This article was originally posted on Confined Space.

The fact that most OSHA chemical standards are old, outdated and don’t protect workers very well is something that government, labor and industry can generally agree on.  There is less agreement, however, on what needs to be done about that problem. But it’s a question that needs to be addressed, as an estimated 50,000 workers die every year from occupational disease, mostly related to chemical exposure, and almost 200,000 are sickened.

Rachel Cernansky, writing in the New York Times today about “America’s Toxic Workplace Rules” asks “Why does the [Labor] department’s Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration allow workers to be exposed to dangerous chemicals at limits far higher than those set for everyone by the Environmental Protection Agency” and what will Trump’s Labor nominee, Alexander Acosta, do about it?

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Under current law, employers can give workers time off—paid or unpaid—whenever they want to, for any reason. They can, for example, reward employees who work overtime by giving them unpaid time off at a later date. The employer pays time-and-a-half for the overtime when it’s worked, and then can give an equivalent amount of unpaid time off to repay the employees for the extra time away from their home and family. That’s what a family-friendly employer can do now, with no legislative change required.

But Rep. Martha Roby wants a better, more “flexible” deal for employers. She wants them to be able to withhold the overtime pay until the employee takes compensatory time off (comp time), only paying it out if they can’t agree on a mutually convenient time to take the leave by the end of the year. Roby has introduced a bill, H.R. 1180, “The Working Families Flexibility Act,” to give employers that new right, while pretending to do something for employees.

Why should Rep. Roby stop there? I’d like to propose the “Working Families Super Flexibility Act.” My new bill takes the ideas of H.R. 1180 one step further, providing the greatest possible flexibility to employers and employees. Instead of receiving wages at the time they perform their work, employees can agree to receive credits toward future time off, which will be deposited in a “comp time bank.” The employees will have the freedom to use these credits whenever they want, as long as their employer agrees on the dates for leave. If no mutually convenient time is found before the end of the calendar year, the employees will finally get their earned wages—assuming that the company hasn’t gone out of business (as 400,000 do each year)—and the employer will collect all accrued interest.

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The New York Times had an article recently about academics and financial advisers who want to bring back a Baroque-era investment vehicle—the tontine—where an annual dividend is split among surviving investors (the Washington Post had a similar story two years ago). The present-day appeal of the tontine is partly based on its supposed transparency. It’s unlikely, however, that potential investors would be able to accurately predict the payouts they might receive, which would depend on their health relative to that of others in the pool, among other variables. Still, it’s a morbidly interesting excuse to think about insurance markets and innovative retirement schemes.

Gambling on other people’s death isn’t unique to tontines. The AIDS epidemic created a secondary market in life insurance policies, allowing ill policyholders to tap some of their benefits to pay for health care and living expenses. Though this may have served a useful function in a country with inadequate social insurance—especially pre-Obamacare—it’s hard to feel sorry for investors who lost big after the discovery of antiretroviral drugs.

Tontines, like Social Security, traditional pensions, and life annuities, insure against the risk of living longer than expected in retirement. The problem of outliving one’s savings has gotten worse as Social Security benefits have been trimmed back and private sector employers have replaced traditional pensions with 401(k)-style savings plans. In theory, 401(k) savers can insure against longevity risk by purchasing life annuities, but few actually do. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that few have significant savings to begin with—a problem exacerbated by current low interest rates that lock annuitants into low annual payments. In addition, potential buyers must navigate complex and tricky insurance markets and face prices driven up by adverse selection and asymmetric information, the classic problem of markets for individual insurance whereby people at greater risk (of living longer, in this case) are more likely to purchase insurance and have an incentive to conceal information to avoid higher risk-adjusted premiums, leading to higher prices for all consumers and a shrinking market

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For decades, early childhood education advocates and the scientists, economists, and philanthropists who back them have been waiting for the federal government to step up to the plate and do what’s responsible, moral, and economically wise: make high-quality early childhood education a reality for everyone. With no indication that this is happening, even less so now, we need to focus on more promising pathways.

A smart path forward might combine adapting high-quality state-level strategies across more states and bubbling up lessons from pioneering districts. The latter help ensure a targeted focus on community-level needs and assets, and some offer timely lessons on how to link early childhood to the elementary years and beyond.

Recent presidents have all expressed support for investments in early childhood education. Still, even the strongest advocate, President Obama, left a legacy that includes higher standards and more funding but far too little of either to ensure all children a strong start. President Trump’s early childhood agenda consists so far of his daughter’s proposal to use tax deductions for the costs of child care to boost resources for the middle-class and wealthy families that can already afford it, while neglecting working-class and poor parents who can’t and expanding the budget deficit. Other policies he has advanced would compound problems for disadvantaged students. His “skinny budget” would strip public schools of key resources and, had the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare passed, it would have deprived millions of children of the physical and mental health care needed to succeed in them.

A recent study that I presented at the 2017 Federal Reserve Community Development Research Conference found that gaps in kindergarten readiness between high- and low-income children are enormous, and that they haven’t budged in the past 10-15 years—highlighting the need for more intensive policy responses. Other, more hopeful findings may point the way. Data from the same study indicate that parents are increasingly doing their part—reading to their children, singing with them, and playing games—regardless of their social class. So even though today’s low-social class parents are poorer and working odd hours at low-wage jobs, they are devoting the time and resources that science indicates are critical for child development.

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Once again, a bill promoting comp time is being paraded out by congressional Republicans and will be the subject of a hearing in the House this morning. The bill would allow private sector employers to offer comp time at time-and-a-half in lieu of overtime pay when an employee works more than 40 hours in a week. It is being touted by congressional Republicans as a boon to worker flexibility, but do not be fooled—everything the comp time bill purports to provide for workers is actually already available under the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The bill only provides a new employer right to avoid paying workers the overtime they have earned.

Here are a couple scenarios to show workers are never better off under the comp time bill.

First, the easy example: consider the very common case of the low- or moderate-wage workers whose paycheck is not enough for them to make ends meet, and who would always prefer to work extra hours to get extra pay. Under comp time, these workers give up their right to overtime earnings in exchange for future time off. This is not what they need or want and they are unambiguously worse off under comp time than overtime.

But what about a worker who doesn’t need or want the overtime pay and prefers the time—are they better off under the comp time bill than under current law which provides overtime pay for working more than 40 hours a week? Nope! At best they are back at neutral.

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The Trump administration announced last week that it would sign two executive actions to launch a review of U.S. trade policy. A review of trade policy and its potential to harm U.S. workers is welcome and long overdue. However, the specifics of the review offered by President Trump mean that it is likely to fail to provide any help to American workers, in part because it asks the wrong questions.

The president’s first order requires Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and White House Trade Council to “identify every form of trade abuse and every nonreciprocal practice that contributes to the U.S. trade deficit,” according to the commerce secretary. The report is to be completed within 90 days, with an analysis of the detailed cause of the deficit “by country and major product.” But the trade deficit is not a “product by product” or a “country by country” problem. We know what it is caused by and what should be done about it.

The trade deficit is not a bilateral problem between the United States and individual countries. The U.S. trade deficit is a result of global trade imbalances. There are ten to twenty countries that have developed large, persistent, structural trade surpluses that are distorting trade flows worldwide. The top ten surplus countries are shown in Figure A below. In 2015, these countries, led by China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, had a collective trade surplus of approximately $1.5 trillion. (The figures reported are current account balances, the broadest measure of trade in goods, services and income.)[1] The United States’ current account deficit of $463 billion in 2015 accounted for less than one third of the total surplus accumulated by the big surplus traders. Other countries have also suffered from persistent, structural trade deficits, job losses, and downward pressure on wages, including Great Britain, Brazil, Australia, and Mexico. Attacking the root causes of global trade imbalances will benefit all deficit countries, and not just the United States.

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Tuesday, April 4th is Equal Pay Day— the day that marks when a typical woman’s earnings catch up to what a man earned in the previous year. The gender wage gap is a measure of pay disparity between men and women. The research is conclusive: gender wage gaps exist across the wage distribution and among workers of every education level. The median woman worker (that worker in the exact middle of the distribution of women’s wages) is paid 83 cents for every dollar that the median man is paid. Among workers who have a college degree or advanced degree, the gap is even larger, with women being paid only 73 cents on the male dollar. Women of color face dual penalties of racial and gender-based pay gaps; black and Hispanic women are paid only 65 cents and 59 cents on the white male dollar.

Closing the gender wage gap is essential to helping women achieve economic security. We should use all the tools available to combat the factors contributing to pay disparities. Some of these tools include establishing standardized rates of pay, requiring more transparency in compensation data, strongly enforcing antidiscrimination laws, and allowing workers to earn additional benefits such as paid sick and family leave, which help enable workers to balance demands at home and at work.

For the vast majority of women, true economic security and a fair share of the economy’s growth will require combining progress in closing gender-based pay disparities with progress in linking their wage growth to economy-wide productivity growth, a linkage that has been severed in recent decades. The levers that will allow the wages of the vast majority of both men and women’s wages to benefit from overall economic growth include allowing the economy to reach and stay at genuine full employment, and raising labor standards such as updating the minimum wage and the overtime threshold.

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