The minimum wage has lost 21% of its value since Congress last raised the wage
Saturday marks 12 years since the last federal minimum wage increase on July 24, 2009, the longest period in U.S. history without an increase. In the meantime, rising costs of living have diminished the purchasing power of a minimum wage paycheck. A worker paid the federal minimum of $7.25 today effectively earns 21% less than what their counterpart earned 12 years ago, after adjusting for inflation.
After the longest period in history without an increase, the federal minimum wage in 2021 was worth 21% less than 12 years ago—and 34% less than in 1968. : Real value of the minimum wage (adjusted for inflation)
Notes: All values are in June 2021 dollars, adjusted using the CPI-U-RS
Source: Fair Labor Standards Act and amendments
As a result of Congressional inaction, over two dozen states and several cities have raised their minimum wage, including 11 states and the District of Columbia that have adopted a $15 minimum wage. These higher wage standards have increased the earnings of low-wage workers, with women in minimum wage-raising states seeing the largest pay increases. In the rest of the country, however, states have punished low-wage workers by refusing to raise pay standards. As many as 26 states have gone so far as to pass laws prohibiting local governments from raising their minimum wage.
The farmworker wage gap continued in 2020: Farmworkers and H-2A workers earned very low wages during the pandemic, even compared with other low-wage workers
Key takeaways:
- More than two million farmworkers were deemed “essential” amid the pandemic in order to sustain food supply chains, but the latest wage data show that farmworkers were not rewarded adequately: They earned just $14.62 per hour on average in 2020, far less than even some of the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor force.
- At this wage rate, farmworkers earned just under 60% of what comparable workers outside of agriculture made in 2020—a wage gap that was virtually unchanged since the previous year. They also earned less than workers with the lowest levels of education.
- The wage paid to most farmworkers with H-2A visas—known as the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR)—was even lower, with a national average of $13.68 per hour. (The AEWR is based on a mandated wage standard that varies by region and is intended to prevent underpayment.) But many H-2A farmworkers earned far less in some of the biggest H-2A states. In Florida and Georgia—where a quarter of all H-2A jobs were located in 2020—H-2A workers were paid the lowest state AEWR, at $11.71 per hour.
- Farmworkers are employed in one of the most hazardous jobs in the entire U.S. labor market and suffer very high rates of wage and hour violations, and the majority of farmworkers who are unauthorized migrants or on H-2A visas are even worse off, with limited labor rights and heightened vulnerability to wage theft and other abuses due to their immigration status. Congress should take immediate action to improve labor standards for all farmworkers and provide migrant farmworkers with a path to citizenship.
Near the start of the pandemic in 2020, numerous work and travel restrictions were implemented in the United States to slow the spread of COVID-19. But for most workers, including farmworkers, options like remote work were either not permitted or not feasible. The more than two million farmworkers who grow, harvest, and pack the crops that end up on grocery store shelves were deemed “essential” and expected to work to keep food supply chains up and running.
Were those farmworkers ultimately rewarded and valued for their massive contributions to society? It appears not—the latest wage data show that farmworkers continued to earn far less than even some of the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. labor force, which suggests their important work continues to be undervalued. This post reviews the wages that farmworkers earned in 2020 relative to other comparable sets of workers.
Worker-led state and local policy victories in 2021 showcase potential for an equitable recovery
What new world of work can be built from the crisis COVID-19 created for workers and working-class communities? Some 2021 state and local policy victories are providing early answers. Across the country, workers are organizing to win policy changes aimed at strengthening labor standards, raising wages, reversing long-standing race and gender-based exclusions from labor rights, and building power to ensure these gains are not short-lived. The following examples of campaign and policy victories from recent legislative sessions are just the beginning of what is necessary to create a world where all work truly has dignity.
Building worker power and protecting the right to organize at the state level
Long before COVID-19, the right to unionize varied widely depending on a worker’s occupation, race, gender, or ZIP code. Union workers had more job security during the pandemic, and more workers are expressing interest in gaining a voice on the job through a union, yet legal exclusions and steep barriers to organizing mean that far too few workers have access to the union protections they want and need. Because federal labor law still excludes farmworkers, domestic workers, and public-sector workers from coverage, states are left to determine whether millions of disproportionately Black, Brown, immigrant, and women workers in front-line occupations will have legal rights to pursue a union contract.
This year, educators, care workers, farmworkers, and public servants acutely affected by the pandemic worked to accelerate the passage of proposals to expand labor rights and defend existing rights from ongoing state legislative attacks. Colorado enacted a groundbreaking, comprehensive Farmworker Bill of Rights extending full rights to organize unions and collectively bargain to 40,000 farmworkers across the state in a significant effort to advance worker power at the state level. The legislation also includes new workplace safety protections, rights to minimum wage and overtime pay, anti-retaliation protections, rest and meal breaks, and other minimum standards that have long covered workers in other sectors.
Care workers are deeply undervalued and underpaid: Estimating fair and equitable wages in the care sectors
The Biden administration has made large investments in care work—both child care and elder care—key planks in its American Jobs Plan (AJP) and American Families Plan (AFP). These investments would be transformative, and a greater public role in providing this care work can make the U.S. economy fairer and more efficient. The administration has also recognized the need to pay workers in these sectors higher wages—which are sorely needed—but setting a fair wage standard for care workers presents unique challenges.
For a variety of systemic reasons, including racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, there has never been a set of institutions that has managed to carve out decent wages and working conditions in care work. For example, the average hourly wages for home health care and child care workers are $13.81 and $13.51, respectively, which is roughly half the average hourly wage for the workforce as a whole. So, unlike in sectors like construction, a “prevailing wage” standard would just cement the industrywide insufficient wages currently experienced in care work.
But just because it’s challenging doesn’t mean it’s impossible to establish strong wage standards in this sector. All wages in the U.S. economy are politically and socially determined, but given that care work is heavily publicly financed, care wages are especially determined by political decisions (via commission or omission). As a result, there is a strong administrative responsibility and opportunity to set equitable wages in this sector. This research memo outlines a number of ways to improve the wage standard for care workers and is a preview to a forthcoming, more comprehensive research report.
Civil monetary penalties for labor violations are woefully insufficient to protect workers
Key takeaways:
- Workers’ rights and safety violations receive significantly lower fines than financial and corporate law violations. And in many cases, these violations involve no monetary penalty at all.
- Because workers’ rights and safety violations result in such low financial penalties, these fines function as the cost of doing business rather than as deterrents.
- The ineffective nature of workers’ rights enforcement often leads to repeated workers’ rights and safety violations with little incentive for employers to improve conditions.
Civil monetary penalties—fines imposed when a law or regulation is violated—are enforcement tools. Agencies utilize them to enforce statutes and regulations, and the minimum and maximum civil penalties may be established administratively or by statute. By examining civil monetary penalties for violations of various key federal laws, we find a striking pattern: Workers’ rights and safety violations are assigned a significantly lower penalty value than violations of other laws—characteristic of a system that unjustly undervalues workers. While employers and corporate officials face significant civil monetary penalties for breaking the law related to consumer finance, lobbying, and insider trading regulations, violations of fundamental labor and worker protection laws involve only minimal civil monetary penalties or even no monetary penalty at all.
Policymakers cannot relegate another generation to underresourced K–12 education because of an economic recession
Key takeaways:
- Federal education funding and additional recovery funds targeted to education during recessions can help if they are sufficiently large and are sustained for long enough.
- During the Great Recession, federal funding and additional recovery funds targeted to public K–12 education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided an initial and critical counterbalance to the defunding brought about by the recession, but these funds were phased out far too prematurely.
- Nationally, total real revenue per student lagged behind the pre-recession level, on average, for eight school years after the onset of the last economic downturn.
- The reductions in total revenue per student were not uniform across districts: High-poverty districts and their students experienced the biggest shortfalls—and a very sluggish recovery.
As Congress debates the appropriate amount of investments needed to boost the economic recovery from the COVID-19-induced recession, we can learn a lot by carefully looking at the decisions made in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. One of the clearest lessons of that period is that spending by the federal government largely dictated the amount of economic suffering for those hit the hardest. When that spending falls short of what is needed, some groups never fully recover.
School finance deserves a place in this discussion. Federal support to education plays a critical role in filling recession-induced fiscal gaps that open at the state and local levels, and maintaining education funding during economic downturns contributes to a faster and fuller economic recovery. As we discuss in this post, if federal investments in public education had been larger, sustained as needed, and allocated in a way that channeled further assistance to districts serving larger shares of low-income students, they would have better assisted our students, schools, and communities in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
May Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows job openings held steady and quits dropped
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her initial insights on today’s release of the Jobs and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for May. Read the full Twitter thread here.
The layoffs rate continued to trend downwards while the hires rate softened and the quits rate fell. It’s clear the monthly data exhibits some volatility, but the labor market over the last few months continues to move in the right direction.
2/n pic.twitter.com/NBeut1IAIp— Elise Gould (@eliselgould) July 7, 2021
June jobs report shows strong growth and the promise of recovery: Initial comments from EPI economists
EPI economists offer their initial insights on the June jobs report below. They see strong growth in employment, especially in leisure and hospitality—the numbers do not signal a big labor shortage. The economy appears to be on its way to a full recovery by the end of 2022.
From economist and director of EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (@ValerieRWilson)
Read the full Twitter thread here.
The 850k jobs added in June reflects lifting of more COVID-19 restrictions in time for summer, no indication of labor shortage, and on pace to reach pre-COVID unemployment rate by end of 2022. 1/n
— Valerie R Wilson (@ValerieRWilson) July 2, 2021
Job and wage growth do not point to an economywide labor shortage
Highlights: Labor shortage
- The available data suggest that we’re seeing a relatively brisk adjustment to a large and positive economic demand shock, not an economywide labor shortage.
- In a measure of wage growth that controls for composition bias—the Atlanta Wage Growth Tracker—wage growth in the first 15 months following the COVID-19 economic shock has been comparable to the weak wage growth seen during the 2001 and 2008 recessions.
- Job growth by industry is very well predicted simply by the size of the jobs deficit that remained from the COVID shock—in fact, job growth in leisure and hospitality has been a bit higher than one would expect given the size of the COVID-19 hit to that industry.
Monthly job growth over the past three months has averaged 540,000, a pace that would see the economy hit pre-COVID measures of labor market health by the end of 2022. While recovery can’t come soon enough for U.S. workers, if we do hit this target of pre-COVID labor market health by the end of 2022 it will constitute a recovery that is roughly five times as fast as that following the last downturn (the Great Recession of 2008–2009, when reattaining pre-recession unemployment rates took a full decade).
Disappointing Supreme Court decision makes it harder for farmworkers to unionize
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court published its decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, a case involving an employer challenge to a California regulation that allows union representatives to visit the property of agricultural employers—in narrowly tailored and time-limited circumstances—to carry out efforts to organize the hundreds of thousands of California farmworkers who work in hazardous and low-paying jobs and who suffer disproportionately high rates of wage and hour violations.
In a disappointing 6–3 decision, the Court’s conservative justices ruled that the California regulation constitutes a per se physical taking of the employer’s property, which in practical terms means union organizers will no longer have the right to access the farms where farmworkers are employed.
The vast majority of farmworkers across the country are not protected by the National Labor Relations Act—the federal law that enshrines the right of workers to join and form unions. In an attempt to fill that gap for farmworkers in California, over four decades ago the state’s legislature passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA), which established collective bargaining rights for farmworkers, and then-governor Jerry Brown signed it into law in 1975. The ALRA’s access regulation enables organizers to visit the properties where farmworkers are employed, allowing the law to be implemented and have real meaning for workers.