Bosses Will Exploit Workers If Workers Don't Know It's Happening: Study
By Alexander Eichler Posted: 07/06/2012 5:21 pm Updated: 07/06/2012 5:21 pm
Pro-tip for all you bosses out there: It's easier to take advantage of your employees when they don't realize quite how much you're benefiting from them.
For their study, the researchers set up a workplace scenario in which a manager had the power to control a worker's wages. The manager and the worker were attempting to finish a project together, and the more effort the worker put into the project, the less work the manager had to do.
When the worker knew about the relationship between their own efforts and the manager's, the manager was less likely to cut the worker's pay. But when the worker was in the dark about how their own productivity affected the manager, the manager made "frequent and pronounced" attempts to squeeze the worker to do more for less.
Employers Get More From U.S. Workers as Jobs Gain Lags Forecast
Retailers reported this week that same-store sales rose 0.3 percent in June from a year earlier, based on results from more than 20 companies tracked by Retail Metrics Inc. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
By Shobhana Chandra and Rich Miller - Jul 6, 2012 11:00 PM CT
Companies in the U.S. are relying on existing workers and temporary employees instead of hiring, helping to explain why payrolls grew less than forecast in June.
The average workweek rose for the first time since February and temporary staffing climbed for a third consecutive month, according to Labor Department figures issued in Washington yesterday. The report also showed payrolls advanced by 80,000 workers, less than the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of economists, and the jobless rate held at 8.2 percent.
The need to boost hours and add provisional employees is a sign that sales are holding up in the face of a deepening slump in Europe and a slowdown in China and the rest of the world. Nonetheless, businesses may lack conviction that revenue gains will be sustained in light of the threats, making them reluctant to permanently expand payrolls.
“Firms are still seeing an increase in demand, and there is a need for more labor,” said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts. “But there are so many risks out there that businesses don’t want to commit to hiring full-time employees.”
The median estimate of 84 economists surveyed by Bloomberg projected a 100,000 gain in payrolls. Forecasts ranged from increases of 35,000 to 165,000. The May advance in employment was revised to 77,000 from a previously reported 69,000.
The lack of a pickup in hiring fueled concern the world’s largest economy was slowing, pushing stocks down. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropped 0.9 percent, erasing a weekly gain, to close yesterday at 1,354.68.
Longer Workweek
The average workweek climbed by six minutes to 34.5 hours in June, the report showed. Temporary staffing rose by 25,200, the biggest increase since February.
Candace Bailey, 24, has adapted her job-hunting strategy to weaker employment conditions.
“I’m primarily looking for full-time, but since it’s been a while, I’m definitely open to temporary work as well,” said Bailey, who lost her marketing job in Washington two months ago. “In the past two weeks or so, I’ve been definitely looking at temporary work until I find a full-time job.”
The pickup in hours “suggests there might be a little better momentum in the economy,” Bruce Kasman, chief economist for JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, said on a conference call. At the same time, there is “an absence of a real desire by firms to act on that in terms of hiring.”
The increase in the average workweek would be equivalent to a 325,000 gain in payrolls, according to estimates by economists at Nomura Securities International Inc. headed by Lewis Alexander.
Auto Sales
Automobiles are one area where demand is holding up. Cars and light trucks sold at a 14.1 million annual rate in June, up from May’s 13.7 million pace, Ward’s Automotive Group data showed. General Motors Co. (GM), Ford Motor Co. (F) and Chrysler Group LLC reported U.S. sales that topped analysts’ estimates, helping the industry surpass projections and stay on pace for the best year since 2007.
“We’re seeing strong demand for our current products as well as for our new models,” Bill Krueger, vice chairman of the Americas for Nissan Motor Co., said in a telephone interview yesterday. The Yokohama, Japan-based automaker plans to boost hours, add shifts or increase payrolls at plants in Tennessee and Mississippi “to really have the supply catch up with demand,” he said.
Manufacturers were among those asking existing employees to put in a longer workweek last month. Factory overtime climbed to 4.7 hours in June on average, the most in five years, yesterday’s report showed.
Hourly Earnings
In another bright spot, workers’ average hourly earnings rose to $23.50 in June from $23.44 in the prior month, yesterday’s report showed.
“For the 92 percent of folks who have jobs, their incomes are rising, raises are still happening,” said Chris Varvares, senior managing director of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis.
Consumers are benefiting from falling gasoline prices and lower inflation. The cost of living dropped in May by the most in more than three years, Labor Department figures showed last month. A gallon of regular fuel at the pump cost an average $3.36 as of July 5, down from this year’s peak of $3.94 in early April, according to AAA, the biggest U.S. auto group.
Retailers reported this week that same-store sales rose 0.3 percent in June from a year earlier, based on results from more than 20 companies tracked by Retail Metrics Inc. Luxury chains such as Saks Inc. (SKS) and discounters like TJX Cos. topped analysts’ expectations, while stores targeting middle-income consumers trailed projections.
Lowe’s Cos.
“What we are seeing today from an income perspective is our economy is modestly adding jobs,” Robert Hull, chief financial officer at Lowe’s Cos., the second-largest U.S. home- improvement retailer, said at a June 26 consumer conference in Boston. “That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s not sufficient to have a material impact on the unemployment rate.”
The “mixed” jobs report suggests that Federal Reserve policy makers are unlikely to take further action to boost the economy at their next meeting, such as a third round of so- called quantitative easing, said David Greenlaw, a managing director and economist at Morgan Stanley in New York.
“We don’t think the report was quite bad enough to tip the scales toward doing something like QE3,” Greenlaw said. “But I certainly think there’s plenty of fodder for discussion and definitely some indication that the Fed needs to be more worried about prospects for growth going forward.”
Presidential Election
Yesterday’s report deprived President Barack Obama of progress on voters’ overriding concern with just four months before the election.
Obama, speaking yesterday at a campaign stop in Poland, Ohio, called the addition of new jobs “a step in the right direction” though the economy has to grow “even faster.”
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called the report “another kick in the gut.”
While Romney has suggested that Obama has done a worse job managing the economy than President Jimmy Carter, investors have given the U.S. a vote of confidence.
The S&P 500 has surged 68 percent under Obama, more than three times the 19 percent increase during Carter’s first 3-1/2 years in office starting in 1977.
Although unemployment is higher than the 7.5 percent level in May 1980, inflation is lower. Consumer prices rose 1.7 in May from a year earlier, compared with a 14.4 percent increase in May 1980.
Longest Stretch
Still, unemployment has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest such stretch since monthly records began in 1948.
Among those also having trouble finding full-time work is Dave Marshall of Tampa, Florida. The 23-year-old Army reservist, who works part-time for two security firms in the area, said he has been unable to find a job that utilizes his degree in sociology from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“I am getting edged out by people with experience,” Marshall said. “There have been some entry-level positions that I have applied for, but the economy is so bad that the people who have been let go are also applying for entry-level positions and a lot of them have two, three years of experience.”
Nicole Sandler, 52, lost her job at Air America in January 2010 when the radio station closed. She was ineligible for unemployment benefits because she was a contractor.
Temporary Jobs
Sandler moved in with her fiance in Coral Springs, Florida, in April 2011 when she lost her house in Miami. She gets about $1,000 a month from a webcast she puts together five nights a week and takes temporary radio jobs when she can get them.
“I work but I’m still technically unemployed,” said Sandler. “I guess I could try to find a job doing something else, but at 52 to take an entry-level job I may as well do what I’m doing. What am I going to do, work in a supermarket?”
The jobs figures showed private employment, which excludes government agencies, increased 84,000 in June, the weakest in 10 months. Retailers cut payrolls by 5,400, while manufacturers added 11,000 workers.
The report “reminds everyone that confidence matters,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania. “In June, the European debt issue reached a boil and a meltdown could not be ruled out. That had to have a major impact on business confidence.”
Uncertainty about the U.S. government’s fiscal outlook may also be hampering hiring plans. Congress has yet to resolve the so-called fiscal cliff, which represents more than $600 billion in higher taxes and reductions in defense and other government programs in 2013 that will take place without action.
The best strategy for companies to follow when confronted with such uncertainty ahead of Dec. 31 is to “stay lean and keep your inventories taut,” Sandy Cutler, chief executive officer of industrial equipment-maker Eaton Corp. (ETN) in Cleveland, told a conference May 31.
To contact the reporter on this story: Rich Miller in Washington at rmiller28@bloomberg.net Shobhana Chandra in Washington at schandra1@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net
GOP Rep. Tells Constituent Who Asks About Raising The Minimum Wage To ‘Get A Job’
Rep. Bill Young (R-FL)
By Travis Waldron on Jul 5, 2012 at 2:00 pm
House Democrats earlier this month proposed increasing the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/07/496003/house-dems-10-minimum-wage/ ], which would catch the minimum wage up to the buying power it had in 1968. The proposal hasn’t gone anywhere, though, since Republicans who control the House of Representatives oppose any increase.
CONSTITUENT: Hi, I’m (inaudible) how are you? Happy Fourth of July. Jesse Jackson, Jr. is passing a bill around to increase the minimum wage to 10 bucks and hour. Do you support that?
YOUNG: Probably not.
CONSTITUENT: 10 bucks, that would give us a living wage.
YOUNG: How about getting a job?
CONSTITUENT: I do have one.
YOUNG: Well, then why do you want that benefit? Get a job.
Young seems to miss the point that the millions of minimum wage workers in this country already have jobs. What they want is a job that will pay them enough to actually live on, and Congress could afford them that “benefit” by making the minimum wage as strong as it was [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/01/13/404060/romney-minimum-wage-inflation/ ] four decades ago.
Republican intransigence on economic policy has been a key contributor to the sluggish recovery. As early as 2009, Republican fear-mongering over spending and their readiness to filibuster in the Senate helped convince [ http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/100961/memo-Larry-Summers-Obama ] the White House economic team that an $800 billion stimulus was the most they could hope to get through Congress. Reporting has since revealed that the team thought the country actually needed a stimulus on the order of $1.2 to $1.8 trillion. The economy’s path over the next three years proved [ http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/13/424283/gop-budget-austerity-debunk/ ] them right. Here are the top five ways the Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery since:
Obama Campaign Disagrees With Supreme Court's Health Care Ruling
Amanda Terkel Posted: 07/05/2012 11:18 am Updated: 07/05/2012 1:01 pm
WASHINGTON -- Although the Supreme Court handed President Barack Obama a victory by upholding the Affordable Care Act, the Obama campaign made clear on Thursday morning that it still disagrees with Chief Justice John Roberts' ruling that characterized the individual mandate as a tax.
"The difference between the Obama administration -- and the president -- and Mitt Romney is that we've been consistent," said Stephanie Cutter, Obama's deputy campaign manager, on MSNBC. "This is a penalty administered through the tax code. It's a penalty of less than 1 percent of the American public who can afford to get health care but choose not to get it."
On Wednesday, Romney had told CBS News that he believes the individual mandate imposes a tax -- rather than a penalty -- on individuals who choose not to purchase health insurance.
On Thursday, MSNBC host Chuck Todd accused the Obama campaign of essentially flip-flopping the same way that it was accusing Romney of doing.
"He seems to be reluctantly saying, 'Well, the Supreme Court said it's a tax so, fine, it's a tax.' But then he says his own -- it's not what it is in Massachusetts. It was a penalty," said Todd, referencing the very similar health care plan enacted in Massachusetts during Romney's tenure as governor.
The Republican National Committee also charged the Obama campaign with being disingenuous in its attacks on Romney, pointing to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's arguments before the Supreme Court during which he said the individual mandate was "justifiable under its [Congress'] tax power [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/11-398-Tuesday.pdf ]."
While Verrilli did make that argument, he never said that the administration thought the mandate imposed a tax. Rather he contended -- as Cutter did on MSNBC on Thursday -- that it was a penalty administered under the tax code.
From the transcript of Verrilli's argument:
JUSTICE SCALIA: Is it a tax or not a tax? The president didn't think it was.
VERRILLI: The president said it wasn't a tax increase because it ought to be understood as an incentive to get people to have insurance. I don't think it's fair to infer from that anything about whether that is an exercise of the tax power or not.
Verrilli also distinguished between taxes and penalties under the tax code, saying that if penalties do "raise revenue, they are exercises of the taxing power, but their purpose is not to raise revenue. Their purpose is to discourage behavior."
“In a curious development, President Obama apparently disagrees with the Supreme Court ruling upholding his health care law," said Amanda Henneberg, spokeswoman for the Romney campaign. "It’s too bad he doesn’t also see that Obamacare is bad policy and bad law. On day one of his presidency, Mitt Romney will begin the process of repealing and replacing Obamacare."
Work and opportunity, poverty and dependency, material security and insecurity: for generations of reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire government, unchecked corporate power and the deprivations and inequalities they bred weren’t just bad public policy — they were constitutional infirmities. But liberals have largely forgotten how to think, talk and fight along these lines.
And they’ve done so at the wrong time. The Supreme Court is again putting up constitutional barriers against laws to redress want and inequity. While it handed liberals a victory on the Affordable Care Act, it also gave a boost to conservatives to revive the old laissez-faire Constitution in the polity and courts: new doctrine and dictums for their attack on the welfare and regulatory state.
But there is a silver lining for liberals as well: in much the same way that the conservative court of the 1930s forced Franklin D. Roosevelt and his allies to construct the constitutional foundations of the New Deal state, today’s court challenges the White House, the Democrats and the liberal legal community to reassert a constitutional vision of a national government empowered “to promote the general Welfare” and — in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s terse formula — “to regulate the national economy in the interest of those who labor to sustain it.”
The majority opinion of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., along with the jointly written dissent of the other four conservatives, outlines the doctrinal and rhetorical bases for assailing much of the New Deal-Great Society constitutional order over the coming years.
The opinions are laced with shout-outs to the Tea Party and the right wing, affirming their crackpot originalism. The joint dissent, for example, invokes James Madison’s views on the spending power to shed doubt on the constitutionality of three “federal Departments devoted to subjects not mentioned among Congress’ enumerated powers”: Education, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development.
The joint dissent also offers a stark revision of federal spending doctrine that could sharply curtail new social provisions. Even the new doctrine that the majority adopted may hobble efforts to condition federal grants-in-aid on compliance with national goals, like child-care assistance for the working poor.
You would think that liberals would have a full-bodied response. They don’t.
Instead, they are on the defensive, training their fire on the revivalists’ theory of constitutional interpretation. But conservatives dominate the debate not because they have a killer theory (they don’t), but chiefly because they have a bold, clear account of past constitutional commitments, adding up to a vision the Constitution promises to promote and redeem: individualism, small government, godliness and private property.
Liberals have too often been complacent and purely defensive. The Constitution, they often declare, does not speak to the rights and wrongs of economic life; it leaves that to politics. Laissez-faire doctrines were buried by the New Deal.
Until last week, this response may have been understandable. But it was always misleading as history, and wrong in principle, as well. And it was bad politics, providing no clear counternarrative to support the powers of government now under attack from the right.
That’s a major failing, because there is a venerable rival to constitutional laissez-faire: a rich distributive tradition of constitutional law and politics, rooted in the framers’ generation. None other than Madison was among its prominent expounders — in his draft of the Virginia Constitution, he included rights to free education and public land.
Likewise, many framers of the Reconstruction amendments held that education and “40 acres and a mule” were constitutional essentials that Congress must provide to ex-slaves. They also held that equal rights and liberty for white workingmen required a fair distribution of initial endowments, including free homesteads and free elementary and secondary education, along with land-grant-funded state colleges.
In the wake of industrialization, turn of the century reformers declared the need for a “new economic constitutional order” to secure the old promises of individual freedom and opportunity. America was becoming a corporate oligarchy, making working people wage slaves, impoverished and ill-equipped for democratic citizenship.
The New Deal brought this progressive vision to partial fruition. In the preindustrial past, Roosevelt explained in countless speeches [ http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=447 ], the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights “in acquiring and possessing property” joined with the ballot and the freedom to live by one’s “own lights” to ensure the Constitution’s promise of “liberty and equality.”
But the “turn of the tide” came with the closing of the frontier and the rise of great “industrial combinations.” New conditions demanded new readings. “Every man,” he said, has a “right to make a comfortable living.” Alongside education, “training and retraining,” decent work and decent pay, his Second Bill of Rights set out rights to social insurance, including health care.
The distributive tradition has evolved, but its gist is simple and durable: you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.
That’s because gross economic inequality produces an oligarchy in which the wealthy rule. Insofar as it produces a lack of basic social goods at the bottom, gross inequality also destroys the material independence and security that democratic citizens require to participate on a roughly equal footing in political and social life. And access to such goods is essential to standing and respect in one’s own eyes and those of the community.
In the face of the court’s new constitutional offerings to the assault on the welfare and regulatory state, liberals must remind Americans of the constitutional promises and commitments that led us to create that state in the first place. They must remind lawmakers that there are constitutional stakes in attending to the economic needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans, their dread of poverty and their worries that mounting inequalities are eroding our democracy and its promises of fairness and opportunity.
The Constitution on this account promises real equality of opportunity; it calls on all three branches of government to ensure that all Americans enjoy a decent education and livelihood and a measure of security against the hazards of illness, old age and unemployment — all so they have a chance to do something that has value in their own eyes and a chance to engage in the affairs of their communities and the larger society. Government has not only the authority but also the duty to underwrite these promises.
Often during the 2008 campaign, and a few times since, the former constitutional law professor in the White House has spoken in this key. Now he might take a leaf from Roosevelt and use the bully pulpit to explain these constitutional ideals for our time. He should defend the distributive tradition and its vision of government as if our constitutional democracy depended on it. After all, it does.
William E. Forbath is a professor of law and history at the University of Texas.
John Roberts Health Care Switch Sparks 'Deep' Supreme Court 'Discord': CBS News (VIDEO)
This photo provided by the U.S. Courts Circuit Executive's Office shows Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, participating in a program at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort that is part of the Science and the Law program by the Judicial Conference of the District of Columbia Circuit in Farmington, Pa. on Friday, June 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Ann Wilkins/US Courts Circuit Executive's Office)
By Chris Gentilviso Posted: 07/08/2012 1:11 pm Updated: 07/08/2012 7:38 pm
"No one has any idea how it's going to be resolved but conservatives feel this sense of betrayal -- that Roberts changed his mind for the wrong reasons," Crawford said on "Face The Nation." "If he had been with the liberals from the beginning … that would have been one thing. But to have switched his position -- and relatively late in the process -- infuriated conservatives."
IN WORCESTER, MASS. — Karyn Johnson is a 38-year-old woman with a thick Massachusetts accent, a cramped office and a big job. In a city of 31,265 smokers, it’s up to her to get them to quit.
Johnson works for the Worcester Department of Public Health, a working-class city one hour west of Boston. Her task is daunting: With a population of 181,000, its smoking rate is 47 percent higher than the rest of the state.
And yet through her efforts, the city’s teen smoking rate dropped year after year. Then so did her budget. In 1998, the department had about $350,000 to spend on tobacco cessation efforts. Today, Johnson has $135,000.
She is not alone. The recession has battered public health; across the country, local and state health departments have shed 52,200 jobs since 2009.
Back in the early 2000s, five full-time staff members worked on smoking cessation in Worcester. Just last year, there was money enough to go around to all 600 tobacco sellers in the area, to make sure they were complying with city regulations and not selling to teens.
This year, Johnson had the budget to visit 300 stores. The rest, she says, “just didn’t get checked.”
“What’s really frustrating is that we do so much work, updating our policies and making them stronger,” Johnson says, “and then can’t really enforce our policies.”
In a way, Worcester is in the middle of a national experiment in public health spending. It will show what happens when public health infrastructure shrinks just as America’s health problems are getting bigger.
“The big picture is that tobacco use remains the leading preventable cause of death in the United States,” said Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But there was a combination of fiscal crises, and states choose to do other things than tobacco cessation.”
Teachers and firefighters regularly are cast by politicians as the face of local government; their roles are familiar. Public health officials, by contrast, tend to be behind the scenes, the ones running anti-tobacco ads, inspecting restaurants for compliance with health regulations and monitoring populations for disease outbreaks. It’s their job to make public environments healthier.
When public health departments do their best job, the results are elusive. They cannot tally up disease outbreaks prevented the way firefighters can count fires extinguished. And that can make vying for funds from recession-squeezed budgets a tough battle.
“We don’t have blue lights, red lights, flashing around the city,” said Derek Brindisi, Worcester’s public health director. “We’re all behind the scenes, so we can become less of a priority.”
Big gains, eroded
Of all the work American public health departments have done in the past century, smoking cessation is easily their proudest success. A concerted policy effort from local, state and federal agencies dramatically reduced American smoking rates over the course of decades.
Interventions were set in motion in the mid-1960s after the surgeon general first warned of nicotine’s harmful effects. The federal government added warning labels to cigarette packages, followed by a ban on television ads for tobacco in 1969. Arizona, four years later, became the first state [ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12649&page=110"; title="www.nap.edu ] to ban smoking in many outdoor places. Nearly 3,500 [ http://www.no-smoke.org/pdf/mediaordlist.pdf%22%20title=%22www.no-smoke.org ] cities have followed suit.
Recent economic downturns have hit smoking cessation budgets, and public health spending in general, hard. Among state health agencies, 89 percent scaled back the services they offer between 2008 and 2010. During that same time, national spending on smoking cessation dropped by 20 percent, mirroring similar cuts made during the recession in the early 2000s.
Funding for tobacco cessation is falling even as the data suggest the problem is as persistent as ever. While cigarette use among teens has declined, on average, by 2 percent a year, use of other tobacco products, such as cigars and smokeless tobacco, has increased.
“Following a sharp decline in use since the late 1990s, the prevalence of current smokeless tobacco use began to rise sharply in 2003 and has continued to rise since,” the Obama administration concluded in the most recent surgeon general’s report, issued in March.
If the declines in youth tobacco use during the 1990s had continued, the Centers for Disease Control estimates, 3 million fewer teens would be smokers.
“The 20th century was the cigarette century,” said Gregory Connolly,who directs Harvard’s Center for Global Tobacco Control. “What’s frightening about the 21st century is it’s the tobacco century. Companies have a total tobacco approach. We may see lower cigarette consumption offset by the use of other forms of tobacco.”
‘Such an uphill battle’
In 1998, Massachusetts had one of the country’s biggest tobacco cessation budgets, spending $39 million in state and federal dollars — second only to California. Massachusetts has some of the most stringent restrictions on smoking in public places.
Cuts made during the past two recessions, in the early and then the late 2000s, have changed that. By 2010, combined state and federal spending on smoking cessation in Massachusetts had fallen to $6.8 million, about 17 percent of the 1998 budget. Massachusetts now ranks 35th in its spending. Overall public health spending has dropped, since 2006, by 14 percent.
In Worcester, that means no more nicotine patch handouts; Worcester’s last was in 2008. There are fewer checks to make sure tobacco retailers are complying with regulations, and less resources to push back if they aren’t.
Lately, Johnson has seen a wave of non-cigarette products coming to market. She collects the ones she finds in a red plastic bag in her office. Some are in brightly colored tins that look like they might contain mints. Others are small cigars, called cigarillos, that have fruity flavors and sell for 59 cents. These products tend to be taxed at 5 to 10 percent of the rate for cigarettes.
“There’s a lot of people trying to do good policy work, but it seems like every time we get a handle on the products out there, it changes,” Johnson said. “We ban blunt wraps, and describe them as ‘brown paper’ in the city ordinance, and all of a sudden there are green blunt wraps.”
As in the rest of the nation, use of these products among the young has been on the rise in Massachusetts, from 13 percent of teens in 2002 to 17.6 percent in 2009.
In Worcester, 21 percent of teens use some kind of tobacco product, cigarette or otherwise. With the adult and youth smoking rates nearly identical, the number is unlikely to bend downward.
“It’s definitely alarming, because we’re putting all this energy into protecting youth from cigarettes and they’re just using different products,” Johnson said. “We’re trying to bend the adult smoking rate down from 22 percent but youth are at 21 percent. This is just such an uphill battle.”
Trying new approaches
With Massachusetts’ spending on tobacco cessation down, it’s looked to other ways to tackle the issue. “Our policies continue to create an environment where the norm is not smoking,” Massachusetts Public Health Department director John Auerbach said. “The combination of good state policy and federal money, with the health-care reform impact, it’s made it easier for us to continue this downward trend.”
Federal funds have patched some budget holes: The state has kept its tobacco quit line open with hundreds of thousands of dollars from the health reform law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, a $15 billion federal commitment to preventive health care.
The quit line is among a handful in the country that is “proactive,” meaning that quit-line workers will, after being flagged by a doctor, reach out to a smoker.
Local hospitals have begun [ http://www.mhalink.org/AM/customsource/tobaccofree2/tobaccofree.html ] to ban smoking on their campuses. In 2010, Massachusetts became the first state to require Medicaid to cover a wide range of smoking cessation products. It has shown immediate returns: Each dollar invested in that program has returned $3.12 in savings from reductions in cardiovascular-related hospital admissions, according an analysis [ http://www.prevent.org/data/images/roi%20policy%20paper_a.pdf ] by George Washington University.
The state does still, however, run into obstacles. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) proposed a $1.7 million increase [ http://www.mass.gov/bb/h1/fy13h1/exec_13/hbudbrief16.htm ] in tobacco cessation spending this year. It would have included $500,000 for local teen smoking prevention.
The Massachusetts’ legislature rejected the extra funding. A dollar tax increase on tobacco products also was left on the cutting-room floor.
Johnson has joined forces with 18 smaller cities near Worcester. Collectively, their budget is the same as Worcester’s in 1998. They meet regularly, develop policies together and pool resources for store compliance checks.
In May, Johnson got some good news: Her budget would grow in 2013, enough to once again cover an annual check of every tobacco seller.
It feels like a small victory for a department that touches every life, but often completely out of view.
“I have this idea of coming up with a video of what cities used to be like in the 1900s just to show what a big impact public health departments have had,” Brindisi said. “Sometimes, I feel like we should just get a helicopter so people know we’re here.”
Kliff wrote this article with the assistance of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, which is administered by the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Seeing Spots by Jane Mayer November 19, 2012 ABSTRACT: Talk story about the makers of a particularly effective anti-Romney campaign advertisement ["Stage", about 70% of the way down in the post to which this is a reply]. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/11/19/121119ta_talk_mayer
.. Greg Medcraft's speech was as emotional and vigorous which you could ever hope to see from any corporate regulator anywhere ..
Evan Schwarten Date December 3, 2014
Australia's corporate regulator has railed against the financial advice sector, saying the industry had treated its clients appallingly and broken their trust.
Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft says the pain inflicted by poor or unethical financial advisers on thousands of unsuspecting clients was heart-breaking.
"It's absolutely broken my heart to see what financial advisers have done to people and what they often continue to do to people," a visibly angry Mr Medcraft told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
Mr Medcraft said he'd seen many cases where people had been advised to move their money into completely inappropriate investment products, while others had no idea of the type of investments being made on their behalf.
"Australians want advice they can trust, it is absolutely appalling," he said.
ASIC has come under fire over its failure to head off widespread problems in the Commonwealth Bank's financial planning arm, where more than 1,100 customers lost their savings through poor advice.
A Senate inquiry earlier this year lashed out at misconduct and fraud within the division between 2006 and 2010.
Mr Medcraft also called for higher education standards for financial advisers, saying planners should be required to pass a university level exam.
The current minimum industry standard, called RG146, has been widely criticised as insufficient, though some wealth management companies insist on higher standards.
Meanwhile, Mr Medcraft renewed his calls for tougher penalties to deter white collar criminals.
"Australia needs penalties that will scare the pants off people," he said.
He said convicted white collar criminals needed to be either sent to jail or handed fines that were significantly larger than they proceeds of their crime.
"Breaking the law in the financial sector seems to be a trade-off between fear and greed," he said.
"We need penalties that amplify the fear and absolutely suppress the greed."
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