Andy Puzder is the CEO of CKE Restaurants (Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.). Bloomberg reported his 2012 salary and other compensation as $4.485 million, so he is doing well in what he likes to deride as the Obama economy.  His restaurant chain is doing well, too, apparently, since its profits reportedly rose more than 30 percent last year. (So much for overregulation!)

But Puzder is opposed to President Obama’s proposal to update the Department of Labor’s overtime rules, an update Puzder claims would turn CKE’s poorly paid assistant managers into “glorified crew members.”  Those rules have been updated only once in the last 39 years and are so obsolete that workers earning less than the poverty level can be considered “executives” and denied overtime pay even if they work so many extra hours that their pay falls below the minimum wage. But that helps Puzder make a bigger profit, so he says leave the rules alone.

One thing is certain: Puzder won’t let any rule change reduce the millions he takes home from CKE. He wants us to know he will take it out of his employees, one way or another. As Puzder says, “overtime pay has to come from somewhere, most likely reduced hours, reduced salaries or reduced bonuses.”

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On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) region 13 director, Peter Sung Ohr, granted the Northwestern University football players the right to join the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA) union. The petition by the Northwestern football players was filed by their quarterback, Kain Colter, and had the support of the United Steelworkers. Ohr’s decision establishes a precedent for athletes at private colleges and universities to form or join unions. At the very least, it will allow players to join together to voice their concerns with issues that affect their well-being such as injury risk and time commitment. As of January, CAPA’s stated goals for the petition were limited to seeking more medical protections for players and guaranteeing scholarships in the event of injury. This decision, however, could also fuel growing criticism of the thriving business of college athletics and encourage the idea that the players should be paid on top of their scholarships.

Northwestern University and the NCAA have criticized the decision, arguing that college athletes are amateur athletes and students, not employees. Yet, the facts of the current system indicate that by any definition, these athletes are woefully underpaid employees. Broadly speaking, an employee is one who is compensated for one’s work and is under the control of an employer. The players at the Northwestern football team were compensated in the form of grant-in-aid of about $61,000 each academic year to cover the costs of tuition, fees, room, board, and books required for their education. As for control, Ohr touched on several aspects of the Northwestern football program’s system that are typical of many college athletic programs, in which players are under the supervision of their coaches and must follow a special set of rules. Northwestern sets strict limits on players’ ability to pursue outside employment, post on social media, or profit from their “athletic ability or reputation.” Additionally, players are required to commit 40 to 60 hours of time for conditioning, meetings, and practice for the team. “Not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs,” Ohr noted, “it is also many more hours than the players spend on their studies.”

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The Supreme Court is deliberating in a case that will decide whether in-home personal care and home health aides are allowed to unionize and bargain agreements with government agencies. The case will also decide whether their contracts can require every aide who benefits from the collective bargaining agreement to pay her fair share in agency fees (or dues, if she is a union member).  These collective bargaining agreements have made a huge difference in the lives of the overwhelmingly female and disproportionately minority workforce that cares for the sick and disabled, the frail elderly and small children in their homes or in the homes of the customers.

Until the 1990’s, when states and counties across the nation began creating public entities to act as employers and bargain collectively with the workers’ unions, the in-home care workers rarely were paid more than the minimum wage, they had no coverage for health or dental insurance and no pension or retirement plan. Even today, after almost two decades of progress, half of these workers have incomes less than twice the poverty level and they earn far less than workers in other occupations – even after taking into account gender, age, race, education, and geography.

But where in-home aides have been permitted to unionize and bargain collectively they have improved pay and benefits, training, retention, and the safety of clients and workers alike. In Illinois, where the Supreme Court case challenging unionization arose, the latest contract includes $13.00 an hour pay, health and dental insurance, a grievance procedure, and paid training hours – a huge improvement over what was formerly minimum wage work with no benefits and no respect.

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In the context of a lost decade of wage growth for women, two recent proposals—to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour (including increasing the separate minimum wage for tipped workers), and to increase the threshold salary for overtime pay to $50,000 annually—can provide much needed relief to women.

Increasing the minimum wage requires that Congress pass a law. The current minimum wage of $7.25 was set in 2007 and went into effect in 2009, but President Obama has already acted by executive order to require firms that hold contracts with the federal government to pay their workers a minimum of $10.10 per hour. In contrast, increasing the salary threshold for receiving overtime pay does not require congressional action, but does require action by the Secretary of Labor. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets the overtime pay premium at 50 percent more than the regular wage or salary, also known as “time-and-a-half.” Currently, if workers are classified as executive, administrative, or professional, and they earn more than the salary threshold of about $23,000 a year ($455 per week), they do not need to be paid overtime. President Obama recently directed Secretary Perez to consider how to update the rules so that workers are paid fairly for their overtime hours.

Because women earn less than men on average, it is not surprising that women are the majority—64 percent—of those who earn the minimum wage and would thus benefit disproportionately from an increase in the minimum wage. Economists expect that employers will also increase the pay of workers earning somewhat above the minimum, in keeping with past experience of minimum wage increases. An EPI analysis shows that 15.3 million women—9.6 million directly and 5.7 million through the spillover effect—would receive a pay increase were the minimum wage to be raised to $10.10 per hour. EPI also finds that nearly one-third of all working single mothers—or 2.3 million women—would receive a direct or indirect pay increase. Overall 55 percent of workers who would benefit from the increase are women.

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Twice a year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) updates its fact sheet, “The Gender Wage Gap,” to report the latest data as they become available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. This year, we noticed something new when we added the latest figure for median weekly earnings for men and women who work full-time—a virtual standstill in women’s real wages for the past ten years. This was true when looking at trends in both usual weekly earnings and annual earnings for those who work full-time, year-round.

For several decades, as new Fed chair Janet Yellen notes, women have been the success story in the economy. Women increasingly pursued higher education, eventually surpassing men in college graduation rates. Women also joined the labor force in larger numbers, worked more throughout their lives, and entered a variety of occupations that had been formerly virtually closed to them, becoming bus drivers, mail carriers, fire fighters, police officers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and many others.

These gains in education and work experience (what economists call human capital) contributed to narrowing the wage gap, and the equal opportunity legislation of the 1960s and 1970s helped too. The gender wage gap closed from 40 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2012 (in terms of annual earnings). Women’s real earnings—meaning wages adjusted for inflation—grew as well, from $22,418 in 1960 to $28,496 in 1970, $30,136 in 1980, $34,247 in 1990, $37,146 in 2000, and $38,345 in 2012.

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This commentary first appeared in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity.

The pressing importance of jobs and economic growth – rather than the misplaced obsession with austerity – finally seems to be gaining recognition inside Washington. President Obama illustrated this renewed focus in his State of the Union address, emphasizing the need to “do more to make sure our economy honors the dignity of work, and hard work pays off for every single American.” The president’s fiscal year 2015 budget, released this month, builds off these ideas. It provides a robust vision for building a sustainable platform for economic growth with shared prosperity and security.

These priorities are front and center in the budget. The president proposes an additional $28 billion in nondefense discretionary funding (plus $28 billion in defense spending) in 2015. Much of this new spending – offset by the closing of tax loopholes – would focus on improving the well-being of low- and middle-income Americans through job creation and making work pay (wages have been stagnant since 2000).

A major budgetary focus is getting people back to work, with a particular emphasis on helping the long-term unemployed re-enter the workforce. Such assistance is desperately needed. Research by the Boston Federal Reserve showed that employers were extremely unlikely to call back job seekers who had been out of work for at least six months, even if their qualifications were better than other applicants’.

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I’d like to attract your attention to this report from WJHG, a local news affiliate in Panama City, Florida. It’s a stark reminder of everything that’s wrong with the State Department’s large de facto guestworker program, the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program. For those not familiar with SWT, it is one of many “cultural exchange” programs in State’s J-1 visa Exchange Visitor Program; each year it allows around a hundred thousand foreign college students from around the world to come to the United States to work for four months in hotels, beach resorts, restaurants, and various other mostly seasonal businesses, in a variety of lesser-skill jobs.

In Guestworker Diplomacy and numerous commentaries, I’ve explained in detail how this temporary foreign worker program disguised as an exchange program was designed and is administered by an agency with zero expertise in regulating, monitoring, or enforcing labor- and employment-law related issues and is thus entirely unqualified to manage the program. This in turn results in a dysfunctional program where severe abuses and exploitation of vulnerable foreign student workers, and even human trafficking, takes place. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a new report, Culture Shock: The Exploitation of J-1 Cultural Exchange Workers, which provides numerous real-world examples of such abuse, exploitation, and criminal activity. But the perspective we get in the WJHG report from Scott Springer, the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement/Homeland Security Investigations Resident Agent in Charge in Panama City, Florida, shows just how deep the problems are.

Agent Springer took the initiative to reach out to local J-1 “sponsors”—the private organizations to which the State Department has outsourced management and oversight of the Exchange Visitor Program—and offered to conduct information sessions along with local law enforcement and victims’ advocacy groups. His intention was to better inform J-1 student workers about what can go wrong in the program and how they can protect themselves. Agent Springer should be applauded for his candor and for working to protect the safety of vulnerable young student workers. Here’s what he’s observed that motivated him to offer his services:

J-1 Visa students are probably among our most exploited individuals on the beach. We kept seeing such a large number of problems here with the J-1 community, not with the students, but with the students being exploited by egregious employers.

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By most economic measures, Washington’s preoccupation with shrinking deficits through budget austerity has failed to improve economic outcomes for anyone but the already well off. Most Americans would agree with this sentiment, unequivocally.

Strong majorities of Americans consider a flagging economy to be our top priority, and that the creation of an abundance of quality jobs is the most effective remedy to our economic malaise. And while Americans want government to reduce deficits, we reject the ideas that safety net programs like SNAP and unemployment insurance ought to be diminished, or that Social Security and Medicare benefits ought to be cut. Instead we endorse raising revenues through increases in taxes paid by high earners and profitable corporations.

These mainstream perspectives have a sound basis in economic research and are reflected in the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s Better Off Budget. While the media generally presents the progressive budget as a fringe alternative to the Ryan and Obama budgets, in actuality, the Better Off Budget is the only budget that reflects the mainstream priorities listed above.

It does so by aggressively spurring job creation to close the output gap, reach full employment, and set the stage for sustained broad based wage growth. EPI analyst Joshua Smith assessed the macroeconomic impact of the budget and determined that it would create 4.6 million jobs within one year of implementation.

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A couple of my EPI colleagues have recently shown and testified twice that raising the state minimum wage to $10.10 would greatly benefit Maryland workers. In my opinion, it’s not nearly enough of a raise, but it’s what’s on the table, and there’s no doubt it would help hundreds of thousands of workers. In any case, the legislative saga to make it a reality continues. On March 3, the Maryland House of Delegates’ Economic Matters Committee approved a number of changes to legislation proposed by Governor O’Malley to raise the minimum wage to $10.10. The changes weaken the law and exempt certain employers and industries from having to pay the increased wage. Two days later the full House considered over a dozen amendments—most of which were seeking to expand the committee’s exemptions—but none passed. That version of the bill was then passed by the House on March 7. What you should know is that the bill could have been much better, but a number of delegates in a Democratic-controlled House managed to greatly water down the scope and impact of the bill, and the bill also did not remove a number of exemptions that exist in current law.

The worst change to the originally proposed House version of the minimum wage law was the committee’s deletion of the provision that would index the minimum wage to inflation after 2016. That provision would have ensured that the bottom of the wage scale kept pace with the cost of living over time. Gov. O’Malley expressed his disappointment with this and plans to do all he can to get it reinserted during the remaining stages of the legislative process. Another unfortunate modification is a six-month extension of the time it will take for the minimum wage to reach its peak of $10.10. Workers earning the minimum wage are hurting now and earning near or below the poverty line; they need a raise as soon as possible, not one that’s slowly phased in through 2017.

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This Saturday is the second anniversary of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), which took effect on March 15, 2012. President Obama said at the time that KORUS would increase US goods exports by $10 to $11 billion, supporting 70,000 American jobs from increased exports alone. Things are not turning out as predicted.

In first two years after KORUS took effect, U.S. domestic exports to Korea fell (decreased) by $3.1 billion, a decline of 7.5%, as shown in the figure below. Imports from Korea increased $5.6 billion, an increase of 9.8%. Although rising exports could, in theory, support more U.S. jobs, the decline in US exports to Korea has actually cost American jobs in the past two years. Worse yet, the rapid growth of Korean imports has eliminated even more U.S. jobs. Overall, the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has increased $8.7 billion, or 59.6%, costing nearly 60,000 U.S. jobs. Most of the nearly 60,000 jobs lost were in manufacturing.

Trade deals do more than cut tariffs, they promote foreign direct investment (FDI) and a surge in outsourcing by U.S. and foreign multinational companies (MNCs). FDI leads to growing trade deficits and job losses. U.S. multinationals were responsible for nearly one quarter (26.9 percent) of the U.S. trade deficit in 2011. Foreign multinationals operating in the United States (companies like Kia and Hyundai) were responsible for nearly half (44.2 percent) of the U.S. goods trade deficit in that same year. Taken together, U.S. and foreign MNCs were responsible for nearly three-fourths (77.1 percent) of the U.S. goods trade deficit in 2011.

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