Let’s say you’re earning the $7.25-an-hour minimum wage. How many hours would you have to work to equal what a year of college costs? How about a year of family health insurance premiums?

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has crunched the numbers and they’re not pretty.

This is a cross-post from the California Labor Federation's Labor's Edge blog.

California was built with a vision that prioritized investments in our future. From creating a world-class infrastructure to seeding innovation through our schools and universities, investments fueled the economic miracle that once was our state. But as those investments dried up in recent years, we’ve risked tearing the very fabric of California.

It’s time to chart a different course.

[On Tuesday], the California Labor Federation and the state Building and Construction Trades Council unveiled labor’s new “Invest in California” jobs plan, which focuses on renewing the state’s commitment to innovation and investments that built an economy of broadly shared prosperity.

Marco Trbovich, vice president at Tricom Associates, sends us this.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed led a presentation on his city’s initiative to retrofit a wide range of commercial, public and residential buildings in a 400-block area of downtown that proved the highlight of a gathering of investors, pension fund managers, business, labor and community leaders at Heartland Capital Strategies’ first Responsible Investment Forum.

If you want to prepare yourself for the inevitable election year discussions/arguments with your right-wing uncle or tea party neighbor about the nation’s economy and how we got into the ditch that we’re finally driving out of, check out Failure by Design: The Story Behind America’s Broken Economy.

The misery of U.S. joblessness has everyone’s attention, but in the African American community, high unemployment has been the norm for 50 years, in good times and bad.

If this new Republican idea weren’t so scary, we would be laughing…hysterically.

As reported by the Washington Post 2chambers blog yesterday, Rep. Jeffrey Landry (R-La.) is proposing that working Americans—already battered bloody by the recession—be forced to give up some of their Social Security benefits if they “opt in” to receive a payroll tax cut. (So much for the Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves.)

Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.

More from Alabama, where a delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders is investigating the state’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law instantly intimidated the nine Latino employees of Max’s Delicatessen, owned by Steve Dubrinsky, who says: 

They are good solid people, and I don’t like how they feel right now.

As Greece teeters toward collapse because of austerity measures imposed upon it by international lenders, the current doctrine of cutting public employment and programs in the midst of an economic crisis perhaps deserves a reassessment.

In “The State of Young America: The Databook,” the economic experts at Demos demonstrate that by virtually every measure, the fortunes of America’s young people are falling under a deluge of debt, shrinking opportunity, rising costs of living and lack of access to health care.