at all the case in the Chicago area, where the retail and fast food workforce is largely immigrant. Not necessarily illegal-immigrant-with-false-ID, but immigrant nonetheless. Lots of Indians at JC Penny. Eastern Europeans at Kohls. And mainly Hispanics at McDonalds. In Detroit, or, rather, the Detroit area,... Read more
That’s the title of a CNN piece about the state of racism and race relations in the United States. The main thesis: white Americans think they’re “color blind” but they’re not, really. Evidence: white Americans disapprove of Obama even when presented with “facts” that show that, really, he’s been a great president; ergo, they must be racist. Americans believe that blacks have “caught up” with whites economically, but they really haven’t. A study of identical resumes sent out, one with... Read more
You know, as family visits go, this falls in the category of “OK.” Our first stop in (metro) Detroit, prior to my parents’ house, was the previously-mentioned John King Books. Was it everything I remembered? Not really. Big, yes. Also fairly dusty and dingy and, in the end, I wasn’t able to browse in a particularly relaxed way because, since it was my idea to go there, I felt reponsible for making sure everyone else was finding something. The youngest... Read more
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