In a swift reaction to ugly publicity about suicides, injuries, and mistreatment of workers, Biel Crystal, one of Apple’s most important suppliers of touchscreen cover glass for its iPhones, reached an agreement with the Chinese labor rights group, SACOM, to take three steps toward better conditions by January 2014:

1. Clear work contracts for workers that include details on terms of contract, terms of probation, position, affiliated department.  The company also will not ask workers to turn in the contract when work relation ends.
2. Compensation and assistance for injured workers in accordance with China’s Regulation on Work, related injury insurance and adequate measures to protect workers from work injury.
3. One day off every seven working days.

These very basic protections might seem like minimal progress, but in light of the appalling conditions at Biel Crystal’s plant, even providing limited basic protections is welcome.

The fact that the company has acknowledged such significant shortcomings in these fundamental areas of labor rights shows just how far Apple is from living up to its commitments to decent labor conditions throughout its supplier chain. It should be a reminder to all who follow Apple that the recent report by its hand-picked monitor, the Fair Labor Association, was little more than a whitewash that covered up the truly horrendous labor conditions in the factories that make Apple products. The FLA’s investigation also assessed conditions for less than one-fifth of the workers in Apple’s supply chain and thus missed gross violations at other factories, such as at the Biel Crystal plant.

Take a look at the figure below, which displays comprehensive household income data from the Congressional Budget Office (a fantastic data set).1

The bottom line charts actual household income for the middle income fifth—it’s the average income of households between the 40^th and 60^th income percentiles. So, it’s households that are richer than forty percent of households as well as poorer than 40 percent of households. Think of it as a representative, if narrow, slice of the middle class.

This income rose by 19.1 percent in the 28 years before the Great Recession (1979-2007), or 0.6 percent per year. Better than zero growth for sure, but, could it have been higher?

The top line shows household incomes that start with middle-fifth incomes in 1979, but then are allowed to grow as fast as the overall average growth rate of household incomes. And since the very rich saw extraordinarily fast growth over this period (241 percent cumulative growth for the top 1 percent over this period!), this made overall average growth run much faster than growth for the middle-fifth—which is why that top line pulls progressively farther and farther away from the bottom line over time.

By 2007, if middle-fifth incomes had grown simply as fast as overall average incomes, then they would be 27 percent higher (about $19,000). This is big money for moderate-income families.

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Ezra Klein’s recent piece arguing that inequality is not the defining challenge of our time has attracted plenty of attention by now, so this might be getting old for people, but a couple of more thoughts.

First, I actually think he has a fair point in worrying that inequality could displace failure to fully recover from the Great Recession as a focal point for policymakers (I’ve actually worried a bit about that myself in the past—see here). And while there are plenty of ways that these issues are entangled, there are plenty of ways they’re not, and caring about acting aggressively on inequality is not actually a precondition to agreeing that we should push the U.S. economy back to full-employment (see pieces by economists like Ken Rogoff and Martin Feldstein, who have not shown any real interest in the inequality problem but who argue for boosting demand to complete the recovery).

On the other hand, it’s not like engineering a full recovery from the Great Recession has actually been a pressing focal point for policymakers (outside of the Fed) for a long time now. They really gave up focusing on this around 2011, and rising concerns about inequality are not why they gave up (for the record, the reason they did is simple: Republicans, especially in the House, have been determined to throttle government spending, and the resulting austerity is why the economy is nowhere near full recovery). Another reason to not worry too much about the alleged distraction of inequality is that acting to stem its rise often dovetails pretty nicely with boosting demand and helping recovery. For example, a substantial increase in the minimum wage would actually provide a moderate demand boost. Not a game-changing one, but it moves in the right direction, for sure. And if arguments to return more quickly to full employment are buttressed by invoking issues of inequality rather than “stimulus versus austerity” (a debate that has not borne fruit in the policy realm), that’d be great.

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Ezra Klein has kicked off an expansive and useful conversation about whether reducing inequality or increasing growth (meaning a stronger recovery and driving down unemployment, not longer-term growth, as Matt Yglesias usefully points out), should be the top priority of policymakers. Klein uses my good buddy and former colleague Jared Bernstein’s recent WCEG paper as the starting point. This is good conversation to have, and is no doubt spurred by the founding of CAP’s new WCEG, headed by another former EPI colleague, Heather Boushey. Props also to Paul Krugman, Brad Delong, Matt Yglesias, Dean Baker, Ezra Klein, Jared Bernstein, Tim Noah, Steve Waldman for their thoughts.

I’d like to add a few thoughts to this discussion.

1. There’s a danger to dwelling on the question of ‘does inequality hurt growth?’ if it establishes a litmus test that means addressing inequality requires a firm yes. Some lesser lights from the Manhattan Institute are already using this logic. If inequality has no effect on growth it is certainly still worth working towards more equitable growth because it would mean the vast majority—the 99 percent, you might say—would do far better. My colleague Josh Bivens (in the State of Working America) used the CBO’s comprehensive income data to calculate the middle fifth’s income was lower in 2007 by roughly $19,000 compared to a scenario where there had been equitable growth from 1979 to 2007. Josh refers to this as the inequality tax. I think this is the type of calculation that Krugman was looking for in his most recent post, when he illustrates that inequality matters.Read more

Beginning in 2011, policymakers—particularly Republicans in the House of Representatives— embraced the idea that austerity somehow fosters economic growth. They used the leverage provided by the need to raise the statutory debt ceiling to force steep cuts in spending under the Budget Control Act (BCA). Since then, discretionary spending has been falling, even before inflation adjustments. This austerity has been the primary drag on economic recovery, and has also squeezed spending on education, infrastructure investment, scientific research, and the federal workforce, which will lead to slower future growth and less efficient government. And there appears to be no end in sight even though it has been shown that austerity does not increase economic growth.

The Budget Conference agreement announced earlier this week by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), which the House overwhelmingly passed last night, sets discretionary budget authority limits for fiscal years 2014 and 2015. In the press release announcing the deal, the two co-chairs pointed out that the bipartisan deal for fiscal year 2014—at $1.012 trillion—is midway between the House budget level of $967 billion and the Senate budget level of $1.058 trillion. The agreed upon level is 8 percent less than the fiscal year 2010 discretionary budget authority and 5 percent less than the fiscal year 2011 level (all in nominal terms).

One key question is just how much relief this deal actually provides from austerity’s grip, and what could have happened if there was bipartisan support for active policies to get the economy and labor market back on track? I examine three scenarios.

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The Murray-Ryan budget deal is marginally better than nothing; it prevents another federal government shutdown in January and provides a slight boost to discretionary spending over the next two years, relative to where we’d be absent this deal.

However, the deal demonstrates yet again that U.S. fiscal policy is a mess. Instead of dealing with the economic challenges of today—a sputtering economy, a jobs gap of nearly 8 million separating us from a pre-Great Recession labor market, long-term unemployment still at crisis levels, and nearly three job seekers for every job opening—policymakers are still acting as if future deficits are the single greatest threat to American living standards. No single fact exemplifies Congress’s preoccupation with deficit reduction than this: The Murray-Ryan deal will cut the ten-year deficit by about $23 billion—roughly the same amount as it would cost to extend federal emergency unemployment insurance for another year, a policy that would save 310,000 jobs in 2014.

It has indeed come to this. Given a clear choice, Congress would rather make symbolic gestures toward reducing the medium-term deficit—which is by no means a dire concern—than take on today’s economic challenges and help the most vulnerable among us.

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The third and final verification assessment by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) of remediation steps at three Foxconn factories making Apple products led to a raft of stories with headlines touting the progress on worker rights at Apple’s largest supplier Foxconn. While some reforms reported – such as reducing work weeks somewhat (though not to levels in accordance with Chinese law) and certain safety and health improvements – do represent steps forward, progress has been scant in fundamental areas and critical promises have apparently gone unfulfilled. Unfortunately, it is still accurate to describe Apple’s supply chain as rife with labor rights abuses.

The FLA ignores crucial reforms promised by Apple and Foxconn, including increasing wages enough to offset reductions in work hours, providing back pay for uncompensated work time, and making progress towards a livable wage standard.  On March 29, 2012, the FLA described the basic remedial actions to be undertaken by Foxconn and Apple, including the promises that compensation at Foxconn factories would increase enough to offset any reduction in overtime hours; that Foxconn and Apple would provide retroactive pay for the many circumstances in which workers had not been compensated for all their overtime hours; and that a study would be undertaken to determine the amount of compensation necessary to provide for basic needs (according to the FLA’s own survey, nearly two-thirds of workers said their compensation did not provide them enough to meet their basic needs).

The FLA has not reported progress regarding any of these critical promises; indeed, the final report does not mention them at all.

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Farmworker Justice, the tiny but tireless organization that advocates for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Protection Act (AWPA), a federal law designed to help farmworkers get paid and obtain safe transportation to the fields without fear of retaliation. I worked on the legislation and the implementing regulations 30 years ago as a staffer for Rep. Bill Ford, so I listened with mixed emotions as lawyers familiar with the Act outlined both how the law has helped and where it has fallen short.

AWPA did not change the basic powerlessness of migrant farmworkers, especially the undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America who do most of the farm work in the West and Southwest.  As Hector Sanchez of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Mary Bauer, a legal aid attorney from Virginia, put it, farmworkers still live and work in Third World conditions here in the U.S., the richest country on earth. They are often housed in shacks, trailers, cars, or even chicken coops with no plumbing.

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In the last week, we’ve paid great attention to Nelson Mandela’s call for forgiveness and reconciliation between South Africa’s former white rulers and its exploited black majority. But we’ve paid less attention to the condition that Mandela insisted must underlie reconciliation—truth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela established, and that Bishop Desmond Tutu chaired, was designed to contribute to cleansing wounds of the country’s racist history by exposing it to a disinfecting bright light. As for those Afrikaners who committed even the worst acts of violence against blacks, they could be forgiven and move on only if they acknowledged the full details of their crimes.

In the current issue of the School Administrator, I write that we do a much worse job of facing up to our racial history in the United States, leading us to make less progress than necessary in remedying racial inequality. We have many celebrations of the civil rights movement and its heroes, but we do very little to explain to young people why that movement was so necessary. Earlier this week, the New York Times described how the Alabama Historical Association has placed many commemorative markers around Montgomery to commemorate civil rights heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, but declined—because of “the potential for controversy”—to call attention to the city’s slave markets and their role in the spread of slavery before the Civil War. Throughout our nation, this fear of confronting the past makes it more difficult to address and remedy the ongoing existence of urban ghettos, the persistence of the black-white achievement gap, and the continued under-representation of African Americans in higher education and better-paying jobs.

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Tax increases were considered a dead issue in the discussions leading up to the recent budget deal negotiated by Sen. Murray and Rep. Ryan. The main justification for this position was that tax reform is imminent, and changes to the tax system could be better handled by the experts on the Ways and Means Committee. This argument has been repeated over and over, but it is meaningless. To begin with, the House GOP leadership has made it clear that tax reform will have to be revenue neutral—that is, no revenue increases—so waiting for a tax reform bill in the context of a budget deal makes no sense. Second, the House GOP leadership has made it clear that tax reform will not be considered, let alone introduced, this year. The prospects for tax reform in the next year or the next Congress are, at best, dim. So there was no serious excuse for not increasing tax revenues in the budget deal.

Wholesale tax reform, however, is not needed to increase tax revenues; just a few tweaks to the tax system could raise enough revenue to extend unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term unemployed and provide substantial relief from the sequester over the next 10 years. The table below lists six tax changes, with revenue estimates, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The six changes, which would increase taxes on those taxpayers most able to pay, are:

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Reactions to last night’s budget deal epitomize what’s wrong with American tax and budget policy these days. On the one hand, policymakers are given a pat on the back for simply keeping the government from grinding to a shuddering halt. This is a low bar indeed. On the other hand, the criticisms lobbed against the deal are completely backwards—claiming that the deal is insufficiently ambitious in closing long-run budget deficits.

The deal is indeed insufficiently ambitious, especially when held up against all of the ways intelligent fiscal policy could help American living standards. I recently tried to provide some detail on what fiscal policy would look like if the living standards of low- and moderate-income families actually entered into policymakers’ calculations. For anybody interested in seeing just how far short the deal brokered yesterday was in meeting the economic needs of American families, take a look at that paper, Taking “Middle-Out” Economics Seriously in this Fall’s Fiscal Debates.

The very short version of how yesterday’s deal fell short is as follows:

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On Monday, Paul Krugman dissected the Republican view that emergency unemployment insurance should be ended, throwing 1.3 million jobless workers into immediate financial crisis. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), for example, claims that unemployment compensation keeps workers from taking jobs and that people should be cut off from unemployment benefits after six months to keep them from becoming dependent. The fact is, as Krugman points out, there are far more people looking for work than there are job openings, and for two out of three unemployed workers it is literally impossible to find a job, no matter how hard they work or how small a paycheck they are willing to work for.

The notion that people would rather get unemployment compensation than a job ignores how low weekly benefits actually are. In many states with unemployment rates above the national average, the average pay replacement rate is far lower than the national average. Mississippi, for example, has 8.5% unemployment and a UI pay replacement rate of 28.6%. Tennessee’s unemployment rate is 8.4% and its UI pay replacement rate is 28.2%. And Arizona’s unemployment is 8.2%, while its UI pay replacement rate is a near-rock bottom 24.9%. It’s hard to argue that such stingy benefits are keeping anyone from taking a job. The average weekly benefit in Mississippi in 2013 was $194, which works out to less than $5 an hour for a 40-hour work week.

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The budget deal announced last night by conference chairs Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is better than another government shutdown, but nicer words than this are hard to find to say about it.

By far the worst aspect of it is the failure to extend the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program (EUC) in 2014. Without these extensions, 1.3 million workers will have their benefits cut off at the end of 2013, and another 850,000 workers will exhaust normal UI benefits over the first quarter of 2014.

The share of long-term unemployed workers in the total labor force was 2.6 percent in November—double the share of June 2008, when President Bush first signed the UI extensions into law.

Besides cutting off a vital lifeline to millions of Americans, cutting these extensions also continues the disastrous march towards budget austerity; a march that has been by far the primary contributor to our failure to recover from the Great Recession. Cutting these UI extensions in 2014 will create a fiscal drag on the U.S. economy that will reduce job growth by more than 300,000 over the year.

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When my daughter was in sixth grade she was shocked—SHOCKED—that there were so few women in powerful places, either in the private sector or the public sector. She thought that half of all the top jobs should go to women: half the Senate, half the House, half the CEOs, just like the student council at her school, where there was one boy and one girl for each grade.

I assured her that things were getting better and that by the time she grew up there would be women at the top of every enterprise. She is 22 now, and about to enter the workforce full time. Are we there yet? There are more women in the Senate and in the House, but a new study confirms that women are still not making progress on corporate boards.

In 1995, I worked on the release of the “Glass Ceiling” report (pdf) at the U.S. Department of Labor. Reviewing the report today, it’s clear that we’ve made shockingly little progress since then. I can find some hope in the fact that the recently named CEO of General Motors is Mary Barra. She is not just any old new CEO—she busted through the glass ceiling in one of the most male-dominated industries. But overall, there are so few women in corporate boardrooms that it’s hard to even argue for the need for a ladies room.

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The Job Openings and Labor Turnover data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the ratio of job seekers to job openings remained unchanged in October at 2.9-to-1, which is equal to the worst month of the early 2000s downturn. A ratio of 2.9-to-1 means that for nearly two out of every three job seekers, there are no jobs available, no matter what they do.

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which has provided support to millions of Americans who lost their job through no fault of their own during the Great Recession and its aftermath, should not be allowed to expire on December 28, 2013, as it is set to do. Allowing these benefits to expire would cut a crucial lifeline to millions of unemployed workers and their families at a time when job opportunities remain historically weak.

A blog post by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa in the Wall Street Journal highlights findings from a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that much of the shrinking of the U.S. workforce has been due to workers retiring early, and that given that people who retire early are less likely to reenter the labor force when job opportunities improve, improving economic conditions may not draw these workers back in.

I’ve looked at the breakdown by age of the 5.6 million “missing workers”—potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities in the aftermath of the Great Recession, are neither employed nor actively seeking work. More than three-quarters of missing workers are under age 55 and are therefore unlikely to be early retirees. That means that even if all of the missing workers age 55 and over are early retirees who will never reenter the labor force no matter how strong job opportunities are (a very strong assumption), that still leaves 4.3 million missing workers under the age of 55 who are likely to re-enter the labor force when job opportunities strengthen. In other words, weak labor force participation rate remains a key component of the total slack in the labor market.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.

By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.

NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.

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The American Benefits Council, the American Council of Life Insurers, and the Investment Company Institute released a study this week entitled (no joke): Our Strong Retirement System: An American Success Story (pdf). College professors may want to bookmark this study for textbook examples of cherry-picked data, outdated findings, and hypothetical scenarios contradicted by real-world outcomes. To cite one example: the authors tout the fact that 401(k) participants with at least 30 years’ tenure with the same employer (an unrepresentative group to say the least) have significant savings in their accounts. The authors devote a later section of the report to the unsubstantiated claim that “the 401(k) is a good fit for America’s mobile workforce.”

Mostly, though, the report simply ignores the biggest economic challenge of our time: inequality. As Natalie Sabadish and I note in our Retirement Inequality Chartbook, it doesn’t matter if the “average” household has $86,000 saved in retirement accounts (pdf) if the median (50^th percentile) household has only $2,500 while the 99^th percentile household has $1.3 million (pdf). Simply put, Mitt Romney’s gargantuan IRA doesn’t make up for the fact that most families have virtually nothing saved for retirement, any more than Romney’s lavish Bain Capital compensation made up for the fact that most workers haven’t seen a real raise in years.

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Much of the focus last jobs day was on the government shutdown and its impact on the employment data for October. The November job numbers will likely show at least some reversal of October’s trends in the household survey data, including the increase in unemployment, decline in employment, and decline in labor force participation, as these movements were in part driven by the temporary furlough of government workers (while the BLS stated, and we reported, that the shutdown did not affect the labor force participation rate, further analysis suggests that it likely had some impact). Because of these distortions in the October household survey, the change from October to November will provide little information about the underlying labor market trend. Instead, it’s important to focus on shifts over longer time periods.

The talk about the government shutdown is largely a distraction from the larger issue, namely just how many jobs the economy needs to create to return to pre-recession levels of employment.

In addition to the economic ramifications of the 800,000 furloughed government employees in October, we still face a 1.43 million jobs shortfall in public sector employment. The graph below illustrates the public sector jobs gap from January 2000 through September 2013. In an effort to not overstate the jobs gap which may have temporarily occurred because of the government shutdown, we are omitting October’s numbers. On Friday, this will be updated through November 2013.

Overall, it’s clear that austerity driven job losses in the public sector have been an enormous drain on the recovery.

No one should be surprised that the 5^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in D.R. Horton, Inc. v. NLRB and sided with the corporation against the interests of its employees. (The decision lets employers refuse to hire employees unless they agree to give up any right to file a lawsuit in court or to file a class action or joint grievance before an arbitrator when their employment rights are violated.)

By and large, that is what courts do when they are presented a choice between corporate interests and the rights of workers—especially their rights to unionize or act collectively. The history of American law is an almost unbroken train of cases where courts have trampled the rights of workers to organize against more powerful employers. Even when Congress or state governments act explicitly to protect working families and equalize the balance of power in the workplace, the courts usually take the side of the corporations (they’re people, too, after all). In the 19^th century, the courts treated unions as conspiracies in restraint of trade and applied the anti-trust laws against them. When Congress amended the anti-trust laws in 1914 to free unions from anti-trust regulation, the courts nevertheless found ways to outlaw boycotts, strikes, and picketing. Congress had to pass a new law in 1932 that barred federal courts from issuing injunctions in peaceful labor disputes.

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In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the centrist think tank Third Way’s Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler call economic populism a “dead end for Democrats,” pointing to one lonely data point—Coloradans’ vote against raising taxes to increase education funding—to call into question the entirety of progressives’ economic policy agenda.

Call me crazy, but I’m not prepared to cede the direction of American politics to the 1.3 million people who turned out to vote on a school-tax measure—just 36 percent of registered Colorado voters. For one thing, a similar school-tax measure was defeated by an almost identical margin in the state just two years ago, and yet this result didn’t portend doom to Democrats running state-wide in 2012. And for another, aside from living in a swing state, I’m not sure why these voters are more representative of America than the New Yorkers who on the same day as the Colorado vote elected Bill de Blasio mayor in a landslide, or the Californians who in 2012 voted to increase their income taxes to fund public education.

In any event, Colorado’s vote against a tax increase has very little to do with Americans’ attitudes toward Social Security and Medicare, as Cowan and Kessler presume, and even less in common with the reality of these programs’ fiscal future.

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President Obama hit all the right notes in his speech today addressing income inequality. I was pretty tough on him last July in a similar speech where I said he was better at the diagnosis of the problem than in proposing solutions. In particular, I pointed out he failed to acknowledge that to generate expanded opportunity and a broader middle class requires broad-based wage growth. After all, a good working definition of the middle class is people and families that rely almost exclusively on the income from work—wages and benefits. They don’t have income from owning stocks or other financial assets and don’t receive much ‘transfer income’ from the government.

Today, the president did better; he said “growth alone does not guarantee higher wages and incomes” and said, “the third part of this middle-class economics is empowering our workers.” He followed this with recommendations to strengthen collective bargaining, achieve pay equity for women, rebuild manufacturing and raise the minimum wage. I appreciate that. He noted the need to continue to combat racial discrimination while also asserting the increased prominence of class as a determinant of well-being. Providing more skills and better education is always critical for social mobility and improved productivity. He urged a strengthening of our social safety net, including retirement savings and Social Security. He called for maintaining the unemployment benefits needed to protect the long-term unemployed. And, he said that the Affordable Care Act was an important cornerstone in providing economic security, which it surely is. These are the basic ingredients needed to generate a different set of outcomes than the disheartening ones produced over the last few decades. Bravo!

It was nice to see the President use our research on the pay disparity between CEOs and typical workers (273:1) and the wealth disparity between the top one percent and the median household (288:1).

Sure, there are a few misguided distractions in the speech—more exports, but nothing about trade deficits which involves imports, the need for corporate tax reform—but no reason to dwell on those items at this moment. You always want to see improvement and this speech definitely improves on the July speech. It’s great that he said ”our number one priority is to restore opportunity and broad-based growth for all Americans” and an A+ speech would have inserted ‘wage’ before growth.

In his New York Times column this morning, David Brooks uses a garden metaphor to instruct us on the different functions of the public and private sector. He writes that the government is like the “stem,” providing us with the essential but rather uninteresting infrastructure to allow the “flower” of private life to bloom. Thus, we need parks, public transportation and public safety, but people can provide their own picnic.

Putting aside that there might be other things we need for a picnic—such as safe food and a job with a day off—Brooks’ division of responsibility is reasonable. But the political context of his column is nonsense. What we face today is not some theoretical ignorance of the right balance between things that are private and things that are public; all but the most libertarian understand the public’s role in providing “stem” functions. The reality is that everywhere we look, essential public functions are being undermined, if not destroyed, by privatization.

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Apple’s ugly labor problems aren’t limited to its Foxconn factories, and they aren’t going away.

The labor rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) first exposed the wave of employee suicides at Apple’s Chinese contractor, Foxconn, and the grueling conditions in which hundreds of thousands of employees work. SACOM has regularly revealed Apple’s failure to abide by its so-called code of conduct, and along with another watchdog group, China Labor Watch, has monitored Apple’s failure to live up to its announced intention to clean up sweatshop conditions at its factories in China and to stop the use of indentured student labor.

In April, China Labor Watch reported that two more Apple/Foxconn workers had committed suicide by jumping from buildings to their death. China Labor Watch also found labor law violations at ten other Apple suppliers, including Pegatron.

Now SACOM has released a new report that details the serious labor rights violations at another Apple supplier, Biel Crystal, which reportedly makes 60 percent of Apple’s touch screens. SACOM reports that five Biel Crystal workers employed at its Huizhou factory have killed themselves since 2011. One possible cause is the stress of working horrific hours—11 hours a day, seven days a week, with only a day off in a month. This is a gross violation of Chinese labor law, which limits overtime to 39 hours a month. The Biel Crystal employees work more than twice as much overtime as the law allows.

When will American consumers wake up to Apple’s crushing exploitation of Chinese workers?

This year, EPI is delighted to join the growing ranks of nonprofits participating in Giving Tuesday.

While Americans have embraced the bargain-hunting possibilities of Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday seeks to round out the week that follows Thanksgiving by returning to a theme of giving back. Giving Tuesday, which started last year—largely through the initiative of New York City’s 92^nd St Y—is a day to support nonprofit organizations and kick off the season of annual giving by donating to a charity of your choice.

Of course we hope you will consider a donation to EPI. But the bigger message here is to take time to give back in some way. You can share who you’re giving to and help promote the nonprofits near and dear to your heart using the hashtag #GivingTuesday.

We are deeply grateful for the contributions from supporters we receive throughout the year that fund our research and activities, including this blog. We wish you safe travels and happy holidays, from the EPI family to yours.

National average scores of students on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will be released Tuesday, and we urge commentators and education policymakers to avoid jumping to quick conclusions from a superficial “horse race” examination of these scores.

Typically, The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is given an advance look at test score data by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and issues press releases with conclusions based on its preliminary review of the results. The OECD itself also provides a publicized interpretation of the results. This year, ED and the OECD are planning a highly orchestrated event, “PISA Day,” to manipulate coverage of this release.

It is usual practice for research organizations (and in some cases, the government) to provide advance copies of their reports to objective journalists. That way, journalists have an opportunity to review the data and can write about them in a more informed fashion. Sometimes, journalists are permitted to share this embargoed information with diverse experts who can help the journalists understand possibly alternative interpretations.

In this case, however, the OECD and ED have instead given their PISA report to selected advocacy groups that can be counted on, for the most part, to echo official interpretations and participate as a chorus in the official release.1 These are groups whose interpretation of the data has typically been aligned with that of the OECD and ED—that American schools are in decline and that international test scores portend an economic disaster for the United States, unless the school reform programs favored by the administration are followed.

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Last year, EPI fiscal policy analyst Ethan Pollack released a report showing that a number of revenue increases called for in the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s (CPC) annual budget could support truly significant job-creation programs. Ethan specifically estimated job gains stemming from using the revenue to support infrastructure projects.

Besides national numbers, he also broke down job-gains by every state. We decided to update these numbers with revenue estimates the last CPC budget, just to remind people that even if it is decided (mistakenly) that the budget deficit is too large and cannot be allowed to rise to support job creation programs, these programs can still be funded with progressive tax increases and create jobs (less efficiently than if funded by deficits, but still significant job creators on net).

Our call for financing deficit neutral job programs with progressive tax increases is not simply an ideological preference. Rather, progressive tax increases (i.e., raising money from high-income households and corporations) impose a much smaller drag on economic recovery than broader based increases, allowing for the greatest job gains when paired with infrastructure spending. This is an extremely well documented piece of empirical economics.

Below we have replicated the tables for revenue and job creation using updated numbers. We only show numbers for 2014 through 2016, as the job creation numbers depend on the assumption that the economy is not at full employment. Beyond 2016 it’s impossible to assess this assumption one way or the other.

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The post originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

The deeper you are in the inner sanctums of power, the slower you are to get disturbing news from the rest of the world. So, I suppose it should be no surprise that it has taken so long for a prominent member of the American policy elite to suggest openly to his colleagues that the core assumption upon which they have been managing the economic crisis might be dead wrong.

Four and a half years after the current “recovery” began, economic pain remains widespread. Wages and incomes are still falling, the share of jobless working age people has not declined, and hunger and homelessness are rising.

Yet the Washington/Wall Street message to the rest of America remains: Have patience.

True, acknowledges the official story, we’re in the slowest recovery since the 1930s. But capitalist markets always fluctuate around a long-term trend of expansion at full employment. It follows that what goes down must come up. So, after previously assuring us that a deep recession would mean a strong recovery, they now tell us the deep recession is the reason for the weak one. Anyway, the accepted wisdom continues; as long as the Federal Reserve keeps the cost of capital (i.e., interest rates) low, sooner or later the natural workings of the market will return us to pre-2008 prosperity.

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Yesterday’s NYT column by David Carr about internships doesn’t just bury the lede, it takes it hostage and heads off in the opposite direction before revealing that Carr thinks businesses ought to pay their interns and will be rewarded for it. Carr starts out by seeming to make fun of young people who think they’re too good to get someone else’s coffee and drycleaning and seems in particular to have no patience for an intern who moved to New York to work for Vogue only to find herself being abused and undervalued—and crying into her pillow at night. He argues that lawsuits enforcing interns’ right to be paid might be ill-conceived.

But the column takes an abrupt turn when Carr describes the experience of The Atlantic Media, which ended its practice of hiring unpaid interns soon after the Labor Department issued a Fact Sheet declaring most unpaid internships at for-profit companies illegal. The Atlantic began paying its interns (Carr doesn’t mention that it provided backpay to previous interns who had been unpaid) rather than doing away with internships altogether. It created year-long fellowships involving mentoring and education, substantive work, and honest compensation. Far from suffering financially, the company has thrived. The fellows are diverse, smart, creative, and bring new energy to the company.

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Huffington Post reports a recent floor speech where Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)  condemned the notion that we ought to be cutting back on Social Security benefits rather than expanding them:

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) recently joined the push to increase Social Security benefits, saying the program can be kept solvent for many years with “some modest adjustments.”

“The suggestion that we have become a country where those living in poverty fight each other for a handful of crumbs tossed off the tables of the very wealthy is fundamentally wrong,” Warren said in a Senate floor speech on Monday. “This is about our values, and our values tell us that we don’t build a future by first deciding who among our most vulnerable will be left to starve.”

She added, “We don’t build a future for our children by cutting basic retirement benefits for their grandparents.”

I agree with Warren: It’s morally wrong to cut Social Security benefits when seniors are already struggling and the generations coming behind us will have fewer pensions and lousier savings in their 401(k)s, if they have any savings at all.  We are a wealthy nation, but our wealth is being shifted away from the majority and into the pockets of a smaller and smaller slice of upper income earners and rich families.  As EPI’s State of Working America reveals, from 1983 (when the last major Social Security reform was enacted) through 2010, the wealth of the bottom 60 percent of Americans actually declined.  Even as the nation’s wealth increased by 63 percent, the bottom 60 percent of families were made poorer because a range of policies froze their wages, shipped their jobs overseas, lowered the minimum wage (after adjustment for inflation), and indebted them by raising the price of education.

Further, as much as I agree with Sen. Warren on the merits and understand why she felt the need to push back on the “grandparents vs. grandchildren” framing, I don’t think she went far enough in her argument here—because it is actually the grandchildren who are really the most at risk. Maya MacGuineas and Alan Simpson pretend that if we don’t cut “entitlements” (earned benefits) like Social Security now, we will somehow bankrupt our grandchildren. So their solution is….to cut the grandchildren’s income. Raising the retirement age for the generations coming behind us means cheating them, cutting their benefits when we should be raising taxes now to fund their future benefits.  They are the ones who will lose the ability to retire while they can still enjoy it. They are the janitors, cashiers, factory workers, construction workers, and nurses’ aides who will be forced to work even longer in physical jobs or see their benefits cut to levels even closer to poverty. Already, the average benefit is just a little more than the poverty threshold, $14,760 vs. $11,490.

Besides being morally wrong, cutting Social Security is economically incoherent. As EPI has shown repeatedly, retirement insecurity is growing and essentially every “leg of the retirement stool” besides Social Security is failing American workers and retirees. In short, the next generations will need a strong Social Security system more than ever. If they are to have what they need, Social Security must be expanded, not cut back. Its funding must be shored up by scrapping the cap, the arbitrary limit that lets the top earners escape taxation on salaries over $113,700 a year, while the bottom 90 percent pay on every nickel they earn. Additional benefits will require higher payroll taxes, but those taxes will be a fair price for better financial security for the elderly. For some details on this, see Monique Morrissey’s presentation at the National Academy for Social Insurance from earlier this year.