Social Media Nerd
Concise, curated news and rambling rants on social media
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Photo reblogged from Think Progress
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Fast-food restaurant employees protested in New York City on Thursday, demanding higher pay and the right to form a union - the latest attempt by lower-wage workers in the United States to increase their compensation.
The campaign, called “Fast Food Forward,” seeks to roughly double hourly pay to $15 an hour and is being billed as the largest attempt to unionize U.S. fast-food workers.
Leading the effort is New York Communities for Change, a group that has helped unionize low-wage carwash and grocery workers in New York.
Strikes were scheduled at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Domino’s restaurants around the city throughout the day.
READ ON: Fast-food workers in New York protest for higher wages
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Photo reblogged from The Atlantic
![theatlantic:
Happy Birthday Occupy! Income Inequality Is Still Getting Worse.
Occupy Wall Street may well have been the first global protest movement to rally around a statistic cribbed from an economics paper. So to mark its one year anniversary today, I thought I’d break out some of the latest numbers tracking U.S. inequality, courtesy of this month’s Census Bureau recent report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage.
From 2010 to 2011, the top 5 percent of U.S. households upped their share of the country’s income by 5.3 percent. The top 20 percent got a 1.6 percent bump. And while the country’s poorest saw their piece of the pie grow by a smidgen, the middle classes lost ground.
Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_maie9t8gDK1qcokc4o1_500.png)
Happy Birthday Occupy! Income Inequality Is Still Getting Worse.
Occupy Wall Street may well have been the first global protest movement to rally around a statistic cribbed from an economics paper. So to mark its one year anniversary today, I thought I’d break out some of the latest numbers tracking U.S. inequality, courtesy of this month’s Census Bureau recent report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage.
From 2010 to 2011, the top 5 percent of U.S. households upped their share of the country’s income by 5.3 percent. The top 20 percent got a 1.6 percent bump. And while the country’s poorest saw their piece of the pie grow by a smidgen, the middle classes lost ground.
Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]
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Photo reblogged from The Atlantic
![theatlantic:
An Awful Jobs Report for Young People
For most Americans, today’s jobs report was merely bad. For young people, though, the news was just downright awful.
After declining for most of the summer, the unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 16 and 19 popped up again, rising from 23.8 percent to 24.6 percent. Among 20-to-24 year olds, it hopped to 13.9 percent from 13.5 percent in July.
These numbers don’t necessarily mean that thousands of young people are suddenly getting laid off again. Rather, they’re a sign of how hard it still is for teens and early twenty-somethings to find work.
Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]
cheers, y’all.
I repost this not to discourage you from looking for work, though things look bleak. Do not give up on finding that dream job.
I post this so that you understand that your inability to find a job does not reflect poorly on you. It does not mean you are inadequate or a poor worker (though you may be poor in a different sense). You do not need to berate yourself for being unemployed.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9zmt1JaCT1qcokc4o1_500.png)
An Awful Jobs Report for Young People
For most Americans, today’s jobs report was merely bad. For young people, though, the news was just downright awful.
After declining for most of the summer, the unemployment rate for workers between the ages of 16 and 19 popped up again, rising from 23.8 percent to 24.6 percent. Among 20-to-24 year olds, it hopped to 13.9 percent from 13.5 percent in July.
These numbers don’t necessarily mean that thousands of young people are suddenly getting laid off again. Rather, they’re a sign of how hard it still is for teens and early twenty-somethings to find work.
Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]
cheers, y’all.
I repost this not to discourage you from looking for work, though things look bleak. Do not give up on finding that dream job.
I post this so that you understand that your inability to find a job does not reflect poorly on you. It does not mean you are inadequate or a poor worker (though you may be poor in a different sense). You do not need to berate yourself for being unemployed.
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Photo reblogged from Breaking News
US unemployment rate falls to 8.1% in August
U.S. employers added 96,000 jobs in August. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1%, from 8.3%, but only because more people gave up looking for work, The Associated Press reports.
Photo: Job seekers fill out applications during the 11th annual Skid Row Career Fair in Los Angeles, California, on May 31, 2012. (David Mcnew / Reuters) -
Photo reblogged from cute&crude
Picture of the Day: Madrid, Spain. A bleeding demonstration shouts as she is detained by the police during dramatic clashes set off by anti-austerity protests in Spain’s capital today in response to the government’s announcement of 65 million euro austerity package. Coal miners converged on the Ministry of Industry building to protest the end to mining subsidies.
Credit: Andres Kudacki/AP. Via.
(Source: photoblog.msnbc.com)
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Quote reblogged from infoneer pulseIn today’s lexicon, “too big to fail” usually refers to companies that are large in size or market share, but that’s not what’s key. A firm actually becomes “too big to fail” when it achieves a level of importance that discourages regulators from stopping its bad behavior. For-profit universities are now some of the nation’s largest educational institutions (in terms of enrollment numbers and student loan obligations), but some may also be too big to fail. Students at some of the largest for-profit universities now have so much outstanding loan debt that shutting down the institutions might be more painful to federal regulating bodies than simply allowing the universities to continue. Because of their prolific growth and massive size, the ED now has a financial disincentive to shut down or remove accreditation from these schools. That is, fear of a massive potential write-down is protecting some of the largest for-profit universities’ access to federal student loans.
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Photo reblogged from The Atlantic
![theatlantic:
If Colleges Want Federal Funds, They’ll Have to Prove Students Get Jobs
The U.S. Department of Education intends to crack down on postsecondary career programs that can’t demonstrate that enough graduates have found “gainful employment,” a move some for-profit colleges say could cost thousands of students the opportunity for a better future.
Read more. [Image: AP]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6aaeb4nt71qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
If Colleges Want Federal Funds, They’ll Have to Prove Students Get Jobs
The U.S. Department of Education intends to crack down on postsecondary career programs that can’t demonstrate that enough graduates have found “gainful employment,” a move some for-profit colleges say could cost thousands of students the opportunity for a better future.
Read more. [Image: AP]
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Photo reblogged from The Atlantic
What Country Has the Worst Youth Unemployment? Not Spain or Greece…
The big loser is Turkey.
Despite the horror stories you may have heard about over half of Greek and Spanish youths being out of work, the reality is a bit more complicated. The above chart courtesy of the OECD (via Alan Beattie of the Financial Times) gives us a more accurate picture of youth joblessness. Instead of counting everyone under 25 who isn’t working as unemployed, it only counts everyone under 25 who isn’t working and isn’t in schol or a training program as unemployed. Things are still bad, but not nearly as bad as the headlines suggest.
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If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish an entire nation, we put them on the cover of Forbes magazine and pretend that they are heroes.B. Lester (via barbiehighheels)
(Source: maarnayeri)
