Word: labors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last Tuesday, Brown and Labor Secretary Robert Reich were attending a two-day Group of Seven conference in the French city of Lille. Poised to descend the grand stairway at their hotel, both men suddenly realized they were being watched by a crowd of reporters and photographers below. Brown leaned over to Reich and offered the kind of quip that captured his instinct for politics, his sense of timing and his self-deprecating humor. "The only way people will think we are doing something important," he told Reich, "is if we stand up straight, walk fast and let our arms...
Even those who disdain the American system admit now their own is badly broken. President Jacques Chirac of France, who hosted a jobs summit last week of the seven rich industrial countries, called for a "third path" between the too cozy welfare state and the "precarious" U.S. labor market. Taking the American approach immediately is simply not an option. "Any political party that tried would run into a cultural wall upholding public service, entitlements, paid vacations and so forth," says Jean-Marie Chevalier, a University of Paris economics professor. "They'd be kicked...
Even if those programs have not yet appeared, it is possible to discern where the communists are headed by studying the legislation the party is preparing for action in the Duma. One proposal calls for renationalizing industries "that have been privatized contrary to law, the rights of labor collectives and the interests of the country." Another would establish workers' councils in every enterprise and give them the right to control "production, finances and distribution and uses of income." Other new laws would impose state-regulated prices, restore central planning of the economy and give the state a monopoly over foreign...
...dirty little secret in the incentives game is that the real criteria for site selection are skill and cost of labor, proximity to customers and price of real estate. Tax breaks are rarely the dealmaker. Barry Rubin, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University, notes that of a firm's variable costs--charges that come on top of fixed expenses like lease payments--state and local taxes make up at most 3%. Giveaways are likely to have little impact unless other factors are virtually equal...
...California can't arbitrarily lower its cost of labor or real estate. Intel, the world's largest maker of microchips, chose Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the site for a new $1.3 billion semiconductor plant, stiffing its own headquarters location in pricey Silicon Valley. New Mexico sweetened the deal further by giving Intel a 30-year exemption from property taxes for the plant, which Intel says will create 3,000 jobs. The exemption formed the bulk of a 30-year, $566 million incentive package from New Mexico that works out to nearly $190,000 per job. (New Mexico's unemployment rate...