We need to raise the federal minimum wage. Its deterioration in value over the past five decades has exacerbated poverty, widened inequality, and lowered wages for the bottom third of wage earners1—despite the fact that these workers typically are older and have more education than their counterparts a generation ago.

One misguided critique of the effort to raise the federal minimum to $15 in 2025 is that there is a need to establish a regionally adjusted federal minimum wage set to local conditions. In fact, federal minimum wage policy has always provided for tailored standards, by coupling a strong national wage floor with the ability for cities and states to adopt higher standards. Our ability to set a national wage floor is much easier now than it was decades ago when lawmakers last raised the federal minimum wage to new heights. In 1968, when the federal minimum wage was lifted to its highest value in U.S. history and coverage of the law was vastly expanded, there were much larger differences in wage levels throughout the country. Yet, we now have empirical evidence that establishing this unprecedented, nationwide minimum wage did not have adverse employment impacts.

Today, the wage levels of lower-wage states, primarily Southern ones, are much closer to overall national wage levels, so there is even less validity to claims that the federal minimum wage must be lowered to accommodate certain areas. Moreover, the ‘bite’ of a $15 minimum wage in 2025—i.e., the share of workers and businesses impacted, and the magnitude of resulting wage increases—will be well within the range of recent experiences of minimum wage increases in states and localities that studies have shown had little, if any, impact on employment. The proposed increase to $15 by 2025 will lead to improved annual earnings for nearly all low-wage workers.

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Pursuing public health initiatives—including the production and distribution of the vaccine—is the most important priority for our health and economic well-being. Further, investments in state and local governments as well as direct assistance to workers and their families have been essential to their financial security and the economic recovery itself. Given advancements on both fronts in recent weeks and months, I expect the labor market recovery to finally pick up steam.

A year into the recession, the labor market is still down 9.5 million jobs from where it stood immediately before the COVID-19 shock. If we add in jobs that should have been created over that time to absorb new workers, we’re facing a jobs shortfall today of nearly 12 million jobs.

As the labor market finally picks up, the key indicators to watch are where the jobs are returning and for whom. The biggest deficit remains in leisure and hospitality, with 3.5 million fewer jobs relative to its February 2020 level. The economic pain caused by losses in this lowest-paying sector was enormous.

Meanwhile, public-sector employment—primarily education employment at the state and local level—remains 1.4 million jobs below pre-pandemic levels. I’m optimistic that the state and local relief that was part of the American Rescue Plan will provide tremendous support to this sector in terms of employment and the vital public services they provide.

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The U.S.’s largest temporary work visa program is the H-1B—an important program that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers. However, the H-1B program is not operating as intended and needs to be fixed: Instead of being used to fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. labor standards, the latest data show that the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have an outsourcing business model. President Joe Biden can and should implement regulations so that outsourcing companies can no longer exploit the program and to prevent them from underpaying skilled migrant workers.

Outsourcing companies exploit the H-1B program’s weaknesses to build and expand a business model based on outsourcing jobs from other companies. In this arrangement, rather than being employed directly by the outsourcing company that hired them, the outsourcer sends its H-1B workers to work for third-party clients, either on- or off-site. The aim of the outsourcing company is ultimately to move as much work as possible abroad to countries where labor costs are lower and profit margins are higher. The H-1B workers serve three purposes in this business model: to facilitate the transfer of jobs and tasks offshore; to coordinate offshore teams; and to serve as a lower cost alternative to hiring U.S. workers for on-site jobs. H-1B outsourcing companies also replace incumbent U.S. workers with H-1B workers and typically pay their H-1B workers the lowest wages permitted by law, far below market wage rates.

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In the wake of the mass shootings in Atlanta on March 16, we must unite to decry the unacceptable hate and discrimination directed toward Asian Americans. But beyond immediate support and a commitment to justice, the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community requires understanding and visibility. And this understanding—particularly with regard to their economic suffering from the pandemic—must be followed by policy, advocacy, and action.

The mass shootings that killed six women of Asian descent and two other people at Atlanta area spas have left the AAPI community in Atlanta and across the country in mourning and on high alert. While the man arrested for the murders has not yet been charged with a hate crime, the hate and discrimination being directed toward Asian Americans is an inescapable fact. According to Stop AAPI Hate, nearly 3,800 incidents targeting Asian-Americans were reported to the organization between mid-March 2020 and the end of February 2021. AAPI women were more than twice as likely to report hate incidents as men. And these incidents, which range from verbal harassment to civil rights violations to physical assault, “represent only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur,” a Stop AAPI Hate report said.

Advocates attribute the rise of hate and harassment of Asian Americans to the increasingly xenophobic language connecting the COVID-19 pandemic with Asian Americans. In reality, AAPI individuals are suffering under the pandemic, especially Asian American women.

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Today ends a seven-week union election voting period for workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. If workers win a union, the results of the election will further energize the labor movement. If Amazon’s efforts at union avoidance prove successful, the election will serve as the most recent example of employers thwarting workers’ efforts to organize a union. Regardless of the outcome of the election, the coercion, intimidation, and retaliation workers at Amazon’s Bessemer facility have endured reveal a broken union election system.

Unfortunately, their experiences are far from unique—employers are charged with violating the law in 41.5% of all union elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The numbers are worse for large employers, like Amazon, where more than half (54.4%) of employers are charged with violating the law.

We have only to look to the recovery from the Great Recession to know that reforming this system is critical to an equitable recovery now. Even though the unemployment rate ultimately got down to 3.5% in the recovery from the Great Recession, low- and middle-wage workers did not get a fair share of that economic growth. If policymakers do not address our nation’s broken labor law system, then they will be the architects of an economy marked by continued inequality and injustice. This moment is an opportunity to prioritize policies that enable working people to have agency over their working lives and win both economic and democratic reforms for themselves and their co-workers.

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act addresses many of the major shortcomings with our current law. Specifically, it would institute meaningful penalties for private-sector employers that coerce and intimidate workers seeking to unionize—as has been clearly documented in the Amazon organizing campaign in Bessemer.

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