Working Indiana - Working for Democracy and Justice

in 1931, during the depths of America’s perhaps now second worst depression, former three time Republican secretary of labor and then Pennsylvania senator “Puddler Jim” Davis and his Republican colleague in the Senate, Robert Bacon proposed the Federal Davis/Bacon Act, 40 U.S.C.

 Here is a problem that sometimes arises in smaller enterprises: the boss arranges for a package of fringe benefits, perhaps a 401(k), some form of profit sharing and, most important, group health coverage.  An employee falls ill and seeks reimbursement under the terms of the group health Plan.  Unfortunately, treatment is protracted and expensive and the employer finds that he cannot afford to provide group health coverage in the subsequent plan year.  Or, even without a

Saturday’s New York Times reported the sentencing of 270 predominantly Guatemalan undocumented workers, formerly employed at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors, Inc., in Postville, Iowa .  The laborers, who had been toiling up to 14 hour shifts without overtime pay, were convicted, condemned to five month prison sentences and deportation, actions calculated, according to ICE special agent Claude Arnold, to demonstrate our commitment “to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace (and) to maintain the integrity of the immi

For several years, Mrs. DeWitt worked as a clinical manager at Proctor Hospital in Illinois where she received outstanding reviews from her supervisor.  Doubtless she was grateful both for the job and thankful to be covered under the hospitals partially self-funded group health plan, for Mrs.

In session since October 7, 1850, the Indiana Constitutional Convention was now well into its second month.  On a blustery Wednesday, November 20^th, the Reverend Mr. Steele opened the session with a prayer.  After taking up the fugitive slave problem, the session turned to consideration of a report returned by the committee on the State debt and public works on October 26^th.

Along with other psychological baggage, each of us bears the burden of a personal view of “human nature” and Karl Marx, it seems, was no different.  Marx didn’t use the German word for it; he chose the jaw-breaking Gattungswesen, or “species-being.”  It took a century, a messy business with the Czar and his family, two world wars, and a long “cold” one before Oxford’s Gerald Cohen arrived at the common sense observation that Mr.

My thanks to Gregor Koso for posing this interesting question.  Law school students learn that penalties and fines are not enforceable in private contractual relationships.   At common law, a stipulated amount of “damages” agreed to by the parties will not be enforced by the courts if it is higher than the “actual” damages.  On the other hand, where it is hard or impossible to figure out

Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen argues that a key measure of “development” is human freedom.