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Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson is the editor-at-large at The American Prospect and a columnist for The Washington Post. His email is hmeyerson@prospect.org

Recent Articles

Strikes, Alliances, and Survival

Harold MeyersonJul 29, 2013
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Fast-food workers in seven cities are set to walk off their jobs today in one-day actions, escalating what is quickly becoming a nationwide effort to win pay hikes in one of America’s premier poverty-wage industries. Backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the campaign is succeeding in publicizing the plight of low-wage workers in a growing number of states and cities. How it goes about actually winning higher wages, however, remains unclear. For its part, the AFL-CIO is preparing for its biennial convention this September, at which it will begin to hammer out some kind of formal affiliation or partnership with other, nonunion progressive organizations such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club. There are changes afoot within the union’s Working America affiliate—a Federation-run and –funded neighborhood canvass that has expanded from a purely (and brilliantly successful) electoral operation, building support for progressive Democrats among white working-class swing-...

Subsidizing Poverty

Harold MeyersonJul 22, 2013
AP Images/Rich Pedromcelli
Want to know the problem with enterprise zones? Then check out Sunday’s Riverside Press Enterprise , one of the best midsized newspapers in California. A story in it covers Governor Jerry Brown’s successful campaign to have the legislature put enterprise zones out of their misery. (Brown recently signed the bill abolishing the zones.) Conceived by the late Jack Kemp and other unusually well-meaning right-wingers to bring jobs to the inner-city, enterprise zones have provided subsidies to businesses for creating jobs they might have created in any case. Disproportionately, the jobs created were low-paying. Also at Brown’s prompting, the legislature replaced enterprise zones with a better-targeted subsidy. Under the new law, businesses in high-unemployment and high-poverty areas will be eligible for tax credits that come to 35 percent of a new hire’s wages—provided those wages are between $12 and $35 an hour. This drew a wondrous complain from Colin Strong, the head of the San...

What Tom Friedman Doesn’t Understand About the Economy, Part 72

Harold MeyersonJul 22, 2013
AP Images/Charles Dharapak
“Average is over,” New York Times columnist Tom Friedman likes to proclaim, and in at least one particular, he’s right. Friedman no longer writes average columns. With each passing week, his efforts become steadily more moronic. His latest , in Sunday’s paper, is entitled “Welcome to the Sharing Economy,” and in it, Friedman mistakes economic marginality and desperation for innovation and opportunity. The subject of this particular essay is Airbnb, a website where travelers go to rent bedrooms in other people’s homes. “There’s an innkeeper residing in all of us!” Friedman effuses, as he recounts how Airbnb may have as many as 200,000 people per night this summer plopping down in some stranger’s kid’s bedroom. Enthralled by the sheer techno-innovation of it all, Friedman doesn’t pause to ponder just what would impel a parent to turn over junior’s room for a few bucks. Could it be that the factory closed? That Wal-Mart pays so little? No matter: “Ordinary people can now be micro-...

The Great Detroit Betrayal

Harold MeyersonJul 19, 2013
AP Photo/Paul Sancya
AP Photo/Duane Burleson D etroit has filed for bankruptcy. Most of the spot-news coverage has focused on the immediate fiscal crisis of the city, but the immediate fiscal crisis really isn’t what got the city into such deep trouble. Certainly, Detroit’s contracts with its employees and its debts to its retirees don’t explain anything about how and why this once-great city has come to such grief. Those contracts and retirement benefits are par for the course for major American cities—certainly, no more generous than those in cities of comparable size. Any remotely accurate autopsy of the city will find the cancer that killed Detroit was the decline of the American auto industry. The failure of U.S. automakers in the '70s, '80s and '90s to make better cars at a time when foreign-made autos were beginning to enter the U.S. market was surely one factor. Another was the trade deals that made it easy for Detroit automakers to relocate to cheaper climes—most particularly, NAFTA, which...

All Hail Harry Reid!

Harold MeyersonJul 16, 2013
AP Images/J. Scott Applewhite
The United States Senate and the nation it so imperfectly represents both had a good day today, thanks to something that’s been in short order around here lately: A Democrat who knows how to play hardball. By threatening Republicans with ending their right to filibuster presidential executive-brand nominees, Majority Leader Harry Reid ensured that President Obama’s appointments to departments and agencies that Republicans don’t much like would nonetheless be approved. It’s important to note that the Republicans’ real objections have been less to the individual nominees and more to the bodies they were supposed to lead: The Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Workers, consumers and the environment rate a big “Feh” from Republicans, but unable to muster the votes to put their respective bureaus out of business, the GOP has used their power to filibuster to cripple them. Harry Reid...

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