A sign of the times. Student loans default rates for 2009 increased to 8.8% from 7.0%. For profit schools had the worst jump, from 11.6% to 15%. Private universities and colleges had the lowest, but also increased from 4.0% to 4.6%. Public higher education had a 7.2% default rate, up from 6.0%. These numbers are only for a two year time window. Defaults after that 24 month period are not part of this tally.

From the Department of Education:

The rates announced today represent a snapshot in time, with the FY 2009 cohort consisting of borrowers whose first loan repayments came due between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009, and who defaulted before Sept. 30, 2010. More than 3.6 million borrowers from 5,900 schools entered repayment during this window of time, and more than 320,000 defaulted.

Even more horrific these numbers had the new repayment option incorporated where one could scale and cap student loan payments based on their income.

Since the time when the borrowers in the FY 2009 cohort enrolled, the Obama Administration has expanded flexible loan repayment options for borrowers through the income-based repayment plan (IBR). This plan makes loan payments more affordable by capping the monthly payment at an amount based on income and family size.

These numbers are also after another policy change. Schools with high default rates are sanctioned and can lose eligibility for federal student loans. There were actually 5 schools cited in the press release with high default rates:

In yet another blow to U.S. workers, the Obama administration has signed a deal for Mexican truckers to operate inside the United States.

The news headlines all sing hallelujah over some soon to be disappearing punitive tariffs Mexico put on 99 U.S. products simply because we wouldn't let Mexican truckers, instead of American ones, on U.S. highways. There is no mention in the major press of the cost to American workers, the increased illegal drugs entering the country, the illegal immigrants being smuggled into the U.S., and the wages and jobs lost. Nor is there anything mentioned about border security in the press, or even challenging Mexico for being in violation of NAFTA by their attempts to subvert U.S. labor law in the first place.

The teamsters have been fighting this tooth and nail and just came out swinging. Mexican truckers have lax safety standards and much lower wages, yet will be allowed to work in the United States, by driving on American roads, displacing U.S. truckers.

Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa today castigated the U.S. Department of Transportation for agreeing to open the border to long-haul Mexican trucks. Opening the border endangers America’s highway safety, border security and warehouse and trucking jobs.

What do you have to do these days to get any sort of health care? One unemployed man found the answer, rob a bank and get arrested:

When you receive this a bank robbery will have been committed by me. This robbery is being committed by me for one dollar,” he wrote. “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body

He interviewed with the local press explaining why he took such desperate measures. The man was laid off from his job of 17 years. Then, he lost his health insurance. He tried to get help, from everywhere, but all he could get was food stamps. His health was deteriorating rapidly. Finally, he realized where he could get free health care, prison. He needed to get in, so he robbed a bank for one dollar.

Verone has been in jail for a week.

His $100,000 bond has been reduced to $2,000.

He doesn’t intend to pay it. His residence is now the Gaston County Jail.

He goes to breakfast and lunch each day but skips dinner. Dinner means nearly four hours in the general jail population, and Verone said he likes to minimize contact with other inmates.

He got his health care and how many others are committing felonies so they can get food, shelter and medical attention to save their lives?

If we cannot get universal single payer, perhaps all of America should behave as Verone did, so finally, we could all get some health care.

What's wrong with this picture?

Ohio just voted to deny public workers collective bargaining rights:

Republicans in the Ohio House on Wednesday approved a bill that would restrict collective bargaining rights for the state’s public sector unions.

The bill passed 53 to 44; no Democrats voted in favor of the bill, while 5 Republicans voted against it. The legislation has already passed the state Senate once and would need just one more expected approval before heading to Republican Gov. John Kasich’s desk, perhaps before the end of the day.

Kasich indicated earlier Wednesday that he plans to sign the measure into law.

The attack on public unions is in full swing. Shame it has little to do with State's budget problems.

The bill denies collective bargaining, which turns negotiations into basically whatever the employer wants. From the New York Times:

Under the bill, if a public employer chose the costlier of two final offers from management and union and that choice forced a community to raise taxes, then voters would be given the opportunity to overturn the contract through a referendum.

Imagine if the public could overturn a contract the state made with a corporation or business. How many IBM contracts, offshore outsourcing contracts would be cancelled immediately in the next vote? Was that in this bill? Of course not.

The Wisconsin GOP did an end game against Democrats and passed a bill which destroys union rights to collective bargain. Milwaukee Biz Times:

Republicans in a hastily called state legislative conference committee approved a resolution Wednesday night to revoke the collective bargaining rights for thousands of public employees in Wisconsin, leaving Democrats and thousands of screaming protesters outside the Capitol to cry foul.
Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and his brother, Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon) led the committee, which met for less than five minutes and then approved the resolution.
Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca (D-Kenosha) protested that he had not had a chance to even see what was in the resolution before the vote was taken.
“I need to know what was removed. I need to know that,” Barca said.
The public, the media and the Democrats were not allowed to see the resolution before the Republicans voted on it.
“This is clearly a violation of the open meetings law,” Barca yelled, as Scott Fitzgerald called for the vote and struck the gavel to adjourn the meeting.
Barca said state law requires at least 24 hours notice before a conference committee hearing can be convened.
Some Democrats speculated that the committee hearing was a Republican trick to convince at least one of the 14 Democratic Senators into showing up at the Capjtol to protest the conference committee resolution. If one Senator had shown up, the Senate could attain the quorum it would need to approve Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, and the committee vote would not even be needed.

75 Square Feet. That's the size of the average space the American worker gets these days. That's right, you're packed in like sardines. From the incredible shrinking cubicle:

According to the International Facility Management Association, the average American office worker had 90 square feet of work space in 1994, but by 2010, that same worker was down to just 75 square feet of personal space in which to stretch out on the job.

Nor are office drones the only casualty of this spacial downsizing trend. Senior company officials have seen their offices shrink as well, from an average of 115 square feet in 1994 to 96 square feet in 2010.

Whoever invented the cubicle should go down as one of the great destroyers of the human psyche. A subtle, slow, long, torturous squeeze of bland grays and blues designed to drain whatever personality you had right to the trashcan under your feet.

People spend more and more of their time working and now are spending more and more of their time in a space size that would drive a dog mad. Many prison cells are bigger than this.

The article continues on touting work outside the office, yet in some of the corporations cited, the 40 hour work week has never existed. Intel, for example, is notorious to have 60 hour and greater work weeks.

Score one for the people. The National Labor board won a case for a worker fired because she slammed her boss on Facebook.

Employers should think twice before trying to restrict workers from talking about their jobs on Facebook or other social media.

That's the message the government sent on Monday as it settled a closely watched lawsuit against a Connecticut ambulance company that fired an employee after she went on Facebook to criticize her boss.

The National Labor Relations Board sued the company last year, arguing the worker's negative comments were protected speech under federal labor laws. The company claimed it fired the emergency medical technician because of complaints about her work.

Under the settlement with the labor board, American Medical Response of Connecticut Inc. agreed to change its blogging and Internet policy that barred workers from disparaging the company or its supervisors. The company also will revise another policy that prohibited employees from depicting the company in any way over the Internet without permission.

Both policies interfered with longstanding legal protections that allow workers to discuss wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers, the board said.

How about doing something about all of the contract workers getting stiffed, who are officially counted as small businesses, thus do not have any labor protections.

People declaring Bankruptcy increased 9% to over 1.53 million in 2010.

The data showed that the overall consumer filing total for the 2010 calendar year (Jan. 1 – Dec. 31, 2010) reached 1,530,078 compared to the 1,407,788 total consumer filings recorded during 2009. Annual consumer filings have increased each year since the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Prevention Act was enacted in 2005.

It is expected filings to increase in 2011.

NBKRC’s data also showed that the 118,146 consumer filings recorded in December 2010 represented a 4 percent increase from the 113,274 filings in December 2009. The December 2010 consumer filings also represented a 3 percent increase from the November 2010 total of 114,587. Chapter 13 filings constituted 30 percent of all consumer cases in December, a slight increase from November.

The Wall Street Journal dug out the percentage increase in bankruptcies by State. Hawaii had the largest increase in bankruptcies, 28.9%, from last year. California has a 25% rise in bankruptcy filings and Utah increased 24.4%.

The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, has a new study, The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in their Futures. The study concludes what we already know, the Great American Dream is long gone, replaced with strife, struggle and financial pain.

A new survey of unemployed American workers documents dramatic erosion in the quality of life for millions of Americans. Their financial reserves are exhausted, their job prospects nil, their family relations stressed, and their belief in government’s ability to help them is negligible. They feel hopeless and powerless, unable to see their way out of the Great Recession that has claimed 8.5 million jobs.

The survey shows that only one-quarter of those first interviewed in August 2009 have found full-time jobs some 15 months later. And most of those who have become reemployed have taken jobs they did not really want for less pay. Moreover, the recession has wreaked havoc on the retirement plans of older workers.

From the survey, of the third who found a job, 61% believe they will never recover financially, 45% had to take a significant pay cut, with 60% of those losing over 20% of their former income.

What’s disturbing is how many have given up at least one essential – 80% of our panel has spent less on either food, housing, or health care. In fact, 51% of our panelists do not have health care benefits; this is true of 60% of the long-term unemployed.

GM's recent move to early retire their skilled labor is a great example of labor arbitrage by nation-states. The reason is so they can match labor costs to Mexico for manufacturing a new car in the United States. Remember all of that talk about fixing NAFTA?

General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Monday that it was looking to reduce its payroll by several thousand skilled trade workers at 14 U.S. plants in the first quarter of 2011.

GM has offered $60,000 to skilled trades workers who retire or leave the automaker's payroll by March, said spokesman Chris Lee. The automaker currently has a "a couple thousand" more skilled trade workers than it needs to run its U.S. factories, Lee said.

The buyouts and early retirement offers were made to United Auto Workers union-represented workers in 14 U.S. plants, including the Orion, Michigan, assembly plant.

That plant will build the new Chevrolet Sonic under a cost-cutting agreement negotiated by the UAW and intended to allow GM to build the small car in the United States rather than import it from a lower-cost market like Mexico.