The U.S. Department of the Treasury has released new data on how state and local governments are spending the $350 billion of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) allocated by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), covering expenditures through March 31, 2023. Less than half of the money has been spent: States have spent 45% of the $195 billion they were allocated and local governments have spent 38%, both slight increases from the previous quarter. However, these data do not include most spending decisions made during spring state legislative sessions, which may change the situation somewhat.

Fiscal recovery funds can be used for myriad purposes related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impacts. While the official pandemic state of emergency has come to a close, the economy and public services are still dealing with the negative economic impacts, including a loss of public-sector jobs. We find that the 10 states that have spent the least amount of their fiscal recovery funds have state job vacancies twice as high as the 10 states that have spent the most.

Governments should prioritize rebuilding public services and filling state and local government job vacancies with their remaining funds. Fiscal recovery funds must be obligated (designated for specific uses) by December 31, 2024, and must be spent by December 31, 2026.

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In states across the country, lawmakers are engaged in a coordinated, corporate-backed campaign to weaken child labor protections. One type of protection—minimum ages to serve alcohol in bars and restaurants—has been eroded in seven states since 2021. While lowering the age to serve alcohol may sound benign, it is not. It puts young people at risk of sexual harassment, underage drinking, and other harms.

The restaurant industry is already plagued by labor violations. In fact, it is the industry with the highest incidence of child labor law violations. Laws that lower the alcohol service age will subject more young people, at younger ages, to potentially dangerous working conditions at low wages—all in service of employers’ pursuit of cheap labor.

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One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s final decisions this term was in U.S. v. Texas, a dispute between the executive branch and two U.S. states—Louisiana and Texas—regarding whether President Biden had the authority to set priorities for how his administration conducts immigration enforcement. In other words, the states challenged the extent of prosecutorial discretion that can be exercised by a U.S. president when enforcing immigration statutes. The Supreme Court ruled by an 8–1 vote that U.S. states do not have the necessary standing to challenge the federal government’s immigration enforcement priorities—thereby affirming the president’s ability to exercise prosecutorial discretion.

Most of the media coverage and analysis of the decision has glossed over one major impact the decision could have: it could help the Biden administration better protect labor standards for all workers, including migrant workers. While helping workers was not the rationale of the decision, it could be one of its lasting impacts.

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Celebrities like Fran Drescher got a lot of media attention last week when they went on strike. The 160,000+ members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) joined 11,000 already striking film and television writers in the first industrywide shutdown in 63 years.

But it is not just actors—workers across the economy are either walking a picket line or preparing for labor actions later this summer. This has led many to wonder: Why do so many workers feel their only option this summer is to strike?

To us, the real question is: Why didn’t we see more of these actions sooner? For decades, the U.S. economy has been churning out radically unequal incomes. Further, essentially all of this increased inequality has come from unbalanced bargaining power in the labor market. Profit margins have increased at the expense of typical workers’ wages, and only the pay of the most highly privileged workers—corporate managers and executives and a select slice of other highly credentialed professionals—has managed to grow as fast as overall economic growth. The overwhelming majority of U.S. workers have not seen their wages grow at pace with their employers’ profits or executive pay scales.Read more

Earlier this year, the share of the adult Black population with a job—or the Black employment-to-population ratio (EPOP)—surpassed the share of the adult white population with a job for the first time in modern history. While the Black EPOP has since declined somewhat, it’s worth examining the reasons behind the sharp increase in employment over the pandemic recovery and the narrowing of the gap between Black and white workers in 2023. In my analysis, I conclude the following:

• The Black EPOP appears close to the white EPOP in recent years in part because the Black population is significantly younger (i.e., more likely to work) than the white population. After accounting for their different age distributions, Black workers have significantly lower EPOPs than white workers.
• However, the tremendous bounceback in the labor market was a significant boon for Black workers. While Black workers suffered greater losses in the pandemic recession, the employment gap narrowed because Black workers experienced a stronger jobs recovery than white workers.

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In 2021, New York’s City Council passed a set of laws to protect app-based delivery workers, including a bill intended to set a wage standard for some 65,000 delivery workers—the majority of whom are immigrants—following a study from the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP).

Now, more than six months after DCWP released its initial findings, the city is following through on its promise to raise wages for delivery workers on apps like DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats. The new pay scale in New York City starts at $17.96 per hour on July 12, and will increase to $19.96 per hour by April 2025. That’s a big step forward from the $7.09 per hour delivery service workers are currently paid before tips, according to DCWP’s findings.

It is a huge milestone after years of work by the Worker’s Justice Project, Los Deliveristas Unidos, and their allies to improve working conditions for a workforce that helped keep New York afloat through the pandemic. Thanks to the detailed DCWP analysis of confidential data provided by Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash, we finally have an accurate accounting of the number of workers in this industry, their wages, and expenses and risks they incur on the job. Los Deliveristas are rightly celebrating a victory.

At the same time, there is a long way to go to really get this right. After accounting for expenses that DCWP estimates at $2.82 per hour, $17.96 is just higher than New York’s minimum wage (currently $15 per hour, rising to $17 per hour by 2026). It’s a lot less than the $23.82 per hour that DCWP recommended in November. And now, DoorDash and others have sued the City of New York in an attempt to avoid paying these fairer wages.

After heavy lobbying by app companies, the new city standard will also allow companies to opt out of a requirement to pay for total hours worked, and instead companies can pay only for the time workers have an order in hand. This loophole leaves the worst actors in this industry free to continue using a predatory pay model that makes it impossible for workers to earn a decent wage unless they go out under the most dangerous conditions like heat waves, flash floods, and cold snaps.

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The Black-white wealth gap is staggering. In our recently released book, Just Action, Richard Rothstein and I describe how this gap is at the root of our nation’s most serious problems of racial inequality. While wealthy white families often use their economic resources to segregate and create unique advantages for themselves, lower-wealth African American families are limited to living in lower-resourced, more disadvantaged areas. Partly because the differences in household wealth between typical African American and white families determine the neighborhoods in which they live, this wealth disparity is a key factor in Black youths’ poorer academic outcomes, Black adults’ greater health challenges, and young African Americans’ disproportionate exposure to police abuse and higher incarceration rates.

As we note in Just Action, African American household income is about 60% of white household income. That discrepancy is concerning in itself, but the wealth gap is much, much worse: African American household wealth is only 5% of white household wealth.

Government housing policy exacerbated the wealth gap

While many factors have contributed to the troubling disparity between the income and wealth gaps, one factor stands out: government housing policy in the early- to mid-twentieth century.

Policies that subsidized homeownership for white working- and middle-class households during that period allowed those families to buy homes. They accumulated wealth over decades as their homes appreciated. They then passed on that wealth to their children and grandchildren.

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Revised December 21, 2023

This summer, Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington D.C. will raise their minimum wages, boosting pay for 765,000 workers who will collectively gain more than $615 million in wages. Meanwhile, 15 cities and counties will implement minimum wage increases, providing timely relief for low-wage workers facing rising prices. These updates can all be viewed in EPI’s interactive Minimum Wage Tracker and in Figure A and Table 1 below.

Beginning July 1, Oregon will increase its hourly minimum wage by $0.70 to $14.20, while Nevada’s will increase by $0.75 to $11.25. Washington D.C. will increase its regular minimum wage by $0.90 to $17.00 while increasing its tipped minimum by $2.00 to $8.00. Connecticut increased its minimum wage on June 1 by $1.00 to $15.00 an hour.

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