Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Congress Raises Executive Minimum Wage to $565.15 an Hour (The Onion parody piece) http://www.theonion.com/3944/top_story.html WASHINGTON, DC—Congress approved a bill to increase the executive minimum wage from $515.15 to $565.15 an hour, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) announced Monday. The move marks the first increase in the wage since 1997. "This is good news for all Americans who work in the upper levels of commerce," DeLay said. "Almost a third of America's hard-working executives toil at corporations day after day, yet still live below the luxury line. It was about time we gave a boost to the American white-collar worker." The wage was calculated to help executives meet the federal standard-of-easy-living mark of $1.1 million a year. DeLay said that, although his goal is to ultimately reach an executive minimum wage of $800 per hour, he was satisfied with what he characterized as a "stop-gap measure." "Many of the thousands of Americans overseeing the nation's factories, restaurant chains, and retailers can't even afford a jet," DeLay said. "It's our long-term goal to ensure that no one who sees to it that others work hard for a living will have to go without the basic necessities of the good life." Under the new law, the executive-minimum salary will increase to more than $1.175 million a year, plus mandatory overtime for executives who work more than seven minutes after 5 p.m., on holidays, outside of their home offices, or from a limousine or non-chartered private aircraft. A separate section of the bill includes concessions for second- and third-housing credits, as well as single-player health-spa coverage. Top executives nationwide have repeatedly called for wage increases in recent years. 4:54:58 PM    comment []

Restoration set for vandalized memorial By Ken Reamy The Raton Range    TRINIDAD - More than $78,000 has been donated to repair the statues at the Ludlow Massacre Memorial that were vandalized last spring. Mike Romero, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 9856, said they have received a bid in the amount of $77,700 to do restoration work. A California firm, Griswold and Associates, will soon be transporting the life-size statues to its headquarters for what Romero said would be a nine- to 10-month restoration project. Ludlow Massacre group home: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ludlowmassacre/ Donations have come from all over the country and all over the world,Romero said. The heads were knocked off the life-size granite statues of the man and woman, and an arm was taken, as well. The early-May act of vandalism shocked area residents, many of whom either worked in the coal mines or who had relatives who did. 4:47:03 PM    comment []

Labor Versus Capital in Trade-Policy Determination: The Role of General-Interest and Special-Interest Politics http://dsl.nber.org/papers/w10084.pdf [full-text, 28 pages] Pushan Dutt, Devashish Mitra NBER Working Paper No. w10084 Issued in November 2003 ---- Abstract ----- http://papers.nber.org/papers/W10084 Trade policy depends on the extent to which the government wants to redistribute income as well as on a country's overall factor endowments and their distribution. While the government's desire to redistribute income itself is dependent on asset distribution, it is to a large extent also driven by the partisan nature of the government, i.e., whether it is pro-labor or pro-capital. Using cross-country data on factor endowments, inequality and government orientation, we find that, conditional on inequality, left-wing (pro-labor) governments will adopt more protectionist trade policies in capital-rich countries, but adopt more pro-trade policies in labor-rich economies than right-wing (pro-capital) ones. Also higher inequality is associated with higher protection in capital-abundant countries while it is associated with lower protection in labor-abundant countries. These results are consistent with the simultaneous presence of both general- as well as special-interest politics as determinants of protection within a two-factor, two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin framework. Overall, various statistical tests support an umbrella model (that combines both the general-interest as well as special-interest models) over each of the individual models. Source: IWS Documented News Service, School of Industrial & Labor Relations, Cornell University 9:08:38 AM    comment []

Copyright 2003 Lincoln Cushing