http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052203753.html
(Most of OA remarks were comments at WaPo and they are addressed to WaPo as you etc.)
I don’t like to see any Americans lose their job. Maybe if you advocated for us like Lou Dobbs does you would have rising circulation.
Men’s median wages are the same as in 1973, see p60-233.pdf graph page 16 census.gov. Women’s median wages are 77 percent of men’s, which puts them where men’s were in 1960. Yes women make what men did in 1960 as a median.
If the Post said stop all immigration as loud as it could all the time and led the fight against amnesty and H-1B and H-2B, etc. then it would be supported all over the country.
Instead, you can think at least you took us down with you.
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By Frank AhrensWashington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 23, 2008; Page D01More than 100 Washington Post reporters, editors, photographers, artists and other journalists will take early retirement packages offered by the company as a way to cut costs, reducing the newsroom staff by at least 10 percent.
A number of familiar bylines will leave for good or no longer appear regularly in the paper, including those of military affairs reporter Thomas E. Ricks; feature writers Linton Weeks and Peter Carlson; health reporter Laura Sessions Stepp; science reporter Rick Weiss; the husband-and-wife foreign correspondent team of John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore; critics Stephen Hunter, Desson Thomson and Tim Page; Federal Diary columnist Stephen Barr; Weekend writers Richard Harrington and Eve Zibart; and Metro reporters Sue Anne Pressley Montes and Yolanda Woodlee.
Political dean David Broder took the package but will remain on contract; his column will continue to appear in The Post. Sports columnist and ESPN personality Tony Kornheiser also took the offer, but his most recent full-length column in The Post appeared in 2005. Since then, his presence has been largely limited to printed excerpts from his daily Talking Points video, which is planned to continue.
The list includes a number of Pulitzer Prize winners, including Ricks, Broder and Hunter.
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Broder hates us on immigration and never missed a chance to put a shiv(throat cutter) in us on immigration.
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In addition, a number of Post editors who are less-known to the outside world will leave, including Deborah Heard, the Style section’s top editor, and Michael Keegan, who runs the News Art department. Other key editors leaving are Maralee Schwartz and Tony Reid from the Business section; Home editor Belle Elving; Travel editor K.C. Summers; Book World editor Marie Arana; and from the Style section, editors John Pancake, Peter Kaufman, Lynne Duke and Rose Jacobius, the longtime night editor and legendary headline writer.
This is the third round of buyouts The Post has offered in the past five years. The first came in 2003, the second in 2006. Post newsroom employment peaked at 908 in 2003; there are now about 780 full-time-equivalent newsroom workers. After the buyouts, that number will be about 700.
The Post will take the opportunity to restructure its newsroom in ways that may not be apparent to readers.
Continuing to be against us on immigration.
==
In 1999, for instance, the newspaper division of The Post Co. reported $157 million in operating income. By 2007, that number had fallen to $66 million. Daily average circulation of The Post peaked at 832,232 in 1993. It stands at 638,300.
==
One more point on median wages. With gas prices going up, people just don’t have the money. There are people for whom it matters. You should check out the graph at p60-233.pdf page 16 as I mentioned. Note that productivity has doubled since 1973.
You literally kept your readers from keeping pace with the rising productivity until they simply had to stop paying for your product. Its like reverse Henry Ford, have your readers paid so little they can’t buy your product. How is that for stuck on stupid.
David Broder never missed a chance to speak up for immigration and against us. So you kept him. Prediction, with wages staying the same, you will lose more readers who need the money to pay gas. You have to stop immigration down to 25,000 per year the total of legal and illegal and foreign students.
How many foreign students buy the Post? If Americans got the physics and math and engineering Ph.D. fellowships that go to Indians and Chinese we could keep the factories here. You are the rare organization that actually decimates its customers and can’t understand why you lose customers when they can’t afford you.
Spanish speakers and kids who can’t learn to read in school may hurt sales too, online or offline. Your fall in sales parallel the rise in immigration since the 1986 amnesty and 1990 increase in legal immigration. Try to think. Your jobs and ours depend on it.
Reporters who lose Post jobs will never get jobs with benefits like they have now. Those are gone for you just like for us. Lousy health care where the health providers and insurance companies play games because they have the same problem, median wages are the same as 1973 so they have to cheat to make up for it. People don’t have the money so they cheat or stop buying papers.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901042.html
Devaluing Labor
By Harold MeyersonWednesday, August 30, 2006; Page A19
Labor Day is almost upon us, and like some of my fellow graybeards, I can, if I concentrate, actually remember what it was that this holiday once celebrated. Something about America being the land of broadly shared prosperity. Something about America being the first nation in human history that had a middle-class majority, where parents had every reason to think their children would fare even better than they had.
==
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901042.html
“Devaluing Labor
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, August 30, 2006; Page A19Labor Day is almost upon us, and like some of my fellow graybeards, I can, if I concentrate, actually remember what it was that this holiday once celebrated. Something about America being the land of broadly shared prosperity. Something about America being the first nation in human history that had a middle-class majority, where parents had every reason to think their children would fare even better than they had.”
You should read every line of this article several times. There is a lot of knowledge and statistics packed into it. This guy could teach labor econ better than some profs could.
“From 1947 through 1973, American productivity rose by a whopping 104 percent, and median family income rose by the very same 104 percent. More Americans bought homes and new cars and sent their kids to college than ever before. In ways more difficult to quantify, the mass prosperity fostered a generosity of spirit: The civil rights revolution and the Marshall Plan both emanated from an America in which most people were imbued with a sense of economic security.”
“That America is as dead as the dodo. “
David Broder and WaPo helped kill it and thus their own circulation and good jobs. Young journalists won’t get good jobs with benefits and security because journalism helped kill those jobs for Bill Gates and China.
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22 May 2008
Do Brazilians Hate Reading Because They Are So Bad At It Or Are They So Bad At Reading Because They Hate It?
Tyler Cowen points out that in the Nation of the Future:
“Most Brazilians do not read. I don’t mean they can’t read, I mean they don’t read for leisure so much. I was stuck at the Sao Paulo airport for seven hours and did not see a single person reading a book, not once.”
Various commenters chime in with similar stories.
Personally, I have one regular correspondent who used to live in Brazil, but he’s of Dutch background and now lives in Canada. In contrast, I have quite a few correspondents from Finland, a country with a few percent of Brazil’s population. Granted, most younger Finns are literate in English, while most Brazilians are not, but still …
Here are some amazing statistics from the big PISA international achievement test of 15 year olds in 2000 (Figure 2.3):
In Brazil, only 4% of the youths read at one of the two highest levels on a six point scale, versus 33% in the USA and 50% in top-rated Finland. Brazil is even worse than Mexico, where 7% can read at a strong level.
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WaPo and other papers are not going to sell in any language, because the replacement people they wanted and brought here don’t read newspapers.
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Why don’t journalists get retrained for programming jobs? After all they are writers. Or they could document computer programs and write manuals for made in China hardware unless China wants Indians here or there to do that.
==Following variant posted at comments at WaPo
Are they going to get retrained for computer programming jobs? Why don’t you tell Bill Gates you have people who can write for him and he doesn’t need more H-1B’s?
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http://careerservices.rutgers.edu/h1visajobs/index.html
http://www.h1visajobs.com/full_version_list.htm
http://www.garamchai.com/TopH1b2006.htm
http://www.programmersguild.org/docs/lowest_paying_2004.htm
http://www.uscis.gov/files/article/h1top100.pdf
site:www.uscis.gov h-1b employers
==
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/11/should_h1b_empl.html
==
In fact, the guild is about to announce a new proposal advocating that the U.S. government provide “100% subsidies” of tuition and expenses for American students enrolled in degree programs in computer science, engineering, and other fields where there are U.S. skill shortages.
How would the U.S. pay for such a program, you ask? One source for funding could come from hiking government fees that U.S. companies pay to employ foreign H-1B visa holders to $5,000 per worker, per year.
Right now, employers pay a one-time government fee of about $1,500 per H-1B worker. (Current costs for each H-1B visa are higher if an employer wants expedited processing, or if you count legal fees or visa renewals.)
Even if the government fees were to be raised annually to $5,000 per H-1B worker, “that’s still a bargain,” says Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild. “Many of those workers are being underpaid by $10,000 to $20,000 or more a year,” he alleges.
By increasing H-1B fees for the “roughly 500,000″ H-1B workers he estimates are currently in the United States, Berry calculates that the government could afford to pay tuition costs averaging $20,000 per year for 125,000 American students.
==Comment posted at above thread by someone (other than OA)
Many of those entering the US with an H-1B visa have told me personally that they have NO affinity for our country and do NOT care what it stands for. They’re only goal in coming here is to make more money.
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WaPo is actually harmful to its customers because it keeps their wages down by giving Congress and Bush cover on immigration, legal and amnesty and guest worker and student. If WaPo went out of business, its customers would be better off. This is true of journalists as a group. This is a group that harms its customer base by supporting lower wages for its customers and succeeding at keeping its customers wages down.
We see newspaper circulation falling. They are destroying their own customer base and their customers are better off if newspapers didn’t exist. So the newspapers lose circulation. Its not a matter of on-line, off-line, etc. Newspapers advocate for lower wages for their customers and so customers have an incentive not to give them money.
May 25, 2008 at 9:56 am
[...] http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/washington-post-layoffs-another-immigration-bo... Frank Ahrens at WaPo: This is the third round of buyouts The Post has offered in the past five years. The first came in 2003, the second in 2006. Post newsroom employment peaked at 908 in 2003; there are now about 780 full-time-equivalent newsroom workers. After the buyouts, that number will be about 700. [...]