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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Last week’s decision by the National Labor Relations Board regarding Browning-Ferris Industries of California (BFI) is a big victory for working people and labor advocates. By holding that BFI is a joint employer with the staffing agency that provides all but a few of the workers at one of BFI’s recycling centers, the decision closes one of the many loopholes corporations use to avoid paying decent wages, Social Security and Medicare taxes, worker’s compensation premiums and unemployment insurance taxes, and to avoid even providing a safe workplace.

Millions of people work for employers that want their time, their sweat, and their creativity —but don’t want to treat them as employees. The companies have put middle-men between themselves and their workers and—– thanks to Reagan-era legal changes—have avoided their responsibilities, including the duty to recognize and bargain with employee unions. Now, after 30 years of watching corporations evade these obligations with the government’s blessing, the key labor agencies of the federal government are saying, “enough is enough.” The NLRB is following the lead of David Weil, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division administrator, who has begun cracking down on phony independent contractor arrangements.

This victory, like most labor victories these days, is bittersweet. On the one hand, whenever a government agency protects or expands the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively, or holds a corporation accountable for its treatment of workers, it is a cause for celebration. On the other hand, all the BFI decision does is restore the law regarding joint employers to where it was until 1984. Things weren’t going all that well for the labor movement even before the Reagan era, and the BFI joint employer doctrine won’t level the playing field between workers and corporations. It just turns back the clock to a fairer set of rules.

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My name is Caleb Sneeringer, and I worked for Walgreens for six years. I was first hired in 2008 as an assistant manager, and in 2010 I was promoted to executive assistant manager—my first salaried position with Walgreens. I earned a salary of $46,000 and was scheduled for 45 hours a week.

Unfortunately, 45 hours a week quickly turned into 55–70 hours. You see, around the time of my promotion, Walgreens implemented a “no overtime” rule for hourly employees. In my store this and other budget cuts resulted in a loss of approximately 150 hours a week among hourly employees—and their work and responsibilities were shifted to salaried staff. This created a more unpredictable scheduling situation, and many store associates were forced to use SNAP assistance (i.e., food stamps) to meet their basic needs.

Right now, the U.S. Department of Labor is considering an important rule change that would affect salaried workers and overtime pay. If implemented, the overtime salary threshold will be raised from $23,660 to $50,440. For me, my former coworkers at Walgreens, and millions of workers across the country, this rule change will mean the right to receive the overtime pay we are owed.

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After the Department of Labor (DOL) issued regulations last year requiring third-party providers of home care services to pay the minimum wage and overtime to their employees, various employer groups filed suit in federal court in an attempt to have the new rules struck down. In short, they argued that the Secretary of Labor didn’t have the legal authority under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to change the definition of “companionship services” it had used in the regulations it promulgated in 1975 to set wage and hour rules for home care workers. The U.S. District Court judge who heard the case, Richard Leon, didn’t just agree with the employers, he wrote a vituperative opinion expressing his outrage that the Department of Labor was arrogantly usurping congressional powers.

Calling on his inner George W. Bush, the judge declared that the Department of Labor was trying to “seize unprecedented authority to impose overtime and minimum wage obligations in defiance of the plain language of Section 213. It cannot stand.”

Last week, in Home Care Association v. Weil, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit disagreed with Judge Leon about the “plain language” of the statute and overruled him, finding that “the Department’s authority [to change its regulations] is clear.” The appeals court pointed out that the Supreme Court had already decided that Section 213 of the Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t unambiguously compel any conclusion about whether third-party providers of home care services are exempt from the overtime and minimum wage requirements. Judge Leon forgot that the issue was so far from plain that back in 1975 that DOL considered covering third-party employers, before choosing not to. (How he forgot, since he cited DOL’s hesitation himself, is another story.)

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This blog post originally appeared on Wall Street Journal Think Tank.

Recent volatility in stock markets in the U.S. and globally has led many economic observers to conclude that the Federal Reserve is less likely to begin raising short-term interest rates at its September meetings. I’ve been on Team Don’t Raise for a while now, but I’m not excited about those joining the cause in light of recent stock market swings.

As a general principle, the Fed should not react to short-term movements in the financial markets. For one thing, the labor market is much more important to the lives of most Americans, and it is more relevant to the Fed’s mandate of securing maximum employment with inflation stability.

Then consider this: More than 80% of stock wealth in the U.S. is owned by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, and more than half of Americans own no stocks at all (either directly or through retirement or other accounts). In short, movements in the stock markets do not have much effect on the spending power of most U.S. households. That means that movements in the stock markets—especially short-term volatility that is likely to largely dissipate—provides little information about the overall state of economic health.

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The stock market has taken a hit in the past few days, with concern over the Chinese economy driving a big selloff. How worried should we be? The short answer is: not very.

My assessment of the underlying health of the U.S. economy hasn’t really changed over the past week, even as the stock market has declined pretty spectacularly in recent days. Why this equanimity?

A couple of things. First, stock market movements significantly change the wealth of only a small sliver of the U.S. population. Roughly 90 percent of stocks are held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. This means that the spending power of the vast majority of American households isn’t significantly affected by changes in stock prices.

Second, while stocks were pretty expensive in the past week, it doesn’t seem to me that there was an obvious market-wide bubble that would mean these declines were inevitable and will be enduring. Yes, some sectors and stocks (tech and “sharing economy” stocks) do look awfully bubbly. But when graded on things like price/earnings ratios—especially given today’s very low interest rates—the market overall looks expensive but not like an obvious bubble. What all this means is that recent stock market declines are most likely to redistribute wealth from today’s stock owners to tomorrow’s stock owners (who are buying up cheap stocks today).

All in all, the stock market is a terrible gauge of overall economy-wide health, so even large swings in it by themselves do not provide much of a signal for how to assess this broader health.

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President Obama recently announced a major overhaul of the rules governing the payment of overtime to salaried employees. These changes are long overdue and will finally align the overtime exemption for salaried employees with common sense and the original intention of the law—to ensure that all workers receive overtime protection except those with such high salaries or such substantial responsibilities that they don’t need the protections.

Since the president’s announcement, opponents of the proposal have made a number of questionable claims. One claim in particular—that nonprofit organizations providing services to the poor and the disadvantaged will see a crippling increase in personnel costs—is demonstrably false.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is based on a few basic principles. First, most employees in the United States are entitled to the minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 per hour at the federal level, for all hours worked, and “time-and-a-half” for all hours worked over 40 in a workweek. These rules, first enacted in 1938, have proven to be a simple but important protection for workers and the labor market, guaranteeing workers at least a minimal level of wage protection.

The second principle, however, is that FLSA coverage does not extend to all employees or all employers. There are number of exemptions and exclusions from minimum wage and/or overtime embedded in the FLSA. Unless coverage is established for the employer or employees, the protections of the FLSA, including the proposed overtime rule changes, simply do not apply.

Coverage is determined in one of two ways. First, employers who are engaged in business that generates annual business or sales revenues of at least $500,000 per year are covered by the FLSA and must pay the minimum wage and overtime, unless another of the many exemptions in the law applies. Importantly, the key criterion for this provision is business or sales revenue. Most nonprofitsincluding the charitable organizations providing free meals to the hungry and nonprofits providing addiction or mental health services are not engaged in business, they are providing charitable services and therefore their employees are not typically covered by the FLSA.Read more

Catherine Rampell wrote a piece having some fun with the bidding war among GOP candidates about how much they can promise to raise economic growth rates. There’s some good stuff there—including the riff on how GOP politicians are looking to “disrupt” economic statistics largely by defunding those doing the valuable work of collecting them.

But “Step 1” in her list is a pet peeve of mine. The claim is that the growth of the mid/late-20^th century rested largely on the fact that the United States faced less foreign competition in those years, as trading partners’ economies in Europe and Asia were devastated by war. Let me quote a chunk of Rampell’s point here:

“If we (or others) can manage to destroy the capital stock of our economic rivals while sustaining no damage to our own—which is, you know, basically what happened in World War II—we’ll be perfectly positioned for another global-competition-free, postwar economic boom. This little artifact of the last postwar era, and how much it explains the robust mid-20th-century growth rates that my presidential rivals now pine for, has curiously eluded others’ policy plans.”

One hears variants of this argument a lot*, but it’s actually really hard to make an economic case that this dynamic—increased U.S. competitiveness stemming from war destruction in our trading partners—mattered at all for mid-century American growth.

Is the claim that exports surged and that’s why mid-century growth was good? They really did not—exports grew substantially faster post-1979 than before. And we were not shielded from import growth in the pre-1979 period, since imports grew faster than in the pre-1979 period than after.

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This post originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

After forty years of rising income and wealth inequality, some of America’s rich seem worried that maybe things have gone too far. In a recent New York Times op-ed, for example, Peter Georgescu, CEO emeritus of the multinational public relations firm, Young and Rubicon, wrote that he is “scared” of a backlash that might lead to social unrest or “oppressive taxes.”

The Times was so impressed with such enlightened views from this prominent capitalist that a few days later they devoted another long article with his answers to questions submitted by readers.

We should, I suppose, be grateful that Georgescu seems to understand that the gap between the rising value of what American workers produce and the stagnation of their wages has channeled the benefits of economic growth to shareholders (and, he might have added, but didn’t, corporate CEOs). But if you are waiting for him and other members of his class to get serious about the problem, don’t hold your breath.

Georgescu writes that he would like to see corporations pay their workers a fair wage. But with few exceptions, they don’t. He doesn’t tell us why, but the reason is obvious—paying workers less has made their owners and top executives rich.

So, what to do?

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