The word “minimum” is not difficult to define. Several synonyms immediately come to mind: lowest, least, smallest, littlest…

So you might reasonably assume that the “minimum wage” is the lowest wage employers can legally pay their workers, right?

Wrong. Some 3.3 million workers are paid the sub-minimum wage—often called the “tipped minimum wage”—of only $2.13 per hour. For these workers, employers may claim a “tip credit,” by converting tips received by the worker into income. So long as this tip credit, when combined with the tipped minimum wage, adds up to the minimum wage, the employer need not pay more than $2.13 per hour. If tips fall short of this amount, the employer is supposed to make up the difference. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 per hour, so the maximum tip credit that an employer can claim is $5.12 per hour at the federal level. The law effectively transforms tips earned by the worker into a subsidy for the employer.

The tipped minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 22 years.

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Early Thursday, the New York City council successfully overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of a bill giving New York workers access to paid sick leave, at long last. The bill phases in over two years, beginning in April 2014 for businesses with 20 workers or more.

The bill’s passage after a three year battle comes after supporters were able to broker a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in March. New York will now be the fifth city in the United States to require private sector employers to provide a minimum amount of earned paid sick time to their employers, joining Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC (the  Philadelphia City Council has twice passed paid sick leave legislation. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has vetoed the bill both times). Connecticut remains the only state with this distinction. This is a big win for the people of New York City. Overall, it’s a wise investment for employers, workers and the general public.

Nearly 40% of the private sector workforce in the United States has no ability to earn paid sick time. Furthermore, access to paid sick days has historically been far more common among high-income workers, leaving low-income families with little protection when they get sick or need to visit the doctor. This important legislation not only protects workers from lost pay or potential job loss when they or their family members get sick, it also protects the public by keeping sick workers, who feel economically compelled to work, from spreading illness to co-workers and customers.

Furthermore, the great benefits of earned sick days far outweigh the costs. The costs to business are often overstated, when the reality is that earned paid sick days cost very little when compared to business sales, as we showed in the case of Connecticut (and as we testified before the New York City Committee on Civil Service and Labor in March of this year).

While the lack of a national paid sick days policy has continued to erode family economic security, the efforts of jurisdictions around the country that have stepped up for workers and their families serve as models for cities and states throughout the nation.

Greg Mankiw, in his defense of the top one percent (pdf), notes that “the key issue is the extent to which the high incomes of the top 1 percent reflect high productivity rather than some market imperfection,” and quickly turns to a discussion of CEO pay. Mankiw’s got a point—so let’s discuss whether or not CEO pay simply reflects compensation for ‘talent’ and productivity.

Mankiw does not present any evidence on whether CEO pay reflects high productivity: rather, he offers an argument that corporate governance is not problematic, using research by University of Chicago business school professor Steve Kaplan as his evidence. In fact, the chief claim that CEO pay tracks that of other talented workers also comes from Kaplan, who has a paper (not yet public) in the forthcoming  Journal of Economic Perspectives issue along with Mankiw’s contribution and a paper from me and my colleague Josh Bivens. In this post, as promised in a prior one on Mankiw’s data claims, I draw on the evidence presented in our paper to show that CEO pay has grown far faster than that of other very high wage earners (the top 1/1000^th) and that the CEO advantage relative to other very high wage earners has grown more than the college wage premium. We also demonstrate that Kaplan’s own data series shows the same pattern. A fair-minded review of these data, in our view, leads to the conclusion that the spectacular growth of CEO pay does not simply, or even primarily, reflect the market for talent, or some imagined increase in CEO productivity.

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The Supreme Court yesterday did not, for the time being, prevent the University of Texas from continuing its affirmative action plan.

Nonetheless, like the voting rights decision issued today, the Fisher case decision was another setback for racial justice. For one thing, the Court invited another challenge after the case again goes through the lower courts. There, the University will have to prove that it could find no other way to get a diverse student body without explicitly considering race, and will have to prove that it used “good faith” in use of race to achieve diversity. If challengers can show that the University’s examination of applicants’ overall qualifications is really a cover for enrolling black and other minority students—for example, if it is more intent on having black students than violin players, or students from different parts of the state, or other “diverse” factors—affirmative action will be in trouble.

The University and its civil rights group allies have, from an understandable tactical need to defend affirmative action by whatever means are available, accepted a Supreme Court framework that undermines equal rights in the long run.

That framework is “diversity.” According to it, we pursue affirmative action not to remedy the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing discrimination, not because equal opportunity for African Americans is an end in itself, but because

• having a diverse student body improves the educational experience for white students, and because
• it trains corporate and military leaders who will be more effective if they look like and have a better understanding of those they lead.

Forgotten has been the idea that African Americans are underrepresented at the University of Texas and at other elite institutions because, as Justice Ginsburg put it in her lonely dissent, they suffer from “the lingering effects of an overtly discriminatory past, the legacy of centuries of law-sanctioned inequality.” In reality, affirmative action is necessary not to make white students more comfortable in the presence of blacks, but to remedy those effects.

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Seventy-five years ago today, President Roosevelt signed into law the historic Fair Labor Standards Act.  The Fair Labor Standards Act established the minimum wage, legislated a standard workweek, and outlawed oppressive child labor.  President Roosevelt called it, after the Social Security Act, “the most far-reaching, far-sighted program for the benefit of workers here or in any other country.”

Prior to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, both adults and young children often worked brutally long hours only to earn starvation wages.  This was especially true during the Great Depression.  As the Depression endured, firms not only laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, but also implemented significant wage rate cuts.  Despite low wages, or perhaps because of them, many workers (including children) continued to work long hours in unjust conditions.  Workers often labored in what were essentially sweatshops, only to earn low wages.  While campaigning for a second term, President Roosevelt received a note from a young girl that read: “I wish you could do something to help us girls….We have been working in a sewing factory,… and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week… Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.”  Thousands of children, as young as seven years old, were denied a basic education and instead worked in mines, mills and factories for a pittance.  During his first re-election campaign, President Roosevelt publically committed to eliminating child labor and improving labor standards for all working Americans.

Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945 and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet, devised the Fair Labor Standards Act with two goals in mind.  First, the administration aimed to improve job quality through the abolition of child labor, the establishment of a floor on wages, and a ceiling over hours worked.  Second, the administration hoped the Fair Labor Standards Act would create new jobs for millions of the nation’s unemployed by reducing overtime and forcing employers to hire more employees to compensate.  The ultimate version of the Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Roosevelt on June 25, 1938, established a 25-cent minimum wage (that would rise to 30 cents beginning in October 1939), introduced a 44-hour maximum work week (that would first fall to 42 hours in October 1939 and would then fall to 40 hours in October 1940), and set the general age of workforce entry at 16.

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Greg Mankiw’s paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives’ symposium on the top one percent is generating plenty of commentary. Josh Bivens and I have a contribution in that symposium and some new evidence that casts doubt on one of Mankiw’s key claims: that the doubling of the income share of the top one percent reflects the increased economic contributions, or productivity, of those in the top one percent. Specifically, Mankiw claims “that changes in technology have allowed a small number of highly educated and exceptionally talented individuals to command superstar incomes in ways that were not possible a generation ago.” Mankiw’s evidence for this is pretty thin, and we offer contrary evidence. This will take two blog posts, this one addressing the correspondence of growing educational wage disparities and the rise of the top one percent and the next one focused on executive pay.

Before getting down to business, let’s dispose of the distracting discussion by Mankiw and others (e.g. Chrystia Freeland) that we are discussing the incomes of superstar ‘innovators’ like Steve Jobs or J.K. Rowling. The majority of those in the top one percent are financial sector professionals and executives, not ‘innovators.’ Moreover, it is the growth of financial sector and executive incomes, as Jon Bakija and co-authors document, that explains roughly two-thirds of the income growth of the top 1.0 or top 0.1 percent (an analysis we argue understates the role of executives and finance). Besides, as Dean Baker points out, even superstar innovators benefit from a government set system that skews rewards upwards.

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The public isn’t stupid.  They realize that if hundreds of thousands of foreign guestworkers are brought in by businesses to take jobs in IT, engineering, and the sciences, there will be fewer opportunities for them and their children. A new poll published June 20 by the National Journal asks, “Should Congress allow for MORE guest workers or FEWER guest workers in this industry?” The three industries are agriculture, high-tech and construction. The respondents split with respect to agriculture, but by a big majority—55 to 34—they want fewer high-tech guestworkers, and by even bigger numbers—61 to 30—fewer guestworkers in construction.

Sadly, on this and almost any issue that corporate America lobbies intensely, members of Congress mostly fail to represent the views and interests of their constituents; they take the side of the corporations that make big donations to their campaigns, to independent expenditures on elections, and to the political parties. Only a principled few are willing to stand up to Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Intel.

The result is that the new immigration bill will triple the flawed and misused H-1B guestworker program and shut off opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young people here who thought an engineering, math or computer science education would be the ticket to economic security and a rewarding career. It does less damage to U.S. construction workers, though it doubles the number of H-2B visas, which have been used to bring in construction guestworkers, and creates a new W-visa guestworker category, for which 15,000 visas a year are designated.

Rhode Island state treasurer Gina Raimondo is running for governor on the strength of the pension reform she spearheaded in in 2011. The hitch? The new plan—a hybrid between a traditional defined benefit (DB) pension and a 401(k)-style defined contribution (DC) plan—actually increases costs for taxpayers while leaving most state employees and teachers worse off, as Robert Hiltonsmith lays out in a new EPI briefing paper.

Raimondo managed to pull off this sleight of hand because she did save taxpayers money—not through the new hybrid plan, but by slashing pension benefits already earned by workers and retirees, a move that is being challenged in court. These cuts came on top of cuts made in earlier rounds, which in a companion brief I estimate amount to a 34 reduction in benefits for a prototypical career worker, with some workers experiencing cuts of 40 percent or more.

Why introduce a poorly-designed hybrid that costs more without benefiting workers? Good question. Hybrids are hot in policy circles, mostly for good reason. Many private-sector employers aren’t in a position to take on long-term pension obligations, yet 401(k)s have proven to be a disastrous substitute, raising costs and placing inordinate risk onto workers, even the few who manage to play their cards exactly right. EPI (pdf) and others have estimated that DC plans cost roughly twice as much as DB plans to provide a similar level of retirement security.

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As The Huffington Post has reported, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is introducing three amendments to the Senate’s comprehensive immigration bill (S.744). Two are intended to create and open up jobs for young people, and the third would prohibit large companies that have announced mass layoffs from hiring temporary foreign workers. Sanders is rightly concerned about youth unemployment (which averaged 16.2 percent nationwide last year, and 13.1 percent in Vermont) and the massive expansion of current temporary foreign worker programs and the creation of new ones in the Senate bill. He’s also correct to see the connection between these two phenomena.

On the Senate floor Tuesday, Sanders discussed the inconsistency between the country’s persistently high youth unemployment and the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program. The SWT program was created to facilitate cultural exchanges, by allowing foreign college students to work and travel in the United States. But over time it has become a large guestworker program run by the State Department without the necessary basic rules to protect workers. Unlike other programs that allow foreign residents to work here temporarily, the SWT program does not require that guestworkers be paid a prevailing wage, or require employers to first recruit, or even advertise, jobs to U.S. workers before they can hire guestworkers on J-1 nonimmigrant visas.

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In his latest Bloomberg column, Ezra Klein has a nice feature of my recent paper on income inequality growth in the United States and the role of tax policy. Klein’s dichotomy of the income inequality debate splits the “fatalists” from the “redistributions,” with differing views on government’s role in widening income inequality. Downplaying government’s complicity and scope for policy, Klein’s fatalists chalk up income inequality growth to market forces and factors like globalization, technological change, and job polarization. (See Larry Mishel, John Schmitt, and Heidi Shierholz refute this latter argument.) The redistributionists, on the other hand, believe that government policy has contributed to income inequality and policy should be reoriented to instead push back against post-tax, post-transfer income inequality growth.

With regard to the fatalists, one cannot dispute on objective grounds that changes in federal tax and transfer policies between 1979 and 2007 have exacerbated post-tax, post-transfer income inequality growth, up 33 percent over this period, versus market-based income inequality growth of 23 percent (both measured by the Gini index). Moreover, the role of tax policy changes in exacerbating post-tax and post-transfer inequality is understated in these measures because of the phenomenon of “bracket creep”—top incomes rise faster than the inflation adjustment for tax brackets, subjecting more income to taxation at top rates—which innately increases the redistributive nature of the tax and transfer system over time. But while tax and transfer policy should have been pushing harder against inequality growth instead of exacerbating it, there are practical limits to how much increased redistribution can mitigate strong market trends.

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