I was employed for 30 years as a respiratory therapist at St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho. St. Alphonsus is a part of the Trinity Health care system headquartered in Novi, Michigan. In Jan. 2004, I became the target of a psychologically abusive co-worker, a workplace “bully” who tried to get me fired [...]

The Economic Policy Institute recently released a comparison of McCain’s and Obama’s healthcare plans. Please click on the link to read the entire article.
“Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have presented very different plans to reform health care in the United States. Last week, the Urban Institute/Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center (TPC) provided what appears [...]

     Thanks to all of you for continuing to share your thoughts and experiences.  One of the main objectives of UP is to provide a forum for people to do exactly that.  The reason is that it is far too easy to feel as though you are alone and others are not experiencing the same [...]

 On one typical cold and rainy West Coast winter evening ten years ago, I stood with a small group of mostly union activists handing out leaflets to lined-up moviegoers, urging them to boycott the theatre in solidarity with locked-out union projectionists. I had never been a union member, but was there, as I had also [...]

In a dramatic victory for the 8.5 million out of work Americans, Congress passed an essentially “bulletproof” 13-week extension of unemployment benefits last week. Given that our economy is now losing 60,000 jobs a month due to lay-offs, job eliminations, and an otherwise sluggish economy, the action was overdue.

From Editor and Publisher:
“SANTA ANA An Indian company will take over copyediting duties for some stories published in The Orange County Register and will handle page layout for a community newspaper at the company that owns the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks [...]

Background
United Professionals grew out of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2006 book, Bait and Switch: the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, on white-collar unemployment.  On her book tour, Barbara met legions of people who had personally experienced what she had written about. They kept asking, “What can be done to protect the white-collar middle class from being [...]

Despite the unbridled (okay, barely bridled) glee on Wall Street at the Dow’s climb above 13000, the tide that’s raising some boats is swamping others and running a lot of dinghies aground. Let’s follow the money to a few ports of call that UP members care about.
Apparently, we’re not the only ones concerned about the [...]

What if losing your job wasn’t a big deal? What if you’re downsized, RIFed, outsourced, laid off, or just plain fired – and you don’t panic, feel like a total loser, get depressed, or go into debt? What if there was no negative stigma involved in losing your job – in fact, what if the [...]

As we find ourselves not-so-valued by Corporate America, with our jobs outsourced to who knows where, the vacuum left by the departure of other-created busy-ness may be filled with a rush of creativity. If your energy rush includes the thought that, hey, maybe companies will want to outsource jobs I can do to me if [...]