Jack Metzgar argued recently that working-class grit has value for all of us. Perhaps the most talked about notion of grit is Angela Lee Duckworth’s. She defines grit as maintaining “effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.” Duckworth created a “grit scale” focusing on the individual’s ability to commit to […]

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How unequal have workplaces in the United States become? Our best answer happens to come from an unlikely source: the Social Security Administration. Social Security statisticians each year tally up how much compensation gets reported on W-2s, those forms that employers have to file for employees at all their worksites, from mailrooms to executive suites. […]

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(Source: AP via NPR) Outbreaks of E. coli always grab national headlines, but equally dangerous to public health is norovirus, or the winter stomach flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as much as 90 percent of norovrius outbreaks can be traced to sick restaurant workers. That’s because sick restaurant workers cannot […]

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(Source: CNN) Scrooge has come early this year. This holiday season, kids in America’s poorest families are going to have less to eat. November 1 brought $5 billion in new cuts to the nation’s food stamp program, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Poor families will lose on average 7 […]

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In 1930, an obscure lawsuit against Bethlehem Steel unearthed a piece of corporate data that would quickly outrage Great Depression-era America. Bethlehem CEO W.R. Grace, Americans learned, had grabbed $1.6 million in personal compensation the year before. That revelation would soon help fix a variety of new regulations on America’s corporate executive suites, including a […]

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