This week the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) will meet to decide whether or not to raise interest rates. By now this is a familiar debate. Some (call them hawks) argue that rate hikes are needed to slow the pace of economic growth and slow progress in reducing unemployment in the name of combating potential inflation. Others (call them doves) argue that we should not tighten until we’re absolutely sure that genuine full employment has been locked in. The past years’ evidence argues strongly that the doves are right.

Let’s start with the Fed’s own projections, which some Fed officials recently pointed to during a meeting with the Fed Up coalition to claim that interest rate increases were not meant to slow the economy or raise unemployment.

The table below shows the Fed’s current projections for the unemployment rate and other variables. They forecast that it will move from today’s 4.9 percent to 4.7 percent in the last three months of this year, and then fall further, to 4.6 percent for 2017 and 2018. After this it rises (after some unspecified time) to its long-run equilibrium of 4.8 percent. This 4.8 percent long-run rate is essentially the Fed’s estimate of the “natural rate of unemployment”—the lowest rate the economy can stay at without sparking an acceleration of inflation (this acceleration terminology is key: it’s not just inflation rising from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent, it’s inflation that rises from 1.5 percent to 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent to 4.5 percent and so on). Importantly, in the Fed’s forecast, the unemployment rate falls over the next three years even as the projected federal funds rate is moved steadily up. By 2018, the 4.6 percent unemployment coincides with a 2.4 percent federal funds rate (it is just 0.25 percent today).

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Hoping to equate the H-1B temporary foreign worker program with permanent immigration, advocates often lump the H-1B visa together with lawful permanent residence (also known as “green card” status). But the H-1B is a temporary, nonimmigrant visa for guestworkers, not a permanent immigration status that would eventually put a migrant worker on a path to American citizenship.

The H-1B program can serve as a bridge to permanent immigration for many educated and skilled foreign workers; in fact, between 2010 and 2014, an average of 44,000 H-1B guestworkers became immigrants (i.e., lawful permanent residents) each year. The U.S. government approved an annual average of 115,000 new H-1B guestworkers over that same timeframe. The H-1B path to a green card is controlled by the employer. The employer—not the H-1B worker—has the discretion of applying for a green card, and as a result, employers hold a lot of power over the hundreds of thousands of H-1B workers here.

The first step an employer must take to put an H-1B nonimmigrant worker on the path to a green card is to file for permanent labor certification with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), to check if there are any U.S. workers available to fill the job that the H-1B worker is already doing. (These are sometimes referred to as “PERM” applications or the PERM process, which stands for Program Electronic Review Management, the name of the electronic system used by the DOL.) Public data are available showing which companies applied for permanent labor certification for their H-1B workers and for how many, and these data let us examine whether employers typically use the H-1B program as a bridge to permanent immigration—or not. As the table below shows, the top employers received large numbers of new H-1B workers in fiscal 2014 but applied for very few green cards for their H-1B workers.

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Today’s jobs report from the BLS showed that the U.S. manufacturing sector lost 14,000 jobs in August and has now lost 57,000 jobs since January of this year. This job loss is, in part, a consequence of the sharp rise of the dollar in 2014 and 2015, which has gained nearly 20 percent on a broad, trade-weighted basis, as shown below. The rising dollar has reduced the cost of imports, increased the cost of U.S. exports resulting in growing trade deficits. Growing exports support U.S. employment, but growing imports cost U.S. jobs, so the manufacturing decline was entirely predictable from the expected increase in the U.S. trade deficit, which responds to changes in the dollar with a lag of one to two years. Yet the U.S. government continues to do nothing about destructive exchange rate movements, whether they are caused by intentional currency manipulation or more recent, market-driven misalignments.

Data for the U.S. trade deficit in July were also released this morning. The trade deficit in manufactured products (Exhibit 1S) increased 3.1 percent, year to date, relative to the same period last year, despite a decline in the overall U.S. trade deficit. U.S. imports of petroleum products declined sharply in this period, while the trade deficit in non-petroleum goods (which is dominated by trade in manufactures) increased sharply. The single largest cause of the growing manufacturing trade deficit is malign neglect of currency manipulation over the past 20 years by the U.S. government.

China, which has been the most important currency manipulator over the past two decades, was responsible for nearly two thirds (61.3 percent) of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods in 2015. The trade deficit with China increased in July. China has also distorted trade by generating massive amounts of excess production capacity in a wide range of industries, including steel, aluminium, glass, paper and renewable energy products. China’s capacity growth has been fueled by illegal subsidies and other unfair trade practices. A new report from Duke University explores the impacts of overcapacity in China’s steel industry.

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Today’s jobs report came in somewhat underwhelming. This morning, I compared payroll employment growth to weak tea and the labor market saw little to no improvement in other key measures. Yesterday, I urged readers to look under the hood of the headline jobs day numbers and see how well the economy is treating workers across various demographic groups. Today, I’m going to take one statistic from today’s report and see how various groups have fared.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate is 4.9 percent. Let’s just remember for a moment that the unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work, taken as a share of the labor force. So, this leaves out the estimated 2.2 million workers who we expect will return or join the labor force as job opportunities improve. With these missing workers, the unemployment rate would be 6.2 percent. It also leaves out workers who want to work full-time but could only find part-time work or those who might have looked in the last year, but not in the last month. Adding these in, the underemployment rate would be 9.7 percent.

Even with those caveats, I must admit the official unemployment rate is still quite a useful measure. And, along with nominal wage growth, it’s a key measure the Federal Reserve watches when deciding how to act on interest rates. At 4.9 percent, the unemployment rate is 0.3 percentage points higher than it was in 2007, before the recession began, and 0.9 percentage points higher than the last time the economy was at full employment (2000). In fact, for five months in 2000, the unemployment rate was below 4.0 percent, hitting a low of 3.8 percent in April 2000. Examined another way, the unemployment rate is 1.1 times higher today than in 2007 and 1.2 times higher than in 2000.

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Earlier this week, I analyzed the latest wage data by percentile, which shows that inequality has grown since the last business cycle peak in 2007. Today, I’m going to discuss the latest wage data by education groups. The main takeaways are four-fold. First, women are consistently paid less than men across all education groups. Second, wages have increased more for those with a college or advanced degree than for those with lower levels of education, both in the past year and since 2007. Third, the increase in the college premium since 2007 is dwarfed by the growth in wage inequality generally. And fourth, much of the increase in wages in the last few years has been driven by historically low inflation, as opposed to strong or accelerating nominal wage growth.

The table below shows first half (FH) average wages for 2007, 2015, and 2016 by highest level of education attainment and by gender. You can see that at every level of education, men are paid more than women—illustrating the difficulty of women to educate their way out of the gender wage gap. In fact, the gap grows with increasing levels of education. One particular striking finding is that men with just a bachelor’s degree are paid more, on average, than women with an advanced degree.

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It’s well documented and widely understood that wage inequality has grown dramatically over the last four decades as productivity and compensation growth have become delinked. Despite an expanding and increasingly productive economy, wages have stagnated for the vast majority. Looking at the most recent data—through the first half of 2016—we see that wage inequality has continued to grow, with top earners faring far better than those in the middle or bottom of the wage scale. First, the data paints a striking picture of growing wage inequality since the last business cycle peak in 2007. Second, average wage growth overall is slow, and any significant real wage growth continues to be driven by low (and below target) inflation—not meaningful acceleration in nominal wage growth. Last, strong payroll employment growth the last couple of months suggests positive future trends for not only wage growth, but also declining unemployment and rising labor force participation.

The figure below shows the disparate growth across the wage scale from 2007 to 2016 (using the most recent data, for the first six months of 2016, and comparing to wages at each decile and at the 95th percentile to those of the comparable period in 2007). I’m comparing the first half (FH) of both years to maintain the same seasonality in the data. Plus, it gives us a glimpse of what’s happened through the first half of this year. Except for the lowest wages—at the 10th percentile—what you see is a clear increase in growth as one moves up the wage distribution, from negative growth at the 20th percentile (-2.8 percent) to the fastest growth at the 95th percentile (10.4 percent). At the median, real wages grew a total of only 0.8 percent over the nine-year period. So, not only did the labor market since 2007 perpetuate the wage stagnation and inequality of the previous three decades, it has actually exacerbated it.

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The final rule implementing President Obama’s executive order on fair pay and safe workplaces has been issued, along with guidance from the Department of Labor. This is a big deal, affecting as many as 28 million employees in the workforce of hundreds of thousands of government contractors.

The executive order puts in place a commonsense principle: when choosing which companies to do business with, choose the ones that follow the rules rather than the law breakers. Tax dollars should go to contractors with a record of integrity and business ethics, and should not be spent on bad actors. The executive order makes it clear that violations of labor law are an indication of bad ethics and a lack of integrity that must be considered when contracts are awarded.

As part of the contract approval process, federal contractors will have to reveal to the contracting agency any labor law violations they have been found guilty of committing in the previous three years. An agency can refuse to grant a contract to a company that has not resolved its violations. Today, by contrast, it is perfectly normal that a company with several OSHA violations, a National Labor Relations Act violation, and a judgment for wage theft and overtime pay violations could win a $200 million contract from the Department of Transportation or the Defense Department. In fact, the GAO found that almost two-thirds of the 50 largest wage-and-hour violations and almost 40 percent of the 50 largest workplace health-and-safety penalties issued between FY 2005 and FY 2009 were made against companies that went on to receive new government contracts.

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The White House is making one last push for passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, most likely during the lame duck session of Congress, after the elections but before the end of the year. This is despite the fact that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton opposes the TPP, as did Bernie Sanders, her rival in the primary, and as do the majority of Democratic members of Congress.

Let’s review the basic facts. Growing imports of goods from low-wage, less-developed countries, which nearly tripled from 2.9 percent of GDP in 1989 to 8.4 percent in 2011 (as shown in Figure A, below), reduced the wages of the typical non-college educated worker in 2011 by “5.5 percent, or by roughly $1,800—for a full-time, full year worker earning the average wage for workers without a four-year college degree,” as shown by my colleague Josh Bivens.

Overall, there are nearly 100 million American workers without a 4-year degree. The wage losses suffered by this group likely amount to a full percentage point of GDP—roughly $180 billion per year. Crucially, trade theory and evidence indicate strongly that growing trade redistributes far more income than it creates. The modesty of net benefits from trade is highlighted by the U.S International Trade Commission report that recently estimated that the TPP would generate cumulative net gains of $57.3 billion over the next 16 years, or less than $4 billion per year.

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The U.S. economy has staged an impressively steady (if too slow) recovery from the Great Recession.  But more than 7 years in, genuine full employment has not been reached—and until it is there is no reason for the Federal Reserve to begin the process of reining in economic growth. This is frustrating to many central bankers, who have traditionally seen their primary job as making sure that the economy does not grow too fast and generate wage and price inflation. But the economy has decisively changed, and it is sustaining growth, not restraining it, that has become the central problem to be solved. The old school of central banking that demanded comparatively hair-trigger responses to inflation is based on the experiences of the 1970s. Today’s central bankers should instead pay a lot more attention to the 1990s.

Today’s unemployment rate sits at 4.9 percent. This represents tremendous progress from the late-2009 unemployment peak of 10.0 percent. And many policymakers think that 4.9 percent unemployment clearly constitutes full employment—the lowest unemployment can fall without sparking an unsustainable spiral of wage and price inflation. But there is very little evidence that this is the case. For example, between 2005 and 2007, the unemployment rate averaged 4.8 percent, yet inflation-adjusted wages for the large majority of American workers fell in those years. And since the recovery from the Great Recession began, both wage and price growth have fallen well below targets the Fed sets for a healthy economy. So the key question is why is there pressure to raise rates ahead of data indicating any swell of wage and price growth pressure?

The answer is largely: the 1970s. The worry is that the rapid increase in inflation that occurred in that decade, with wages and prices chasing each other upwards for a long spell of time, tells us that inflation can seem quiescent but then leap forward quickly. This 1970s wage/price spiral is the primary episode that informs many central bankers’ thinking on why they must always keep a firm hand on the reins of inflation.

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The top 10 H-1B employers all use the program to send American jobs offshore. All of the firms are leaders in using the offshore outsourcing business model to sell information technology (IT) Services. Contrary to what some have claimed, not all of the top H-1B offshore outsourcing companies are Indian companies or headquartered in India: Five of the firms have their headquarters in India, four are headquartered in the United States, and one is headquartered in Ireland. But all of the top 10 have a common business model with large workforces in India and other low-cost countries.

In 2014, the U.S. government granted these ten firms 25,227 new H-1B workers, nearly 30 percent of the 85,000 annual quota.

And 2014 was not an unusual year. Over the ten-year span from 2005-14 those offshoring firms brought in a staggering 170,535 new H-1B guestworkers (see Table 1). Virtually all of these jobs can, and should, be done by American workers or lawful permanent residents (i.e., permanent immigrants already living in the United States). In fact, in many cases American workers were already doing the job, and they are being directly replaced, often being forced to train their foreign guestworker replacements as a condition of severance agreements. As Craig Diangelo, an American worker who was forced to train his H-1B replacement put it, “The sad part is that my job is still there… It didn’t go away. I went away.”

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The Department of Labor has issued an update to its overtime rules that will bring an additional 12.5 million salaried employees under the exemption threshold, the level below which they are guaranteed overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in a week, regardless of their job title or duties. The Department of Labor estimates that about 4 million employees will gain the right to overtime pay for the first time, and 8 million more will have their right to overtime pay strengthened.

Business groups know that with wages stagnant and profits at all-time highs, they are unsympathetic opponents of the rule, so they have been focusing attention on non-profits. The Society of Human Resources Management, for example, has adopted Operation Smile, a non-profit that helps coordinate cleft palate surgeries in less-developed countries, as its poster child. An Operation Smile executive testified in the U.S. Senate against the new overtime rule, claiming that it would raise the organization’s costs dramatically and reduce its ability to deliver cleft palate surgeries:

“Yet still, this proposed update will increase our payroll cost by nearly $1 million annually affecting over 50 percent of our workforce. This is not a financial cost we can absorb. Considering that a cleft lip surgery costs an average of $240, this would mean nearly 4,200 fewer surgeries provided globally each year.”

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This post originally appeared in Democracy.

This election will be different, not only because of the stark departure of Donald Trump’s candidacy from any usual political convention, but also because the current economic debate is unlike any in recent memory. This was further elucidated by the plans each candidate laid out in Michigan this week. It is noteworthy, first of all, that both candidates have joined in calling for greater infrastructure spending, have abandoned the traditional approach toward trade and opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), have proposed subsidizing child care expenses, have highlighted wage stagnation, and have each claimed to be able to provide faster economic growth than the other.

It would be pointless, however, to delve into precise policy details without first commenting on the disturbing nature of the Trump candidacy. Among the least of his campaign’s problems is that it fails to elaborate on any of its positions or provide any kind of science or data, that would allow a proper assessment of its proposals. Trump has offered many broad ideas about taxes, but the details are strikingly few. Similarly, Trump’s budget plans just don’t add up: He wants more military spending, more infrastructure spending, and no cuts to Medicare or Social Security, along with huge tax cuts—all while claiming he would still move toward a balanced budget. Of course, most problematic is Trump’s bigotry and misogyny, and the egregious character flaws he displays almost daily: authoritarianism, dishonesty, volatility, and a lack of compassion.

But setting all that aside for the moment…

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A recent Bloomberg View op-ed and Politico report have raised questions into whether Melania Trump, a Slovenian immigrant, former supermodel, and wife of the current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, was employed legally in the United States in the mid-1990s while she was in a temporary visa status. (The Washington Post also has a good Q-and-A-style rundown of the issues involved.) The op-ed and reports analyzed Ms. Trump’s past statements about her immigration status and juxtaposed them with the fact that it appears she was employed as a model during that period. If Ms. Trump was in the United States with a lawful immigration status and that status authorized her to be employed (for example, if she held an H-1B visa), then there’s really no issue here to discuss. But Ms. Trump’s response on Twitter to the Politico report did not answer the main questions that were raised: what was her visa status and did it authorize employment?

Since the reports were published, Ms. Trump’s former modeling agent has told the Associated Press that he sponsored an H-1B visa—a temporary work visa that allows employment in the United States for up to six years—for her in 1996. But photos she modeled for which have recently surfaced appear to have been taken in the United States in 1995. Without knowing more or being able to look at her immigration records on file at the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (which Ms. Trump could ask for and release, if she wanted to), it is reasonable to conclude that if she was in fact employed in 1995 and 1996—before she was issued an H-1B—it’s entirely possible that she was unlawfully employed while in the United States on a B-1 business visitor visa, a B-2 tourist visa, or a combination B-1/B-2 visa. Those visa statuses don’t permit employment, although a B-1 status might permit certain business activities (including a single, unpaid photo shoot) as long there is no payment from a U.S. source. But even in the case of a B-1, working for an extended period in the United States as a model would raise serious questions under U.S. law.

We will probably never get a final answer on this, but the situation raises a more important issue: there is a severe and troubling lack of government regulation, oversight, and enforcement when it comes to U.S. temporary (also known as “nonimmigrant”) visa programs.

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gave an economic policy speech yesterday. Besides peddling his standard trade scam, Trump doubled-down on one of his favorite tax scams, and unveiled an entirely new scam.

The speech itself was wrapped in the guise of global economic “competitiveness,” a mostly meaningless term which my colleague Josh Bivens and I will expand further on in an upcoming paper. Trump misleadingly claims that U.S. firms face the highest taxes in the world, and therefore his plan slashes the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 15 percent. Since capital income is heavily concentrated at the very top of the income distribution, and the corporate income tax largely falls on the owners of capital, this is a steeply regressive tax cut.

But Trump would go one step further, creating an enormous tax loophole for the rich by applying his 15 percent corporate rate to “pass-through” entities as well. Pass-through entities are businesses whose income are not taxed at the corporate level, but rather passed through entirely to the businesses’ owners and then taxed at the owners’ individual income-tax levels. High-income households can easily avoid paying their full income tax bill by reclassifying their income as pass-through income. This loophole allows Trump to claim that he is closing the carried interest loophole, while actually lowering the rate that hedge fund managers would pay from 23.8 percent to 15 percent. Incidentally, this loophole has already been tested, which proved disastrous for Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. So disastrous in fact, that Kansas primary voters have ousted more than a dozen Brownback-aligned incumbents in response.

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In a story in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, reporter Eric Morath notes that the recovery from the Great Recession has been historically slow. “In terms of average annual growth,” he writes, “the pace of this expansion has been by far the weakest of any since 1949.” Missing from this story is the fact that our historically weak recovery has been accompanied by historically deep cuts in government spending. The figure below compares the strength of expansion for each recovery since 1949 with changes in government spending (it includes data on the strength of each expansion, as reported by Morath). You can see that almost every other recovery was accompanied by an increase in federal, state, and local government spending.

During a recession, changes in government spending have a “multiplier effect” on output and income: each dollar of additional spending increases—and each dollar cut spending decreases—GDP by much more than one dollar. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 was the worst on record since the Great Depression of the 1930s, in terms of both total decline in real GDP, and total increase in the unemployment rate between the previous peak and the beginning of the subsequent recovery. The economy was in a very deep hole in 2009, and had we spent the way we did after previous recessions, we would have experienced substantial increase in GDP since then. Instead, cuts in government spending over the last eight years have had a pernicious, negative impact on output and income, as well as on jobs and wages, which depend on the level of spending in the economy. If it weren’t for these cuts, the economy would likely be fully recovered by now, and the expansion would have equaled or exceeded the Bush recovery.

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A version of this article appeared in the Globalist.

U.S. trade policy of the last 20 years, if not dead, is on life- support. The economic case for the series of neoliberal trade deals since the North American Free Trade Agreement has collapsed in the wake of job losses, lower wages and shrinking opportunities for American workers. Voters are hostile, and both candidates for President oppose the latest proposed trade pact—the Trans Pacific Partnership.

But neoliberal trade deals have brought enormous profits to America’s multinational corporate investors. So, big business lobbyists and their champions in the Congress and the Administration are organizing to pass the TPP in the post-election lame duck session—regardless of who wins the election.

With their economic arguments discredited, they are now draping these trade and investment pacts with a mantle of moral superiority. American workers who complain are now told that they should be ashamed of themselves. Why? Because off-shoring their jobs helps workers in other counties who are even poorer.

Paul Krugman tells his New York Times readers that they should support “open world markets…mainly because market access is so important to poor countries.”

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Burgeoning research in economics and epidemiology suggests that raising the minimum wage will improve the health of many Americans, especially low-income Americans, and this improvement should help bend the cost curve for medical care.

In a paper published by the University of Chicago Press, David Meltzer and Zhou Chen analyzed the relationship between obesity rates and the minimum wage, using data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from 1984-2006. The BRFSS interviews more than 350,000 adults each year, making it the largest health survey in the world. Meltzer and Chen test whether changes in the inflation-adjusted minimum wage are associated with changes in body mass indexes of adults. They find that gradual erosion in the inflation-adjusted value of minimum wages across states explains about 10 percent of the increase in average body mass since 1970. DaeHwan Kim and I found additional evidence that low wages predict increases in obesity in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a nationally representative sample of 5000 American families, who have been followed since 1968 by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center. Obesity is estimated to cost $190 billion in medical bills each year. A 10 percent decrease in obesity would result in a $19 billion of savings every year.

But it is not just obesity that may be affected by increasing the minimum wage; mental health can be affected, as well. The British government increased the national minimum wage in 1999. To measure its effects on public health, Reeves et al analyzed data on 279 workers in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). Their “experimental group” consists of 63 workers directly affected by the new wage and two “control groups”: 107 workers with incomes 10 percent above the minimum who were not directly affected by the increase, and another group of 109 workers employed in firms that did not comply with the new law. All 279 persons completed short mental health questionnaires as part of the BHPS. The “experimental group” (those who received the mandated minimum wage increases) reported improvements in anxiety and depression, but neither control group experienced improvements.

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On Monday, Vox.com published an in-depth interview with presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. A wide range of topics were discussed, but of particular interest were Sec. Clinton’s positions on immigration—some of which were, I believe, either new or expressed publicly for the first time—regarding the impact of immigration on the labor market and the major flaws inherent in America’s temporary foreign worker programs.

I was encouraged by the fact that Clinton’s comments on immigration got right to the heart of how the immigration system is used by businesses and corporations to keep migrant workers exploitable and underpaid, which in turn degrades labor standards for U.S. workers who are similarly situated. Clinton rightly pointed out how immigration is good for the American economy, but took what I think was a smart, nuanced perspective—speaking about how the undocumented workforce undercuts labor standards for all workers, because undocumented workers fear deportation and because wage and hour laws haven’t been adequately enforced. It’s also encouraging that Clinton highlighted the problems with one of the main guestworker programs, the H-1B—used mainly for jobs in computer-related occupations—although unfortunately she did not discuss others like H-2B, L-1, or OPT.

I have to confess that I was quite surprised and pleased to hear Clinton make those comments. In the very recent past Clinton seemed reluctant to acknowledge that there were any real problems when it came to immigration and the labor market, or that there could be negative consequences for U.S. workers who are employed in industries where migrants make up a large share of the workforce. In fact, during the presidential campaign Clinton and her surrogates went so far as to use Sen. Bernie Sanders’s critique of guestworker programs—namely, that they leave migrant workers powerless and can degrade wages and labor standards—to attack him as somehow anti-immigration and anti-immigrant. I didn’t feel that this attack was fair or justified, which is why at the time, I defended Sanders’s policy position at length. Around the same time, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka wrote convincingly how “Demanding Guestworker Reforms Is Pro-Immigrant”—but without naming any candidates.

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JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon is really proud about giving his employees a raise, heartily patting himself on the back in a New York Times op-ed. JPMorgan will raise its lowest wage to $12, but over the next three years, and only starting in 2017. That’s a roughly 3.2 percent annual boost after taking projected future inflation into account. This hardly seems to deserve a parade.

Has it really come to this? Has providing a modest wage increase really become breaking news that corporate chieftains send crowing press releases about? Let’s be clear about this—this is not the way it’s supposed to be. Wages rising faster than the rate of inflation should be the norm in the American economy and should occur all the time, without fanfare and self-congratulation from employers. That wage increases are newsworthy even while unemployment is below five percent is quite telling. Even at such a low unemployment rate, all the power in the employment relationship still rests with employers.

Dimon points out that some of his current employees earn $10.15 an hour, and brags that this is $3.00 over the current federal minimum wage. Left unsaid is that the current minimum wage of $7.25 is roughly 25 percent below the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage in 1968, despite the fact that productivity has more than doubled since then. (Of course, the bank’s employees in New York City will be receiving $15.00 at the end of 2018 because of the recently passed minimum wage legislation that applies to the city.)

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Gretchen Carlson is doing working Americans a real service by suing Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, for sexual harassment. First, when a powerful, high profile CEO like Ailes is called out for disgusting behavior, it reminds workers and their bosses everywhere that women have a legal right to be treated with respect in the workplace.

Carlson is doing something else: she is boldly fighting the latest technique employers are using to avoid justice, to get away with sex or race discrimination, and to escape lawsuits for wage theft—putting binding arbitration clauses in employment contracts, which keeps cases out of the state and federal courts and push them into private dispute resolution systems that systematically favor employers.

Millions of working Americans are subject to arbitration clauses that they don’t even know about. More and more employers are forcing their employees, as a condition of being hired or of remaining employed, to waive the right to sue in a court if their employer violates the law. Workers must accept a process they often don’t understand, where the costs of seeking justice might be far higher even as their chances of winning or obtaining a just award of damages are reduced dramatically.

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