Next week, the Census Bureau will release its estimates of the number of Americans who lived in poverty in 2014. The official poverty measure is an important metric—particularly since it’s been in place for nearly 50 years, and its measurement methodology hasn’t had major revisions over that time. As shown in the figure below, the share of Americans living at or below the official poverty line fell in the 1960s and stayed within a small range over the last four decades or so, generally rising in recessions and falling in expansions. Since 2000, the official poverty rate has seen a lot more up than down—the poverty rate at the end of the business cycle in 2007 was higher than at the beginning. 2013 was the first year the poverty rate turned the corner and saw some meaningful improvement since the start of the Great Recession. On Wednesday, September 16, we will see whether that progress has continued. While it would be great to see reductions in poverty over the last year, the fact is had economic growth over the last four decades been broadly shared, we could have made much more progress in reducing poverty, rather than just treading water.

Poverty rate, 1959–2013

	Actual poverty rate
1959-01-01	22.4%
1960-01-01	22.2%
1961-01-01	21.9%
1962-01-01	21.0%
1963-01-01	19.5%
1964-01-01	19.0%
1965-01-01	17.3%
1966-01-01	14.7%
1967-01-01	14.2%
1968-01-01	12.8%
1969-01-01	12.1%
1970-01-01	12.6%
1971-01-01	12.5%
1972-01-01	11.9%
1973-01-01	11.1%
1974-01-01	11.2%
1975-01-01	12.3%
1976-01-01	11.8%
1977-01-01	11.6%
1978-01-01	11.4%
1979-01-01	11.7%
1980-01-01	13.0%
1981-01-01	14.0%
1982-01-01	15.0%
1983-01-01	15.2%
1984-01-01	14.4%
1985-01-01	14.0%
1986-01-01	13.6%
1987-01-01	13.4%
1988-01-01	13.0%
1989-01-01	12.8%
1990-01-01	13.5%
1991-01-01	14.2%
1992-01-01	14.8%
1993-01-01	15.1%
1994-01-01	14.5%
1995-01-01	13.8%
1996-01-01	13.7%
1997-01-01	13.3%
1998-01-01	12.7%
1999-01-01	11.9%
2000-01-01	11.3%
2001-01-01	11.7%
2002-01-01	12.1%
2003-01-01	12.5%
2004-01-01	12.7%
2005-01-01	12.6%
2006-01-01	12.3%
2007-01-01	12.5%
2008-01-01	13.2%
2009-01-01	14.3%
2010-01-01	15.1%
2011-01-01	15.0%
2012-01-01	15.0%
2013-01-01	14.5%

 

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Source: EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement Historical Poverty Tables (Tables 2 and 4), Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income Product Accounts public data, and Danziger and Gottschalk (1995)

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Last week the New York Times reported the latest innovation from employers who use the H-2B visa temporary foreign worker program to hire workers to staff traveling carnivals (think your local county or state fair): an employer-created union that collectively bargains with employers on behalf of workers to keep wages artificially low. Thanks to a loophole in H-2B wage regulations, low-wage, low-road employers are permitted to pay their temporary foreign workers dreadfully low wages.

The genesis of the prevailing wage loophole

For about half a decade, thanks to an H-2B wage regulation the George W. Bush administration illegally put in place in 2008, employers of landscapers, dishwashers, tree planters, maids, janitors, carnival workers, and construction workers were allowed to pay their H-2B employees as little as the local 17th percentile wage. (This is legally defined as the “Level 1” prevailing wage, based on Labor Department wage survey data for the job and local area.) After the rule was struck down in federal court in 2010, the Obama administration promulgated a final wage rule in 2011 that would have required employers to pay H-2B workers the local average wage (what’s also known as the Level 3 prevailing wage). However, this effort led to years of federal litigation brought by H-2B employers that stopped the rule in its tracks, and spurred an onslaught of corporate lobbying that convinced members of Congress from both major parties to deny funding to the Labor Department to enforce the rule.

Finally, in April 2013, the wage rule for the H-2B program was re-promulgated as an interim final rule issued jointly by the departments of Labor and Homeland Security. (The fact that the rule was issued jointly negated the main legal challenge, namely that the Labor Department lacked authority to promulgate any H-2B wage regulation.) The 2008 and 2013 H-2B wage rules both required employers to pay their H-2B employees the wage set out in an applicable collective bargaining agreement (CBA). But under the 2008 rule, if no CBA applied, then employers were allowed to pay the 17th percentile wage. The 2011 final H-2B wage rule that Congress blocked would have required employers to pay the higher wage between the CBA wage or the local average wage. Under the 2013 rule, if no CBA covered the H-2B worker, then the employer would have to pay the local average wage.

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The White House sent a Labor Day message from Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shaun Donovan about the many important issues affecting working Americans that will be decided in the next month of congressional budget negotiations. The message is well worth reading.

Donovan describes what he calls a “double-pronged attack on the workers we are celebrating today.” This attack includes deep cuts at the Wage and Hour Division, which protects workers against wage theft by crooked employers, and which collected $250 million in back pay for workers last year. Republicans also want limits on the use of third-party experts to accompany OSHA compliance officers on workplace safety inspections, where they can point out hazards OSHA might miss. They want to cut the budget and limit enforcement of the National Labor Relations Board’s rules to protect workers who join together for better working conditions. They want to block a new OSHA rule that will save thousands of workers from death, disabling lung disease, or cancer from inhaling silica dust. And they are trying to kill a new effort by the Department of Labor to protect retirees from financial advisors who put their own interests ahead of their clients’ interests.

None of the laws protecting working Americans from wage theft, on-the-job injury, unlawful retaliation, or self-dealing by financial advisors is meaningful if the government doesn’t enforce them. That takes resources and staff—investigators and lawyers who can take on big corporations or reckless businesses. Yet congressional Republicans want to cut funding for enforcement of all these laws. At OSHA, for example, Republicans want a 10 percent cut—$57 million, even though OSHA’s inspectors already can’t get to even one percent of workplaces in a year, and negligent employers put workers in harm’s way every day and kill nearly 100 employees a week.

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This post originally appeared on SCOTUSblog, as part of a symposium on Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the challenge to the university’s use of affirmative action in its undergraduate admissions process. 

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisions have been suffused with hypocrisy. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called them out, with barely more gentle phrasing, in her lone dissent to the seven-to-one majority opinion the first time Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013) was before the Court. “Only an ostrich,” she observed, “could regard the supposedly neutral alternatives as race unconscious,” and only a (contorted) legal mind “could conclude that an admissions plan designed to produce racial diversity is not race conscious.”

The “diversity” standard in college admissions has gained great popularity because advocates of race-based affirmative action, stymied by the Court since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, latched onto it as an alternative that could satisfy strict scrutiny. Many proponents have since persuaded themselves that diversity is, after all, a better approach than race-based affirmative action and that if the Court had not required it, we would have had to invent it. Yet while diversity in college classes is certainly an important educational and social goal, its elevation nonetheless dodges the nation’s racial legacy and avoids our constitutional and moral obligation to remedy the effects of centuries of slavery and legally sanctioned segregation. Without acknowledging we were doing so, we have engaged in a legal sleight of hand, substituting enriching the educational experience for remedying past injustice in designing affirmative action policy.

Underlying all this has been the Court majority’s conviction, most recently in Fisher I, that university officials have not identified specific Fourteenth Amendment violations for which their policies are a remedy, and therefore their consideration of race injects, without constitutional justification, a discriminatory racial consideration into the admissions process. The paucity of African Americans at the University of Texas reflects no de jure exclusion, the Fisher I majority believed, but only de factosocial inequality for which there is no race-conscious constitutional remedy. Therefore, including racial diversity in a scheme of skill-based, interest-based, or economic diversity is suspect, requiring very strict scrutiny. Indeed, the conditions set by the Fisher I majority opinion suggest a scrutiny that is strict in theory but fatal in fact. (I discuss the Fisher cases here only as they relate to the treatment of African Americans in affirmative action plans, not to that of other national or ethnic minorities or of disadvantaged economic groups; each has a different history and status, requires different opportunities to succeed, and raises different social policy and constitutional concerns).

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As students head back to school this fall, today’s release of the August jobs numbers provides the first complete look at the summer job market for teens.  As a whole, the stronger start to the 2015 summer jobs season (compared to last summer) signaled by the June youth employment numbers was sustained throughout the summer.  According to seasonally unadjusted teen employment-to-population (EPOP) ratios, averaged for the months of June, July and August, African American youth experienced the largest boost to summer employment compared to last year.  Summer employment was up 2.5 percentage points for black teens, compared to a 1.5 percentage point increase for Hispanic youth and a 1.2 percentage point increase for white teens, as shown in the figure below.  Though black teens continue to have the lowest rates of employment, the 2015 summer youth employment rate for black teens was closer to its 2007 pre-Great Recession rate than were those of white and Hispanic youth.

Valerie

Average teenage (16-19 years) summer employment to population ratio, 2007,2014, and 2015

	2007	2014	2015
white	43.9	34.3	35.5
black	23.0	19.3	21.8
hispanic	31.0	25.0	26.5

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Source: EPI analysis of Current Population Survey

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This blog post originally appeared on TalkPoverty.org.

Labor Day is a time to honor America’s workers and their contributions to our economy. It is also a time to reflect upon the state of workers’ economic position, and how that position has faltered in recent decades. Except for a short period of across-the-board wage growth in the late 1990s, 2015 marks a general 36-year trend of broad-based wage stagnation and rising inequality in our country, which has had real, adverse effects on low- and middle-income households. This anemic wage growth is closely tied to the stalled progress in reducing poverty since 1979, as many poor people work and their incomes are increasingly dependent upon work. Therefore, along with strengthening the safety net, the goals of anti-poverty advocates should be one in the same with pro-worker advocates: to reverse the decades-long trend of wage stagnation and promote real wage growth for all Americans.

Despite dramatic gains in educational attainment, wages have failed to grow for those at the bottom (and middle) over the last four decades. At the same time, low income household incomes have become increasingly dependent on wages. The figure below shows the major sources of income for non-elderly households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution from 1979 to 2011, using the CBO’s measure of comprehensive income. It shows that incomes of the bottom fifth are increasingly dependent on ties to the workforce. Wages, employer-provided benefits, and tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the EITC) made up 68.3 percent of non-elderly bottom-fifth incomes in 2011, compared with only 58.2 percent in 1979. While government in-kind benefits from sources such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps) and Medicaid increased from 13.2 percent of these bottom-fifth incomes in 1979, to 19.5 percent in 2011, cash transfers such as welfare payments have declined 9.2 percentage points (from 18.6 percent to 9.4 percent).

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At the beginning of August, Netflix announced that it would grant its employees “unlimited” parental leave during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. After the initial praise, though, a darker side of the announcement was revealed: only “salaried streaming employees”—the roughly 2,000 white-collar workers who work in the company’s streaming division—will be covered by the new policy.  Employees of Netflix’s DVD distribution centers, meanwhile, will not receive the benefit of paid parental leave.

A few have asked whether or not Netflix’s paid parental leave policy will set a new standard in the American workplace. Unfortunately, the exclusion of its lower-paid workers from the policy already reflects a harsh reality facing U.S. workers: paid family leave is a rarity, and when it is offered, the recipients are much more likely to be high-wage earners.

As the figure above shows, only 12 percent of private sector workers in the United States receive paid family leave, a number that puts us behind our international peers. (Among the 34 OECD nations, for example, the United States is the only nation that does not mandate paid maternity leave.) Which workers receive paid family leave is heavily determined by how much they earn—just like Netflix’s policy. While 23 percent of workers at the top of the wage distribution have access to paid family leave, only 4 percent of workers at the bottom receive the benefit.

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