Nearly three in four Americans (71%) say they worry about the economy “a great deal,” more than worry about 13 other issues Gallup measured in a March 3-6 poll. Nearly two in three (64%) worry a great deal about federal spending and the budget deficit. Americans show the least anxiety about race relations — the only issue about which the majority is “only a little” or “not at all” concerned.

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Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, was at 10.2% in mid-March — essentially the same as the 10.3% at the end of February but higher than the 10.0% of mid-February and the 9.8% at the end of January. The U.S. unemployment rate is about the same today as the 10.3% rate Gallup found in mid-March a year ago.

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With South Carolina facing a projected $700 million budget shortfall next year, it’s important not to overlook a sector of our economy that has the power to both stimulate economic growth and provide a wide range of social good: the nonprofit sector.

According to the S.C. Association of Nonprofit Organizations, public charities employ more than 7 percent of the state’s workforce and generate nearly $13 billion annually in revenue.

In addition to improving social and economic equity, human and environmental health, access to opportunity and community vitality, nationally the nonprofit sector accounts for 5 percent of gross domestic product, 8 percent of wages and salaries and 10 percent of employment. If the nonprofit sector in the United States were a country, it would be the eighth-largest economy in the world, ahead of Canada, Spain, Brazil and Russia.

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By 2006, most of the steel mills in Youngstown, Ohio, had been gone for decades. The population was shrinking year after year. So the city launched a bold plan to redeem itself.

The plan: Quit trying to redeem itself….Youngstown walked away from the most fundamental assumption of economic development and city planning: The idea that a city needs to grow.

“We needed as a city to recognize that we’re a smaller city,” says Bill D’Avignon, head of Youngstown city planning. “We’re not going to grow; we’re never going to be the Youngstown we thought we were going to be.”

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More workers are pessimistic about their retirement future than at any time in the past two decades, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute 2011 Retirement Confidence Survey.

The percentage of workers who are not at all confident about saving enough money for a comfortable retirement reached 27% in 2011, compared with 22% last year. When combined with those who said they are not too confident, the total reaches 50% of workers.

“That is sobering,” says Greg Burrows, senior vice president of retirement and investor services at the Principal Financial Group, a partner with the EBRI survey. “Hopefully this will spur some action.”

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At least 750 workers were evacuated on Tuesday morning after a separate explosion ruptured the inner containment building at Reactor No. 2 at the Daiichi plant, which was crippled by Friday’s earthquake and tsunami. The explosion released a surge of radiation 800 times more intense than the recommended hourly exposure limit in Japan.

But 50 workers stayed behind, a crew no larger than would be stationed at the plant on a quiet spring day. Taking shelter when possible in the reactor’s control room, which is heavily shielded from radiation, they struggled through the morning and afternoon to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3, where overheated fuel rods continued to boil away the water at a brisk pace.

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Coming up with bigger contributions to pension funds will require states to make difficult choices about the size of their work forces, their commitment to public services and the viability of their employee benefits, which are often said to be irreversible and protected by state constitutions.

“The amount they have to be contributing could potentially be two to three times as much as they’re contributing now,” said Joshua Rauh, an associate professor of finance at Northwestern University, who has been challenging the way most cities and states measure their pension promises. “If you don’t want to count on the stock market to pay for all this, this is what you’re going to have to contribute.”

Mr. Rauh and a number of other analysts say the states’ biggest problem has been a failure to understand how much benefits will really cost. Instead of the states’ models, these analysts have come up with alternatives that more closely approximate those used by insurance companies.

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Only 1 American in 7 has faith a lasting economic recovery has taken hold and a plurality say they are personally worse off than they were two years ago.

Almost half of the respondents in a Bloomberg National Poll conducted March 4-7 believe the U.S. is in a “fragile” rebound and could fall back into recession. More than a third of the country believes the U.S. never emerged from recession.

Sixty-three percent of Americans say the nation is on the wrong track, compared with 66 percent who said so in December, which was the lowest in the national mood in the one and a half years the Bloomberg poll has been conducted.

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All of the hype around knowledge-based economies and our abundant resources misses the point about globalization. Financial services jobs can just as easily be done in London, Tokyo or Frankfurt as in Toronto. Americans don’t need to buy our oil if they can find ways to shift to natural gas, which they possess in abundance, or reduce energy consumption altogether. That change could come faster than any of us would care to know.

This leaves Canada with two unappealing choices: Fear globalization, protect jobs temporarily, dig in our heels on traditional resources ”“ and isolate Canada as a very small fish in a very big pond. Or embrace globalization and all its terrifying consequences, and allow Canada to be a global leader in new services and industries.

The first choice is unattractive for obvious reasons. But the second choice is unattractive because we don’t know precisely what these new services and industries will be. That’s the challenge of globalization: Go out and create opportunities that didn’t exist before. Build industries that don’t yet have Standard Industrial Classification codes. Train Canadians for new jobs that don’t even have names. Complement our traditional resources with alternative energy systems that the world will beat down our door to buy.

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As state and federal lawmakers search for ways to reduce government spending, some economists are urging them to raise the retirement age to ease budget pressures.

If Americans were to work longer, they would pay more in taxes, and at the same time reduce the cost of government pensions and Social Security benefits, according to these economists.

But others disagree. They say the fast-moving 21st century economy doesn’t need older workers as much as it needs young workers with the latest job skills.

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Should one support or oppose the legislation which regulates union procedures? The Wisconsin Catholic Conference (WCC) has chosen a neutral stance because the present dilemma comes down to either a choice for the common good, of sacrifice on the part of all, at times that pose immense economic threats, both present and future on the one hand, and on the other hand, a choice for the rights of workers to a just compensation for services rendered, and to the upholding of contracts legally made. As Catholics, we see both of these horns of the dilemma as good, and yet the current situation calls many of us to choose between these two goods. Thus the WCC has taken a neutral stance, and this is the point of Archbishop Listecki’s recent statement, which I have echoed.

The question to which the dilemma boils down is rather simple on its face: is the sacrifice which union members, including school teachers, are called upon to make, proportionate to the relative sacrifice called for from all in difficult economic times? In other words, is the sacrifice fair in the overall context of our present situation?

At a time when all are called to sacrifice, this question requires a weighing of the relative sacrifice which all are called upon to make, so that a judgment about just proportions can be made by each one of us.

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In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It’s the perfect cozy setup.

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker’s bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them are gone. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats’ strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

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…let’s try to put aside the hyperventilation. Everybody now seems to agree that Governor Walker was right to ask state workers to pay more for their benefits. Even if he gets everything he asks for, Wisconsin state workers would still be contributing less to their benefits than the average state worker nationwide and would be contributing far, far less than private sector workers.

The more difficult question is whether Walker was right to try to water down Wisconsin’s collective bargaining agreements. Even if you acknowledge the importance of unions in representing middle-class interests, there are strong arguments on Walker’s side. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

That’s because public sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

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The pro-union rallies in Wisconsin have a retro feel to them — particularly for people of faith.

Clergy and faith-based groups were historically on the front lines of the American labor movement, but priorities shifted with the rise of the religious right and the weakening of unions.

In the Wisconsin protests over the governor’s budget proposal to reduce collective-bargaining rights for teachers and other public-sector employees, however, religious voices have re-entered the fray.

Groups like Faith in Public Life and Interfaith Worker Justice have mobilized coalitions that include Protestants and Muslims, in addition to the Catholics and Jews that dominated pro-union efforts in previous generations.

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KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Yeah, you’ve really seen, I think, in the last couple weeks a revival of this message from religious groups that we haven’t heard in a long time, this sort of solidarity with workers and with union rights. You know, with all the talk in recent years about abortion and gay marriage and health care even, we haven’t heard much about unions from many churches, especially the Catholic Church, which has been a longtime supporter of organized labor.

[BOB] ABERNETHY: Long tradition of support of labor.

ECKSTROM: Right, and that’s really come back this week.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): And I think that’s surprised a lot of people, because the church, the Catholic Church, had been perceived as really focusing more on issues like abortion, and so to see them come out and take a stand to say, yeah, we understand there are tough budget decisions, but workers’ rights and human dignity and the common good of all, including workers, is important, and the ability to organize is also a moral value, and that’s what the bishops were saying.

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Not so much by words but by example, I internalized a respect for the material at hand. The material could be a pork loin, or a mahogany plank, or a lump of clay, or the will of God, or a soul, but when the work is done well, there is a kind of submission of will to the conditions at hand, a cultivation of what I would later learn to call humility. It is a noticeable feature in all skilled workers””woodworkers, potters, poets, pray-ers and pastors. I learned it in the butcher shop [of my Father].

Years later I came upon the phrase negative capability and recognized that it was something very much like submission to the material, the humility, that I had had so much practice in on the butcher block. The poet John Keats coined the term to refer to this quality in the worker. He was impressed by William Shakespeare’s work in creating such a variety of characters in his plays, none of which seemed to be a projection of Shakespeare’s ego. Each had an independent life of his or her own. Keats wrote, “A poet has no identity . . . he is continually . . . filling some other Body.” He believed that the only way that real creative will matured was in a person who was not hell-bent on imposing his or her will on another person or thing but “was capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact and reason.” Interesting: Shakespeare, the poet from whom we know the most about other people, is the poet about whom we know next to nothing.

–Eugene Peterson, “My Father’s Butcher Shop” (Christian Century, February 22, 1001), p. 29

Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down, I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers’ share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s.

No wonder Marx is back in fashion. It’s been more than 100 years since the German philosopher predicted that capitalism’s voraciousness would be its undoing ”” as bosses invest more in new technologies to make things more cheaply and efficiently and less in workers themselves, who, deprived of fair wages, would eventually rise up and revolt. That hasn’t happened, of course, though depressed wages certainly contributed to the revolution in Egypt, not to mention lots of other instances of public unrest over the past few years. But the fact that wages in the U.S. and most other rich countries have been falling since the 1970s and went off a cliff after the recent financial crisis is going to become a more pressing economic and political concern. Just think how hard it will be for Obama to sell himself in 2012 if salaries are still falling.

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Q: How do you characterize the economy right now?

A: The economy is getting stronger every day, and I would say it’s rather broad-based, and hopefully this will continue. That’s true globally. It’s good for America when the rest of the world grows, because you can sell more to the rest of the world. Large corporations are in very good shape, have plenty of capital and are starting to expand. But we also see the same thing from middle market-sized companies and small businesses. Our small-business lending is up 37% this year. Other banks are also seeing more loan demand in middle markets and small business.

Q: What about foreclosures in the pipeline? How do you see that playing out, and why hasn’t the housing market participated in this recovery?
A: The mortgage pain is just a terrible story. Too many mortgages were badly done. I’m not talking about us. But foreclosures haven’t quite peaked yet. We’re probably halfway or two-thirds through the problem….

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Despite severe losses during the recession, the majority of African Americans see the economy improving and are confident that their financial prospects will improve soon.

That optimism, shared to a lesser degree by Hispanics, stands in stark contrast to the deeper pessimism expressed by a majority of whites. In general, whites are more satisfied with their personal financial situations but also more sour about the nation’s economic prospects.

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The threat of inflation is real. It is just a different threat than many realize.

For the U.S., the danger isn’t necessarily an inflationary outbreak””marked by an upward wage-price spiral””so much as a standard-of-living shock. Indeed, household income has barely outpaced inflation since 1975, and gains are largely due to women entering the work force. Median income for men was actually higher, in real terms, in 1973 than in 2009.

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John Wright could make more money doing something else, but he’s found his calling as a custodial worker at James Simons Elementary….

Co-workers can’t imagine the school without his uplifting presence. Cafeteria manager Karen Brown has known him for 10 years, and she’s watched him develop relationships with students to help keep them out of trouble. Wright does the jobs that no one else wants to do, but he never complains.

“It’s the little things you don’t even think about,” she said. “It would be a struggle without him.”

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The next-generation airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late; the first paying passengers won’t be boarding until this fall, if then. Some of the delay stems from the plane’s advances in design, engineering and material, which made it harder to build. A two-month machinists strike in 2008 didn’t help.

But much of the blame belongs to the company’s quantum leap in farming out the design and manufacture of crucial components to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries such as Italy, Sweden, China, and South Korea. Boeing’s dream was to save money. The reality is that it would have been cheaper to keep a lot of this work in-house.

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Business is picking up for retailer Renee Charlton in this small manufacturing city on Lake Michigan, but that may not be a good omen for residents. She sells secondhand clothes.

Residents who waved flags as President Obama sped through their eastern Wisconsin community last month have been shopping at consignment and thrift shops out of necessity, says Charlton, owner of On Second Thought, which sells women’s clothes, purses, shoes and jewelry. Her sales rose 20% in 2010.

She’s glad to have the business but concerned that middle-class folks in Manitowoc have yet to recover from the worst recession in decades, despite Obama’s efforts during his first two years. Her 27-year-old son, a computer whiz, is a prime example: Unable to find full-time work, he has enrolled in a two-year criminal justice program at a nearby technical college.

“People are still cutting back,” Charlton says. “They’re still watching what they spend.”

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As the day unfolded, strikes and protests were held outside a string of government offices and at workplaces, eventually prompting a televised statement from Egypt’s military rulers.

The best guarantee of a smooth transition to civilian rule would be if all Egyptians went back to work, the military said.

Strikes and disputes would “damage the security of the country”, the army’s ruling high council said.

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Christian business professionals have long had an uneasy relationship with the church. Not only does the church tend to privilege church and missionary service over business, but it often condemns business practices and implies the guilt of any participants. Yet there are signs that this dynamic is changing””not least because churches rely on the donations of business professionals.

Many pastors now visit their congregants at work to better understand their professional lives. Justin Buzzard, pastor of the Garden City Church in San Jose, Calif., wrote last year about ministering to professionals in his congregation. “It shows them that I care about their callings, how they spend 50-plus hours of their week.”

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A small Catholic college in Riverdale, N.Y., last month got some news that sent shivers across religious higher education: part-time faculty have a right to form a union on campus.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The National Labor Relations Board also isn’t convinced that the Catholic school is actually Catholic.

According to Elbert Tellem, the NLRB’s acting regional director, Manhattan College can’t prohibit adjunct faculty from unionizing because the school’s core purpose isn’t religious enough to trigger a labor law exemption.

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… all of this amped-up productivity comes with a growing sense of unease. Too often, people find themselves with little time to concentrate and reflect on their work. Or to be truly present with their friends and family.

There’s a palpable sense “that home has invaded work and work has invaded home and the boundary is likely never to be restored,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “The new gadgetry,” he adds, “has really put this issue into much clearer focus.”

The phenomenon started with the rise of BlackBerrys and has snowballed with the use of more smartphones, social media and tablet computers. Employees are using their smartphones and other devices to connect with corporate e-mail, applications and data wherever they happen to be ”” whether at home, on the go or even on vacation.

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Put it together. QE2 is due to run out this summer. Unless you think we’re creating so many jobs in a few months, that it’s obvious that we’re on the right track to full employment, then more QE seems in the cards.

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Unemployment in Britain has surged by 49,000 to nearly 2.5 million, including one in every five young people ”“ putting the number of 16- to 24-year-olds out of work at close to a million, the highest since records of youth unemployment were first kept in 1992.

The rate of joblessness among 16-to 24-year-olds is now 20.3 per cent, which is two-and-a-half times therate among the population as a whole.

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