On César Chávez Day, lost in all the news about the Trump administration’s criminalization and scapegoating of immigrants and attempts to withhold federal funds from cities with policies that protect immigrants, are the 450,000 low-wage-earning migrant workers employed in the United States through the H-2A, H-2B, and J-1 visa temporary foreign worker programs. Many of the workers in these temporary visa programs are in a precarious situation and vulnerable to abuse and retaliation at the hands of employers and their agents.

These “guestworkers” often arrive in the United States in debt, and are tied to and controlled by their employers. Research shows guestworkers are often paid lower wages than similarly situated U.S. workers, and earn wages similar to those of undocumented immigrant workers. This is reminiscent of the Bracero Program—a large guestworker program in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s that admitted hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to work temporarily on U.S. farms and in other low-wage occupations—and which César Chávez fought against. Chávez knew that exploited, indentured, and underpaid workers would degrade labor standards for all workers in the United States, including immigrants. After scandals and political pressure, and President John F. Kennedy campaigning against it, the program was terminated in 1964.

Sadly, America has not learned its lesson. The United States is repeating an historical mistake, once again admitting large numbers of guestworkers in low-wage occupations. With the possibility looming that the Trump administration will reduce enforcement and oversight in guestworker programs—which will be further exacerbated if Trump’s proposed 21 percent budget cuts to the Department of Labor (DOL) are enacted—the United States may once again face scandals like the one where the bodies of guestworkers who died in a traffic accident were not immediately claimed, because farm labor contractors and agricultural growers argued over who their employer was.

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Over the last several decades, black workers have been offering more to the economy and the labor market to incredibly disappointing results in pay and unemployment. Some have argued that the disparity in wages between blacks and white is the result of white workers working longer and harder than black workers. They blame black workers for racial wage gaps, saying that they should do anything from getting more education to simply working harder. Such explanations minimize the role of racial discrimination on labor market outcomes, while perpetuating racial bias and stereotypes of black workers as unmotivated and lazy.

And the data show they are simply false: hours and weeks worked have increased for both races, with a larger increase for black workers over the last several decades. The increase in annual hours is particularly striking for workers in the bottom 40 percent of the wage distribution, where it has been driven almost entirely by women.

Table 1 provides data on annual hours worked in 1979 and 2015 for workers ages 18–64 years old who report non-zero earnings during the year (so the averages are conditioned on working. In forthcoming research, we explicitly address trends in labor force participation). Work hours include paid vacations and time off, and therefore represent paid hours. The table also presents the percent change from 1979 to 2015 in annual hours, weeks worked, and weekly hours. These data are shown by race and wage fifth, or quintile.

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For more than 40 years, big business and the Republican party have teamed up to drive down the wages of construction workers by attacking their unions, passing so-called “right-to-work laws”, and weakening or repealing prevailing wage laws— which protect construction wages from downward pressure. They have, unfortunately, been very successful. Construction wages are lower today  than they were in 1970, despite 40 years of economic growth and a higher national income.

The real average hourly earnings of production/nonsupervisory construction workers were $26.17 in 1970, $26.00 in 1980, and $23.91 in 1990. Construction workers’ hourly earnings bottomed out at $22.97 in 1993 but have never fully recovered from their 1970 peak and were only $25.97 in 2016.

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On a bipartisan basis going back at least to the Reagan administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)—the Department of Labor agency that enforces the right of workers to have a safe workplace—has required employers to keep accurate logs of injuries and illnesses, and has fined them if they fail to keep those logs for five years. Every OSHA administrator has recognized the value of this record-keeping, as a way to make employers pay attention to unsafe practices and address them, as well as to ensure accurate statistics for research, to show progress or lack of progress in improving workplace safety, and to help target the most dangerous workplaces.

Nevertheless, in Volks Constructors v Secretary of Labor, a court blocked OSHA from fining employers for various record-keeping failures that occurred more than 6 months before the citation. The court ruled that OSHA’s regulations didn’t clearly establish that the duty to maintain accurate records is an ongoing duty rather than just a duty to record each incident accurately at the time it occurs. Thus, if OSHA finds that an employer has for many years been hiding the fact that workers have repeatedly been burned, for example, or has failed to record numerous forklift accidents and injuries, it can only cite the employer for inaccuracies arising within the past six months.

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A report in the LA Times last week explored why farmers in the Central Valley are having a hard time finding enough workers, despite reportedly paying up to 40 percent more than the California minimum wage. “Today, farmworkers in the state earn about $30,000 a year if they work full time—about half the overall average pay in California,” notes the Times. “Most work fewer hours.” The second sentence here is key: most farmworkers are not employed 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year, so most earn far less than $30,000 per year. In fact, in 2015, workers who received their primary earnings from agricultural employers earned an average of $17,500—less than 60 percent of the average annual wage of a full-time equivalent (FTE) worker in California.

Many farmworkers are paid an hourly rate higher than California’s minimum wage—$10.00 or $10.50 an hour in 2017, depending on whether the employer has 25 or less, or 26 or more employees, respectively—and workers who are paid piece rates, which reflect how much they pick or prune, often earn $12 to $14 an hour. Many young male farmworkers aim to earn $100 a day, which is $12.50 an hour for an eight-hour day and $14.30 an hour for a seven-hour day. But farmworkers typically are not employed in agriculture year-round. Many farm jobs are seasonal, and few workers migrate between California farming regions—those who pick vegetables in southern California deserts between January and May rarely move to the San Joaquin Valley to pick fruit between July and September.

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Yesterday, the Trump administration released its budget blueprint, which, while it’s unlikely to be passed in its current form by Congress, sets out the administration’s priorities for the years ahead. Simply put, the Trump budget transfers funds from programs that keep people fed and sheltered, protect them from disease and environmental threats, or educate them—and gives those funds to defense contractors to build more weapons, planes, and ships. But it also seems to have the purpose of making America more ignorant, less informed about the challenges and problems that face us, and less able to understand and develop solutions to those challenges and problems. It could be called a “lobotomy budget” because it effectively removes big pieces of the government’s brain.

Here are some examples of how the budget leaves students less educated and less prepared for the 21st century workforce:

• The budget eliminates the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant, a need-based grant program that helps 1.6 million undergraduate students pay for college.
• The budget cuts $1.2 billion for the 21st Century Community Learning Center before and after school programs:

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Today the White House laid out its priorities in its first budget blueprint. And these priorities are simple enough to describe: paying for increased spending on defense and border security with cuts across the board to nondefense discretionary spending (NDD). Among other reasons why these are bad decisions, they would have devastating consequences for public investment.

It’s worth looking at one specific cut that seems fairly telling. Despite campaigning on a $1 trillion infrastructure program, the president’s budget actually cuts the Department of Transportation’s funding by 13 percent. Coupling this cut with the fact that the campaign’s original proposal was simply not a serious plan, and the rumors that the president and Congress are punting infrastructure to next year, it starts to become increasingly clear that increased infrastructure investment isn’t a promise that the Trump administration is taking seriously.

The broader cuts in the budget blueprint foreshadow an even worse fate for overall public investment. NDD is only about 16 percent of all federal spending, but fully half of it is public investment. The Trump budget essentially puts a long-run decline in NDD spending on overdrive. NDD budget authority fell from almost 7 percent of GDP in 1977 to about 3 percent by 1990. It has hovered around 3 percent since then, beginning a slow decline in recent years. The administration’s budget intends to accelerate this decline, reducing NDD spending swiftly and sharply from 2.8 percent of GDP in 2016 to 2.3 percent by 2018.

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Next week, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions holds its hearing on the nomination of Alexander Acosta to be secretary of labor. While Mr. Acosta has had several confirmation hearings in the past, and is expected to do well next week, it is important that he receive a thorough and tough vetting. In the context of an administration that has shown itself to be remarkably anti-worker, it’s more important than ever that the labor secretary be prepared to enforce our labor laws and advocate for all working people.

Senators should ask Acosta specifically about his views on labor and employment laws as they pertain to undocumented workers. For example, it’s been reported that a spate of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have left undocumented workers—who are already easily exploited—unwilling to report wage theft and labor violations. Now more than ever, we need a labor secretary who will argue for a fair economy and a labor market that works for all workers.

As a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Acosta once voiced his adamant belief that undocumented workers deserve the protection of our country’s labor laws. In Double D Construction Group, 339 NLRB No. 48 (2003), the board found the company’s owner had unlawfully terminated an employee, Thomas Sanchez, for his participation in union activity. Not only did Acosta join the board majority overruling the judge’s contrary finding, Acosta wrote a separate concurrence chastising the judge, who had discredited Sanchez’s testimony at the trial on the ground that Sanchez had once knowingly used a false Social Security number to obtain employment. The administrative law judge reasoned: “If Sanchez demonstrated a willingness to use a false government document to obtain work… he may also be willing to offer false testimony” at the trial.

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The Federal Reserve’s announcement today that it would raise short-term interest rates is not surprising, but is disappointing. As always, the issue is less about the direct impact of today’s 0.25 percentage point hike, and more about what this hike means, especially given that it has come relatively hard on the heels of a hike in December. Today’s hike seems to signal that Fed policymakers think that we’re currently at or very near full employment, and that failing to slow the pace of economic growth in coming months would soon lead to accelerating wage and price inflation. They could be right, of course, but it is important to note that there is little in actual economic data to indicate this.

Even the headline unemployment rate (today’s healthiest economic indicator) remains significantly higher than what it reached in 1999 and 2000, when we saw 4.1 percent unemployment for a full two years without accelerating inflation. The share of adults between the ages of 25 and 54 with a job hasn’t even recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, which were, in turn, far below the peaks reached in the late 1990s. And, most importantly, no durable and significant acceleration of wage growth to healthy levels has happened yet. Finally, the Fed’s preferred price inflation indicator—year-over-year growth in “core” (excluding food and energy) prices for personal consumption expenditures— remains stubbornly below the Fed’s professed target and shows no upward trend at all.

The risks regarding the Fed’s interest rate decisions remain deeply asymmetric, and point strongly to erring on the side of continuing to prioritize further improvements in the labor market rather than forestalling possible future inflation, which would mean not raising rates. If the Fed is wrong and raises rates enough in coming months to keep unemployment from falling to the low 4s, this implies millions of potential workers who can’t find jobs or the hours they want, and likely implies tens of millions of workers who will receive lower wage increases than they otherwise could have had. This is especially important for low and middle-wage workers, who need low rates of unemployment before they have any serious chance to bargain for higher wages.

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Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its analysis of the American Health Care Act (AHCA)—legislation designed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The AHCA makes substantial changes to current law, which have large effects on both the costs of care and the coverage rates. I’m going to walk through some key provisions and their effects on specific populations below, but the bottom line is that the number of uninsured Americans will grow by 24 million by the year 2026. This is the result of about 14 million fewer people on Medicaid, 2 million fewer with nongroup insurance coverage, and 7 million fewer with employer-sponsored health insurance. In addition to the outright losses in coverage, the law increases economic vulnerability and health insecurity for millions of Americans by disproportionately exposing those with low income to additional risk through the elimination of cost sharing subsidies in the nongroup market, forcing them to face higher out-of-pocket costs like higher deductibles and co-pays.

Some key highlights of the AHCA score can be found in one highly illuminating table and one brilliantly designed figure. Let’s start with the table. I’ve copied Table 4 below, highlighting some particularly interesting findings. (For full notes on this table, see page 34 of the CBO cost analysis.) The table constructs comparisons of various age profiles in two income groups for individuals seeking coverage in the health insurance nongroup market in 2026. Premiums, tax credits, net premiums, and actuarial value of plans for single individuals at age 21, age 40, and age 64 are constructed at income levels of $26,500 and $68,200 in the top and bottom panels, respectively.

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