In monetary policy of the United States, the term Fedspeak (also known as Greenspeak) is what Alan Blinder called "a turgid dialect of English" used by Federal Reserve Board chairmen in making wordy, vague, and ambiguous statements. The strategy, which was used most prominently by Alan Greenspan, was used to prevent financial markets from overreacting to the chairman's remarks. The coinage is an intentional parallel to Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by George Orwell. Fedspeak when used by Alan Greenspan is often called Greenspeak. An alternative definition of Greenspeak is "the coded and careful language employed by U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan." Edwin le Heron and Emmanuel Carre state that "Nowadays, 'Fedspeak' (Bernanke, 2004) means clear and extensive communication of the Fed's action." Chairman Ben Bernanke and Chairwoman Yellen have effected a major change in Fed communication policy departing from the obfuscation that characterized the previous three decades. In 2014 a new detailed level of Fed communication was dubbed Fedspeak 3.0. In 2018, Chairman Jerome Powell would begin press conferences with a summary statement in plain English, in contrast to his predecessors who would read lengthy prepared statements loaded with monetary policy jargon. In 2021, Powell introduced a recursively ambiguous syntax, saying that "you can think of this meeting that we had as the ‘talking about talking about’ meeting."[ He added, "I now suggest that we retire that term." Read more...
List of Fortune 500 Companies (Year-by-Year)
Keywords: List of Fortune 500 companies
List of Fortune 500 Companies (year-by-year)
The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along with privately held companies for which revenues are publicly available. The Fortune 500, created by Edgar P. Smith, was first published in 1955. The original top ten companies were General Motors, Jersey Standard, U.S. Steel, General Electric, Esmark, Chrysler, Armour, Gulf Oil, Mobil, and DuPont. The original Fortune 500 was limited to companies whose revenues were derived from manufacturing, mining, and energy exploration. At the same time, Fortune published companion "Fortune 50" lists of the 50 largest commercial banks (ranked by assets), utilities (ranked by assets), life insurance companies (ranked by assets), retailers (ranked by gross revenues) and transportation companies (ranked by revenues). Fortune magazine changed its methodology in 1994 to include service companies. With the change came 291 new entrants to the famous list including three in the Top 10. There is a lag in creating the list, so for example, the 2019 Fortune 500 is based on each company's financial years ending in late 2018 (most commonly, on December 31), or early 2019.
Explore the list to see who prospered, who stumbled, and why. See the complete list here
Featherbedding in Labor Relations
Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers. The term "make-work" is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding. The term "featherbedding" is usually used by management to describe behaviors and rules sought by workers. The term may equally apply to mid- and upper-level management, particularly in regard to top-heavy and "bloated" levels of middle- and upper-level management. Featherbedding has also been occasionally used to describe rent-seeking behavior by corporations in response to economic regulation. The term "featherbedding" originally referred to any person who is pampered, coddled, or excessively rewarded. The term originated in the use of feathers to fill mattresses in beds, providing for more comfort. The modern use of the term in the labor relations setting began in the United States railroad industry, which used feathered mattresses in sleeping cars. Railway labor unions, confronted with changing technology which led to widespread unemployment, sought to preserve jobs by negotiating contracts which required employers to compensate workers to do little or no work or which required complex and time-consuming work rules so as to generate a full day's work for an employee who otherwise would not remain employed. Read more...
Management f-Laws
Management f-Laws are subversive epigrams about common management practices. Based on observation and experience, they are used to draw attention to entrenched ways of thinking about management and business that are often at odds with common sense or our actual experience.
Systems theorist Russell L. Ackoff, his co-author Herbert J. Addison and Sally Bibb invented the term in 2006 to describe their series of over 100 distilled observations of bad leadership and the misplaced wisdom that often surrounds management in organizations. Ackoff and Addison's f-Laws might seem counter-intuitive. They are designed to challenge organizations' unquestioning adherence to established management habits or beliefs. Many of the f-Laws describe a relationship of inverse proportionality, in example: "The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things."
The f-Laws advocate adopting a positive, forward-looking and interactive approach to structural or systematic change within organizations, following the principles of idealized design. This is a process that "involves redesigning the organization on the assumption that it was destroyed last night... The most effective way of creating the future is by closing or reducing the gap between the current state and the idealized design".
Three collections of f-Laws entitledA Little Book of f-Laws: 13 Common Sins of Management, Management f-Laws: How Organizations Really Work and Systems Thinking for Curious Managers have been published. While, if read in isolation, each f-Law is a witty and thought-provoking axiom, the books provide a context that draws upon systems thinking and the debate over the importance of developing soft skills in business environments. Read more...
Racial, ethnic minorities and low-income groups in US exposed to higher levels of air pollution
Certain groups in the U.S.—Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Latinos, and low-income populations—are being exposed to higher levels of dangerous fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) than other groups, according to new research from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
In collaboration with the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the study authors developed a new platform linking 17 years' worth of demographic data with data on fine particulate pollution from across the U.S., and created unique visualizations, that shine a light on the stark disparities in air pollution exposure among racial/ethnic and income groups in America. The study will be published on January 12, 2022, in the journal Nature. "Our study, which highlights the relative disparities in PM2.5 exposure in the U.S., is particularly timely given current crises the country is facing, such as a reckoning with racism as well as disparities in COVID-19 outcomes," said Francesca Dominici, Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard Chan School and senior author of the study. Read more...
The Women Leading Today’s Historic Labor Movement
Amid pandemic-fueled workplace strikes demanding better pay and benefits, and more flexibility, female union leaders are heading the charge for a brighter professional future.
The labor movement saw an unprecedented, uproarious resurgence in 2021, as workplace strikes became commonplace throughout the country in what’s being referred to as a historic employee uprising. As the pandemic continues to evolve, leaving in its wake the worst U.S. recession in history with millions of people still out of jobs, employers across industries are facing acute labor shortages. Why? In short, because swaths of people have left their pre-COVID positions in pursuit of more money, more flexibility, and generally better quality of life in an especially fraught time. According to the Labor Department, four million people quit their jobs in April of 2021 alone, while those who’ve remained are shown to be joining unions and organizing in ways they perhaps previously hadn’t.
Despite decades of declining membership, labor unions are currently seeing their highest approval ratings in the United States since 1965, according to a recent Gallup poll. Given that issues like pay, benefits, paid sick time, paid family leave, minimum staffing levels, schedule flexibility, mental health, and workplace safety have become increasingly urgent in the midst of the pandemic, women and femmes have emerged as union leaders across industries like never before, playing pivotal roles in some of the 45+ labor strikes since August tracked by Bloomberg Law. This should come as little surprise, as the Economic Policy Institute found that women in unions are paid more than their non-union counterparts, and that collective bargaining has also aided in lessening pay gaps for workers of color. Of course, women and femmes have also historically been leaders of, and active participants in, the country’s labor movement. Read more...
Unions are not only good for workers, they’re good for communities and for democracy
We know that unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions. But that’s not all unions do. Unions also have powerful effects on workers’ lives outside of work.
In this report, we document the correlation between higher levels of unionization in states and a range of economic, personal, and democratic well-being measures. In the same way unions give workers a voice at work, with a direct impact on wages and working conditions, the data suggest that unions also give workers a voice in shaping their communities. Where workers have this power, states have more equitable economic structures, social structures, and democracies.
Income and economic protections
We find that, on average, the 17 U.S. states with the highest union densities:
- have state minimum wages that are on average 19% higher than the national average and 40% higher than those in low-union-density states
- have median annual incomes $6,000 higher than the national average
- have higher-than-average unemployment insurance recipiency rates (that is, a higher share of those who are unemployed actually receive unemployment insurance)
We find that the states with the highest union densities:
- have an uninsured (without health insurance) population 4.5 percentage points lower, on average, than that of low-union-density states
- have all elected to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, protecting their residents from falling into the “coverage gap”
- are more likely to have passed paid sick leave laws and paid family and medical leave laws than states with lower union densities. Read more...