Today’s New York Times has a story about Italian automaker Fiat and its efforts to “make its workers more productive.” What’s priceless is one of the accompanying photos (see below), which shows a Fiat employee wearing a T-shirt that may inspire something less than optimism when it comes to expectations about boosting productivity, a decidedly capitalistic notion. Namely, the worker is wearing a shirt with a hammer and sickle, the international symbol of communism. The story also quotes a factory worker who worries that the push to improve productivity will “impose American-style standards” on the workforce. Oh, no–not that! The worker concludes that ““too much work is going to kill our workers.” Yes, folks, things are tough all over.

A worker of the world unites

Yesterday’s post about the trendless trend in new jobless claims inspired one reader to complain that I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the history for this data series and therefore drawing unnecessarily dark conclusions.

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