Job seekers fill out applications for positions at a new bar and restaurant while standing in line in Detroit, Sept. 25, 2009. (AP)

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The job news has gone from bad to worse: 9.8 percent official unemployment. Far worse if you factor in those who’ve given up. And worse to come, we’re told.

Big voices are saying we’ve got to get much more radical in rescuing the American job market. But how do you get more radical than trillions in stimulus and TARP money — when a vast deficit already gapes?

This hour, On Point: Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich and chief TARP overseer Elizabeth Warren on the jobless recovery– and rescuing the American job market.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Robert Reich joins us from Berkeley, Calif. He was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton and is now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is “Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.”

Elizabeth Warren joins us from Washington, D.C. She is a professor at Harvard Law School and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP. She has written eight books and more than a hundred scholarly articles dealing with credit and economic stress. Her latest two books, “The Two-Income Trap” and “All Your Worth,” were both on national bestseller lists.

People check job listings on computers at JobTrain in Menlo Park, Calif., on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009. The unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent in August, the highest since June 1983. (AP)

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In all the years since World War II, the United States has not seen job losses like it’s seen in the last two years.

Unemployment is now just under 10 percent, and expected to go higher next year. Long-term unemployment, the highest since records were launched in 1948. Economists are talking “jobless recovery,” which for millions will not seem like recovery at all.

This hour, On Point: We’re getting up close with America’s unemployment epidemic, and asking whether, when, and how the jobs will come back.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Massimo Calabresi, Washington correspondent for Time magazine. His article in this week’s issue, “The Ripple Effect,” looks at how unemployment has affected the community of Roxboro, NC. His piece appears as part of the cover story package, “Jobless in America: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay?”

Also from Washington, we’re joined by Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute focusing on labor markets.

And from New York we’re joined by Richard Sennett, professor of sociology at New York University and the London School of Economics.  He’s written several books on work-life dynamics, including “The Corrosion of Character” and “The Culture of the New Capitalism.”

SEIU members and workers from other unions inWashington, DC on Feb. 4, 2009, as SEIU launched efforts to deliver 1.5 million post cards supporting the Employee Free Choice Act to lawmakers. (Photo © 2009 Kate Thomas/SEIU - Flickr)

American labor union membership is at historic lows. Union leaders, and no small number of economists, say that’s part of the reason American wealth has become so heavily tilted to the top — part of the reason for the Gilded Age and economic bust cycle were suffering today.

Now, unions are pushing hard for new legislation that would make it easier for employees to unionize. It’s called the Employee Free Choice Act — better known as “card check.” It would allow workers to unionize without a secret ballot, and would force companies to negotiate quickly with those unions or face government intervention.

Employers are fighting back very hard on Capitol Hill. A tiny swing vote in the U.S. Senate is poised to decide the issue. It’s a battle royal.

This hour, On Point: Unions, “card check,” and the battle over American labor.

You can join the conversation. Which side are you lining up on? Stronger unions, or status quo? Have you seen problems with how it works now? At this economic moment, does America need a union surge? Would “card check” bring it?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Steven Greenhouse, labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times and author of “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.” He has recently written about what the Employee Free Choice Act means for the American labor movement. 

From Washington, we’re joined by Steven Law, general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He was deputy secretary of labor under President George W. Bush. See the Chamber’s position on the “card check” bill.

Also from Washington is Bill Samuel, legislative director for the AFL-CIO. Read its position on the “card check” bill.

Killing for Coal (cover detail)

Almost a century ago, in the stark Rocky Mountain foothills of Colorado, coal was king, coal miners were armed and restless, and coal barons were ready to kill to keep the fuel coming.

April 20th, 1914, all hell broke loose near Ludlow, Colorado. Open warfare over coal and compensation. The guns came out on all sides. Bullets flew. Fire roared. When it was over, scores had died in the deadliest labor conflict in American history.

A new telling of the Ludlow Massacre traces the conflict to the mansions of the Rockefellers, and deep into the earth. This Hour, On Point: killing for coal.

You can join the conversation. Do you know the history of the Ludlow Massacre? Of killing and coal?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Thomas Andrews joins us from Denver. He’s Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver, and author of “Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War.”

Read an excerpt from the book

Watch Thomas Andrews describe the book at BookVideos TV

Read a review at The New Yorker

Hear a 1974 interview with Mary Thomas (O’Neal), survivor of the Ludlow massacre, at History Matters

Thomas G. Andrews
Harvard University Press (2008)

Excerpt from “Introduction: Civil War, Red and Bloody”

The shooting started around nine o’clock on a bright, breezy morning in a broad valley where the broken foothills of the southern Rockies tumble down onto the high plains. No one has ever determined who shot first, but participants and witnesses all agreed that within seconds of the initial gun blast, bullets began to fly thick and fast. Occupying the high ground was a small detachment of Colorado National Guardsmen. Thirty-four strong, this force and the dozen other militiamen encamped in the flats below consisted mostly of men formerly employed as guards by the largest coal mine operator in the West, the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

Seven months of shootouts and assassinations, executions and ambushes, had already earned the Colorado coalfi eld war the dubious distinction of being the deadliest strike in the history of the United States. On the morning of April 20, 1914, however, the conflict between Colorado state militia allied with the West’s largest coal producers and mineworkers organized under the auspices of the nation’s largest union erupted into open warfare, in what would become known as the Ludlow Massacre.

Returning the guardsmen’s fire were hundreds of striking coal miners of more than a dozen nationalities, all of whom resided in the Ludlow tent colony, “the largest of its kind in the history of this country,” according to a United Mine Workers (UMW) of ficial, John Lawson. Union leaders had named the 1,200-person camp after the railroad depot about a mile away.

The strikers, however, nicknamed it the White City, an apt description of the settlement’s gleaming canvas facades, as well as an ironic reference to the dreamlike buildings that had housed the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

The sounds of exploding powder and shrieking bullets echoed between piñon-covered canyon walls, rousing the many strikers who had decided to sleep in, following Orthodox Easter festivities that had run late into the night. Women grabbed the children and hid with them in cellars dug into the hard adobe soil below the colony. The men of the camp, meanwhile, took their weapons, hurried to defensive positions via a nearby arroyo and returned fire in hopes of drawing the assault away from the colony.

In the early afternoon a bullet hit Private Martin in the neck, inflicting a fatal wound that “smashed” his face “as if hit.” Rifle fire also killed several strikers over the course of the day, including Frank Snyder. Just twelve years old, Frank had left the safe haven of his family’s cellar either in search of food or to relieve his bladder – on this as on so many things eyewitness accounts differ – only to have a bullet tear off his head; “practically nothing above his eyes” remained. At some point in the late afternoon or early evening—here recollections again diverged—Ludlow’s canvas dwellings caught fire under suspicious circumstances; soon the whole camp was ablaze. Two women and eleven children perished in their cellar hideout—asphyxiated when flames devoured the tents over their heads. Militiamen had also arrested and killed three men, including Louis Tikas, leader of the Greek strikers, who died of multiple gunshot wounds to the back.

The family names of the eighteen strikers killed over the course of the day—Snyder and Tikas, Costa and Valdez and Pedregone—hinted at the diverse paths they had followed to the coalfields, as well as their unusual success at forging a common cause despite differences in race, ethnicity, and nationality. Back in September, the Denver journalist Don McGregor—a swashbuckling figure who would later join Pancho Villa’s forces in the

Mexican Revolution—had described the creation of Ludlow’s sister tent colony at Walsenburg as “the outward sign of civil war, red and bloody, with its hates and its assassinations, its woes and its suffering.” On April 21, 1914, dawn’s rays revealed the horrible fulfillment of McGregor’s prophecy. Odd jumbles of metal furniture contorted by the heat, blackened coal stoves lined up like sentries on the plain, ethereal outlines seared into the ground where hundreds of tents had stood fast against rain and wind, snow, and gunshots for seven hard months—only vestiges remained of the hopeful strivings that had created and sustained the Ludlow colony.

Journalists rushed to telegraph and telephone offices while the fighting still raged. The Colorado Coal strike had already attracted national press coverage, but a pitched battle between the United Mine Workers of America and the forces of the powerful Rockefeller family was headline news. “Little children roasted alive,” as the irascible Mother Jones remarked, “make a front page story.” The next morning, papers carried the shocking news of the strikers’ deaths to millions of Americans, thus assuring Ludlow a place alongside Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman in the annals of desperate struggle between Labor and Capital over who would bear the burdens and reap the rewards of American industrialization.

How had all this come to pass—what forces had changed a former Rocky Mountain frontier into an epicenter of class war?

• Back to On Point’s interview with Thomas Andrews.

If you dig far enough down in the world economy today — and you won’t have to dig long — you come to the giant factories of China.

They are massive. Whole cities of production. They turn out a huge portion of every manufactured thing you touch and wear and use these days.

And the bulwark of those factories is a whole generation of young migrant women — factory girls — who have flooded from China’s poor countryside to the factory floor. Know them — and their dreams — and you know the new heart and mind of the world economy.

This hour, On Point: China’s surprising, ambitious factory girls.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Leslie T. Chang, author of “Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China.” She spent a decade in China as Beijing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

» Read an excerpt from “Factory Girls.”

Anthony Kuhn, NPR’s Beijing correspondent. You can hear his latest reports at NPR.org.

An immigration rally on July 27, 2008, in Postville, Iowa, held in protest of a federal immigration raid of the local Agriprocessors plant in May. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

For a tiny town of 2000, Postville, Iowa has been tagged with a lot of superlatives lately. The biggest immigration raid in American history. The biggest Kosher meatpacking plant in the country.

And now, maybe the biggest scandal over slaughterhouse work conditions since Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle.”

On May 12, federal agents swooped in to round up nearly 400 mostly Guatemalan immigrant workers for prison time and deportation. Now comes the inside story of coercion, child labor, and cattle guts — a meat hook beating, and workers who say they felt like slaves.

This hour, On Point: The uproar in Postville.

- Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Julia Preston, national immigration reporter for The New York Times, she has been reporting from Postville, Iowa.

Erik Camayd-Freixas, a federally certified court interpreter, he served as translator for detainees arrested in the Postville raid.

Mark Lauritsen, international vice president and director of the food processing and packing division of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents 250,000 meat packers around the country.

Pastor David Vasquez-Levy, campus pastor at Luther College in Decorah, some 20 miles from Postville. He has ministered to the migrant workers at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, and since the federal raid, he has worked with St. Bridget’s Catholic Church in Postville, the migrant workers’ church, to help the families of the workers now in jail.

* * *

Links:

“After Iowa Raid, Immigrants Fuel Labor Inquiries,” by Julia Preston (New York Times)

“An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants,” by Julia Preston (New York Times)

Read Erik Camayd-Freixas’ personal account of the Postville immigration raid (pdf format)

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We’ve heard it again and again, but seldom laid out with the clarity Steven Greenhouse brings. The American worker is getting crunched. Corporate profits are up. Productivity is up. CEO pay is way up. But the American worker is getting squeezed.

Greenhouse is labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times. He’s brought home the stories that make the squeeze real — on workloads, job security, pensions, stress, health care. If you’re working, you’ll know these stories.

This hour, On Point: the big squeeze on American workers.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Steven Greenhouse, labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times and author of the new book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.”

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly