Labor Day has become a mindless holiday. It is a day off of work for most Americans, nothing more. But with 18 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, it should be a time to debate labor policy. Given the pressures of computers, automation, off-shoring and immigration, we don’t actually honor labor unless we debate labor policy. […]

The statewide mortality rate for black babies — 8.2 per every 1,000 births — was higher than Boston’s. Building social networks with other pregnant women is critical for mothers-to-be, said Elmer Freeman, a Northeastern University specialist in the study of health care disparities. The city has sought to nurture those networks with support groups known […]

“The best (and most successful) academics are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breath,” Professor Hitchcock says. He praises the early career scholars who have dismissed concerns that exposing their research too […]

“This is an awesome case study,” he said. “It’s a great study in managing family dynamics. It’s a great study in leadership styles, in ownership styles. There’s a whole pile of interesting stuff.” — Ted Clark, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern University

Dov Waxman, a professor of political science and the co-director of Northeastern University’s Middle East Center, remembers his first teaching job in Ankara, Turkey, at the beginning of the Second Intifada. “It was a baptism of fire,” says Waxman, who is Jewish. “When they asked me questions about the Holocaust, because they hadn’t heard about […]

Arthur T. Demoulas, the ousted Market Basket chief executive officer who inspired an employee revolt to get him back, won his bid to buy the supermarket chain. Demoulas and his sisters agreed to purchase the 50.5 percent of Market Basket they don’t own from family members who fired him, the company said late yesterday in […]

Six miles off the coast of Key Largo and 63 feet below the ocean surface sits the world’s only undersea marine laboratory—the FIU Aquarius Reef Base. There, researchers from Florida International University, Northeastern University, and MIT recently joined documentarian Fabien Cousteau for Mission 31. The month-long project aimed to study the effects of global warming […]

Workers spent much of Thursday loading up delivery trucks and getting food back into 71 New England Market Basket stores, following the remarkable conclusion of one of the most amazing stories in American business history. In short, Arthur T. Demoulas is back in. More than six weeks after he was ousted as CEO by the […]

More than 265,000 Bay Staters who want jobs still aren’t working — a more than 40-percent spike from 2007 — showing the state is far from clear of the five-yearlong shadow of the recession, a Herald analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data shows. From the second half of 2013 to the first half of […]

Gift cards are a versatile gift for the recipient — and a convenient and easy purchase for the giver. They can even make a smart purchase for yourself, as with iTunes gift cards, which are almost always on sale. Part of that convenience of gift cards is that they are tax free when purchased. But […]

A White House report out last month on the nation’s shrinking labor participation rate said gloomy job prospects likely have driven some older workers into retirement. It also pointed to research that indicates the longer people are unemployed, the lower their odds of finding work. A big factor is that employers discriminate against job applicants […]

As the United States takes a more direct hand in combatting ISIS in Iraq, questions have come up about how any relationship with Damascus will (or should) evolve. “This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated,” said Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the […]