Like Chicago, New York City’s inequality is getting worse. The city’s poverty rate rose to 23% in 2022. According to a New York Times article about an uneven recovery from the Covid recession: “Demand for food stamps and cash assistance has surged. The housing crunch is the worst it has been in more than 50 years, with a rental vacancy rate of only 1.4 percent. Even life expectancy remained below prepandemic levels, according to the Health Department.”
By a 13-2 vote the players of the Dartmouth basketball team formed a union. According to Billy Witz at the New York Times, team members hoped that college athletes will “soon be recognized as employees under federal labor law — a classification that has been a red line for college sports leaders who would be forced to share revenue directly with athletes.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/us/dartmouth-basketball-union-athletes-employees.html
Naked Capitalism analyzes the persistence of the COVID pandemic and its influence on economic drag and a ‘labor reset.’ “Like the war in Ukraine, the officialdom chose to rely on shock and awe, here of vaccines, and weren’t willing to pursue other measures seriously because that would have been real work, such as incurring costs (such as for distribution of high quality masks) and involved spending political capital (for instance, requiring better ventilation in schools and hospitals). And now we are seeing that over-reliance on a simple-seeming solution is producing serious blowback.”
Locally, the South Side Weekly investigated allegations of poor treatment of workers at the Chicago Board of Elections warehouse in McKinley Park.
The Chicago Reader has an interview with historian Sean Dinces about the hidden costs of major league sports stadia.