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The price of iron ore has crashed recently — from more than $190 a ton in 2011, to about $60 today. Iron ore is the key ingredient in steel, and global demand for it, especially in China, is way down. That's being felt far away in northern Minnesota.

Miners have clawed iron ore out of northern Minnesota for more than a century. The Iron Range, as it's known, is pockmarked with deep abandoned pits carved out of the red earth.

Six mines still operate here, processing a lower grade iron ore called taconite. They still employ about 4,500 people, with an average salary of around $80,000.

So when U.S. Steel announced it will be laying off more than a thousand workers at its two mines, it was devastating.

"This isn't the Twin Cities," says John Arbogast with the United Steelworkers union at Minntac, the area's largest mine. "This is all we have, and they're good-paying jobs, and these are hard-working people. They love living here, they love the fishing, the hunting, everything that comes with living on the Iron Range."

And it's not just miners who get hurt. Doug Ellis owns a sporting goods store in Virginia, the largest of nearly 20 small towns that line the Iron Range. It's surrounded on three sides by giant mines.

"My business is built on mining money," Ellis says. "It's what drives all these towns. So really what happens is, when the mines catch a cold, we all catch pneumonia."

Every year he sells hundreds of pairs of expensive steel-toed boots to miners, and a lot of hunting rifles.

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Doug Ellis has owned Virginia Surplus for 25 years in Virginia, Minn. "My business is built on mining money," he said, and will feel the impacts of impending mine layoffs. Dan Kraker/MPR hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Kraker/MPR

Doug Ellis has owned Virginia Surplus for 25 years in Virginia, Minn. "My business is built on mining money," he said, and will feel the impacts of impending mine layoffs.

Dan Kraker/MPR

"Those will be impacted," he says. "By the time November comes around, if they don't have the money, they won't be buying new rifles."

Iron Rangers are hardened to this traditional boom-and-bust cycle. The last big round of layoffs occurred in 2009. The industry did come roaring back, but iron miner John Arbogast says this feels different.

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"In '09, everything was down. It was recession and you could feel it coming," he says. "Now, America's doing great. Unemployment's at record low type levels, everyone's doing well, and then we're the ones getting hit on this. So that's what makes it tough."

The difference this time is the Chinese economic juggernaut has slowed, says Andrew Lane, an analyst for Morningstar.

"The significant decline in iron ore spot prices since about 2011 is largely a function of fading Chinese demand," he says.

At the same time, Lane says, the world's three largest iron ore mining companies have all ramped up production over the past decade.

Some analysts predict the price of iron ore could drop still further.

But in the long term, Tony Barrett, an economist at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, thinks Minnesota's taconite iron ore industry will stabilize.

"The world needs steel. I see the demand for steel recovering, and with that the demand for taconite," he says.

The question everyone's asking here, says Keewatin Mayor Bill King, is when. Because he says with every layoff, every closure, "it just seems like a small part of the town dies away. Each time. You know you lose this business, or maybe a couple citizens move away. So it's hard, it's hard to watch."

King and others here are waiting to see if other mines will announce layoffs, before the next boom on the Iron Range.

The Labor Department's latest report shows employers created 223,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate went down another notch to 5.4 percent.

So, yay!

But study the wage figures in Friday's report — and your "yay" turns to "meh."

Workers got raises of just 0.1 percent in April. Over the past year, wages advanced only 2.2 percent, a pace that amounts to treading water for most families. The average workweek has stalled at 34.5 hours, unchanged from the previous month — and from a year ago.

So workers aren't getting longer hours or fatter raises, even though the private sector has added 12.3 million jobs over 62 straight months, the longest streak on record.

Both President Obama and labor leaders want to end this long period of wage stagnation. But they are locked in a bitter dispute over whether a proposed trade deal would help or hurt workers' wallets.

On Friday, just hours after the jobs data were released, Obama visited the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore., to talk up the advantages of completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP.

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He says that if Congress were to expand trade among the U.S. and 11 Pacific Rim nations, it would help the sportswear giant create more high-paying jobs for Americans. "Let's just do it," Obama told the Nike gathering.

Nike says that under the TPP's terms, Americans would pay much less in tariffs on footwear. As a result of those savings, the company would be able to move forward with plans to develop advanced manufacturing facilities in the United States, which in turn would create 10,000 good jobs.

In a phone interview Friday, Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that's exactly what the president wants to see — more high-paying jobs resulting from the opening of new markets and lowering of tariffs.

Moreover, Obama wants the TPP to force Asian nations to raise labor standards, which then would "give U.S. companies less incentive to ship jobs overseas," Furman said.

"There's no doubt that the process of globalization has created a lot of opportunities for American companies, but it also created challenges for American workers," he said. "The TPP is designed precisely to better manage the process of globalization" to help U.S. workers export more and face less wage competition from Asian workers.

Many labor and environmental leaders aren't buying those arguments. They say Nike has long been a leader in outsourcing factory jobs and lacks credibility on employment issues.

"The Nike brand was built by outsourcing manufacturing to sweatshops in Asia," said Murshed Zaheed, deputy political director at CREDO, a group opposed to TPP. "President Obama should listen to his party's base, and stop pushing this titanic job-killing corporate power grab."

While Obama and many Democrats may disagree over the impact of this trade deal, there is little argument that the labor market could still use some help. Economists generally described April's employment growth as "solid" but also noted that March's original count of 126,000 net new jobs added was revised downward to just 85,000.

Doug Handler, the chief U.S. economist for IHS Global Insight, said the latest report shows "an economy that is now growing at moderate rate [but] not as good as in mid-2014."

The Obama administration wants to strap a booster rocket onto the labor market. It cannot count on getting more economic stimulus from the Republican-controlled Congress, and it's impossible to get more monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve, which already has cut interest rates to extreme lows — and is considering when to raise them.

So that leaves exports as the best tool available to create more jobs, the argument goes.

"If you're opposed to these smart, progressive trade deals, then that means you must be satisfied with the status quo," Obama said at the Nike event. "And the status quo hasn't been working for our workers."

He said the TPP could make the labor market much better and that if it couldn't, "I would not be fighting for it."

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, was not buying his pitch, or Nike's: "Under this unrealistic best-case scenario of an additional 10,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, less than 2 percent of the more than 1 million workers who make Nike's products would be U.S. workers."

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Missing out on sleep pretty much guarantees feeling crummy the next day. But it can also lead to dangerous or even disastrous decision making. Sleep-deprived operators failed to prevent the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

And during the Civil War, Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson was famously running on two hours of sleep when made a series of tactical errors and was ultimately shot by friendly fire.

When we lose sleep, it seems we lose our ability to think on our feet — to take in new information and adjust our behavior, according to a study published in the June issue of the journal Sleep.

Researchers at Washington State University figured this out by rounding up 26 volunteers. Half went without any sleep for two days, while the other half slept normal hours. Over the course of a week, the scientists tested everyone's ability to complete decision-making tests.

In one test, the volunteers had to click a button when they saw certain numbers and hold back when they saw others. Then the rule was switched.

The well-rested group did better on this task in general. But when the rule was reversed, none of the sleep-deprived volunteers were able to get the right answer – even after 40 tries.

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"It wasn't just that sleep-deprived people were slower to recover," says Paul Whitney, a psychologist at Washington State University who led the study. "Their ability to take in new information and adjust was completely devastated."

Whitney says sleep scientists still don't understand why this happens. But it looks like the lack of sleep may be dulling the nervous system's response to new information. They found this out by hooking the volunteers up to electrodes that tracked their bodies' response to stimuli.

"Normally, the machine will pick up when people have a strong negative or positive response to something," Whitney says. "And we found that for the sleep-deprived group, the machine wasn't picking up much. Their reactions were completely blunted," Whitney says.

Sleep loss didn't affect all types of thinking. Everyone did pretty well on tasks that tested short-term memory, though the well-rested people did slightly better.

Since we can function fairly well in some aspects without sleep, people often don't realize just how much sleep deprivation can impair them, Whitney says.

If you can, he says, avoid making any high-stakes decisions when you're short of sleep, he says. And if you don't have a choice, take some extra time to make sure you're considering all the factors.

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"The implication here is you should know that the most likely error you'll make when you haven't slept is that you're not going to second guess yourself as much as you probably should," he says.

Of course, this is only a preliminary study – it's one of the first to test how sleep affects high-level decision-making. And while the study subjects were up for two consecutive days, in real world situations people are more likely to get inadequate sleep over a long period of time, rather than no sleep over a short period.

Previous studies have shown that the effects of chronic sleep loss are similar to the acute sleep deprivation the subjects of this study experienced, Whitney says.

"It's hard to simulate in a lab the kind of decisionmaking that is predictive of what happens in a natural, real-world situation," says Charles Czeisler, head of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women's Hospital and chairman of the board of the National Sleep Foundation, who wasn't involved in the recent research. "But this study does a really good job of getting at that."

It scientifically proves what we've known for a while – in high-stakes situations, sleep loss can be disastrous. "There have been many situations throughout history, particularly in military battles, where very highly capable individuals made mistakes when they were exhausted," Czeisler says. "This shows that when we practice disaster preparedness, we should think about how are we're going to rotate command and control."

And sleep is important even when you're not making life-or-death decisions, he adds. "People are increasingly burning the candle at both ends. And that's really not a good idea. It can even be dangerous."

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is casting his eye beyond the Big Apple — and is trying to cement his legacy as a progressive champion that could help boost his political future.

On Tuesday, de Blasio, less than two years into his first term as mayor of the country's largest city, will unveil at the U.S. Capitol his ambitious "Contract with America" for the left. Modeled after former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's conservative promises of the same name, his 13-point plan will call for robust progressive policies, including universal pre-kindergarten programs, a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, what he perceives as fairer tax plans and more.

After consulting on the plan with other progressive leaders at Grace Mansion, the mayor's residence in New York, last month he's now aiming to mark his turf early on these issues. By appearing alongside the progressive movement's other favorite champion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at the National Press Club just before unveiling his own agenda later that afternoon, de Blasio is trying to send a message that he's a force to be reckoned with in the growing wing of the Democratic Party.

"He wants to be the gatekeeper and definer of who is progressive and who is not around the country," said New York Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, who worked for one of de Blasio's 2013 primary opponents.

De Blasio didn't cut his teeth early on as a progressive voice, though. A longtime political aide and strategist, he worked in the Clinton administration before managing then-First Lady Hillary Clinton's successful 2000 bid for New York's open Senate seat.

Those connections helped him launch his own political career the next year. But when his former boss launched her second bid for the White House last month, he balked, declining multiple times to endorse Clinton, who's been under pressure from the left.

Sheinkopf argued that delicate dance would make his endorsement more valuable to Clinton later on. That neutrality, along with his new agenda he's touting, is together a way to protect his own brand he wants to take beyond the Big Apple.

"He appears to want to be the first mayor to get out of here alive," said Sheinkopf, noting other former New York City mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg saw their onetime national ambitions evaporate.

"This is not by accident — this is purposeful and very smart," he added.

But casting his eye beyond his city has risks. The New York Times calculated he has spent a third of the last month on the road for political trips, from Iowa to Wisconsin to Silicon Valley.

De Blasio defended his out-of-state trips at a press conference Monday, saying he wanted to "use tools we have here to address income inequality and a whole host of other issues. But I also have to participate in changing the national debate, and changing the reality in Washington in a way that will have the support of people in New York City. We've got to do both at once."

A Marist poll last week showed there could be trouble brewing at home. Forty-nine percent of respondents said the city was going in the wrong direction, the first time the number fell below 50 percent since de Blasio took office. What's more, 56 percent said their quality of life in the city had gotten worse. While de Blasio's approval rating had ticked up five points to 44 percent since last year, and a majority of voters still had a favorable impression of the mayor, 53 percent said they didn't think his policies were transforming the city.

Marist pollster Lee Miringoff told NPR that in the poll, de Blasio's liberal base in still intact, but that New Yorkers as a whole were "very divided on his heading out to the national stage versus the job he's supposed to be doing as mayor."

Miringoff said, "He's coming out of the starting blocks fast, and he clearly sees there's a national stage for that kind of dialogue and that national Democrats are desiring that discussion."

It's a discussion national progressive leaders are anxious to hear more from de Blasio. He was the first mayoral candidate MoveOn.org ever endorsed, and Ben Wikler, the group's Washington director, said their members are looking for him to do even more over the next few years, starting with the plans he is releasing Tuesday.

He's a national progressive champion," Wikler said, "and he's demonstrating how you can run as a movement progressive, change laws and create a country we all want to live in."

But, challenges at home are still very real for de Blasio. Critics look at de Blasio and think he is being presumptuous, that he has not accomplished enough in his current job to think he deserves the national spotlight.

Though he was able to get one of his campaign promises through — universal pre-K — income inequality, the core of his progressive message, remains a big problem in New York, where the gap between the haves and have nots is as wide as anywhere in the country. He has faced criticism from community groups because, unlike past mayors, he has shied away from holding town halls or taking questions on radio programs. And though a supporter of de Blasio's, New York's public advocate called attention to the city contracting with a small percentage of minority-owned businesses. She went so far as to accuse de Blasio and the city of "institutional racism" and that "people of color need not apply."

It's a delicate balance politicians need to strike between the national stage and governing at home. Governors, including the current crop of presidential candidates, often face a similar dilemma. That's something de Blasio is going to have to keep an eye on, as he looks ahead — or it could be his undoing.

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