The Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act provides public-sector workers the right to join in union and collectively bargain
In February 2018, teachers went on a statewide strike in West Virginia to demand just wages and better teaching and learning conditions. For nine days, schools across the state were closed as teachers, students, and community supporters protested at the state capital against the state government’s chronic underfunding of public education and the impact on the teachers and students. After a week and a half of striking, the West Virginia teachers received a pay increase, but more importantly, they sparked a movement that prompted public school teachers across the nation to strike in support for fairer pay and better working conditions.
The teachers in West Virginia and across the nation relied on the solidarity and support from their communities to win these fights, because in many states public-sector workers do not have the right to collectively bargain. Under current federal law, public-service workers do not have the freedom to join in union and collectively bargaining for fair pay, hours, or working conditions. There are more than two dozen states with laws that protect public-service workers’ right to join unions, but dozens more have lack any rights. Last year, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 overturned 40 years of precedent by barring unions from requiring workers who benefit from union representation to pay their fair share of that representation. And states continue to perpetrate the assault on public-service employees by either denying or undermining workers’ ability to act collectively in addressing workplace issues.
The federal government’s housing policies deepened segregation: A response to a critique of The Color of Law
In The Color of Law, I wrote that de facto residential segregation is a myth. The distribution of whites and blacks into separate and unequal neighborhoods in metropolitan areas nationwide was not accidental or merely the product of private activity, but was reinforced, created, and sustained by federal, state, and local policy to a sufficient extent to make these residential patterns a civil rights violation, or de jure segregation. The book describes how the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman administrations required residential segregation in their many housing programs. These two presidencies were the first in American history to invest federal funds in civilian housing.
Until now, reviewers of the book have accepted the book’s extensively documented historical account, as the subtitle summarizes: “a forgotten history of how our government segregated America.”
But now, Richard Walker, director of the Living New Deal, a campaign to promote the legacy of the Roosevelt administration’s public works projects, has written a critique of The Color of Law in the socialist magazine, Jacobin, and I’ve responded.
Immigration enforcement is funded at a much higher rate than labor standards enforcement—and the gap is widening
One clear way to understand the priorities of a government is to look at how it spends money. If it’s true as they say that “budgets are moral documents,” then this Congress and administration do not place much value on worker rights or working conditions. A comparative analysis of 2018 federal budget data reveals that detaining, deporting, and prosecuting migrants, and keeping them from entering the country, is the top law enforcement priority of the United States—but protecting workers in the U.S. labor market and ensuring that their workplaces are safe and that they get paid for every cent they earn is barely an afterthought.
In 2013, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) made headlines with a report that highlighted the fact that appropriations for immigration enforcement agencies exceeded funding for the five main U.S. law enforcement agencies combined by 24 percent. A recent report from MPI updated the numbers, showing that after six years of skyrocketing spending, immigration enforcement agencies received $24 billion in 2018, or $4.4 billion more than they did in 2012 (in constant 2018 dollars). This amounts to “34 percent more than the $17.9 billion allocated for all other principal federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined,” which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service, Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
With $24 billion in federal spending and climbing, immigration enforcement has undoubtedly become the top law enforcement priority of the U.S. government and the Trump administration. Where do labor standards and worker rights fit in?
Worker bonuses slump 22 percent after GOP tax cuts
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation gives us a new chance to look at private sector workers’ nonproduction bonuses in 2018 and March 2019 to gauge the impact of the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The bottom line is that bonuses in the most recent quarter, March 2019, remained very low at $0.72 per hour (in $2018), the same as in December 2018 and far below their $0.88 level in 2017 or the $0.90 level in 2018.
This is not what the tax cutters promised, or bragged about soon after the tax bill passed. They claimed that their bill would raise the wages of rank-and-file workers, with congressional Republicans and members of the Trump administration promising raises of many thousands of dollars within ten years. The Trump administration’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers argued last April that we were already seeing the positive wage impact of the tax cuts:
Following the bill’s passage, a number of corporations made conveniently-timed announcements that their workers would be getting raises or bonuses (some of which were in the works well before the tax cuts passed). But as EPI analysis has shown there are many reasons to be skeptical of the claim that the TCJA, particularly its corporate tax cuts, would produce significant wage gains.
Focus on the boom, not the slump—The Fed’s new policy framework needs to stop cutting recoveries short: EPI Macroeconomics Newsletter

Josh Bivens
For the past six months the Federal Reserve has been soliciting input to guide a reassessment of its “monetary policy framework.” This reassessment has been pegged to the 10-year anniversaries surrounding the financial crisis of 2008–09 and the Great Recession. While the Fed’s policy framework deserves much scrutiny, focusing too narrowly on what it could have done differently during the crisis and its aftermath would be a bad mistake.
The Fed failure that inflicted real damage on low- and middle-wage workers over recent decades was generally not insufficient effort in fighting recessions. Instead, the mistake was cutting short recoveries before they had maximized opportunities for employment and wage growth. In short, the time to worry about Fed actions that do not protect the interests of low- and middle-wage workers is during economic booms, not during slumps.
This newsletter explains why the Fed should keep the following points in mind as it undertakes its reassessment:Read more
Teachers are always there to help, but now we’re the ones who need a boost
The teacher shortage is real and it exists for many reasons. The question is why do we lose so many young educators? What causes them to not enter teaching? Why do many leave their chosen field after just a few years? And how can we make teaching as financially rewarding as other fields when the reality is many localities do not have the funds to raise salaries?
Many colleges and universities now require educators to have a Bachelor’s degree prior to entering an education program. After getting a Bachelor’s degree future teachers have one more year to get teaching credentials or in many cases they can spend two more years getting a Master’s degree.
In other words: teachers face the unenviable choice of incurring greater debt prior to entering the workforce or changing majors and entering the workforce after only four years with less debt but also less credentials. This is a significant problem since students average $30,000 in college debt. Some of my colleagues owe something closer to $60,000 in debt. It is the passion, the call of teaching, the desire to make a difference that leads people into education not the paychecks.
When you consider teacher’s salaries you have to ponder how someone with this much debt can afford to take a starting position with the national average starting salary less than $40,000 in 2017! Why would anyone become a teacher?
It is not surprising that education programs are now considering changing course in Virginia to make education once again a four-year degree program. If we want the best people in education we need to make it affordable to get a degree. We also need to consider the portability of that degree. Some states work with surrounding states for reciprocity of licensure, however; a teacher usually has to take additional courses if he/she relocates too far away. This presents yet another drawback.
A strong worker-centered climate agenda must be central to addressing the next recession
The world’s climate is changing at an alarming rate, and at the same time, investments to address the problem are some of the most promising opportunities to boost the economy—both immediately and in the face of any future recession.
However, if today’s investments fail to address climate change or align with the clean technologies of the future, we cannot build a competitive, prosperous, or fair economy for the long term. And it is equally true that if our climate solutions ignore working people and only reinforce today’s inequality, they will neither be lastingly effective, nor will we have any chance of building the support and momentum we need to see them become reality.
By contrast, acting on climate in ways that are focused on the needs, concerns and aspirations of working people and communities can bridge division, galvanize action, and drive sustained climate and economic progress.
This starts at all levels—local, state and national—with having working people, including labor, community, environmental, equity, and justice advocates, at the table. It requires a bold, inclusive worker-centered agenda that not only addresses our climate and environmental crises at the scale that science and equity demand but also addresses the underlying issues that leave so many Americans struggling paycheck to paycheck, and bearing the disproportionate costs of economic disruption and technological change.
We need to act now, and we also have powerful opportunities to respond to recession and economic distress.
We have the need and opportunity to act at scale. The urgency and breadth of the climate challenge has the potential to mobilize trillions in public and private investment across multiple sectors of the economy: energy, transportation, infrastructure, technology, and community resilience—just to name a few. Any one of these has the potential to be economically transformative, and could provide a major—or targeted—stimulus to the economy.
The next recession will create an opportunity to redefine the government’s role in the economy: Lessons from healthcare organizing
Healthcare in the United States, unlike in other rich nations, is sadly and dangerously tied to the business cycle—because most workers receive insurance coverage through their employers, job losses can be doubly devastating. That’s why it’s important to think about an eventual next recession as an opportunity to redefine the federal government role in the economy, and in the healthcare sector in particular.
It’s remarkable how far the healthcare debate has come in just a few short years and it’s not accidental. The last time Americans saw this level of public dialogue about changing the healthcare system was back in 2008, when Democratic candidates all vowed to reform the system and cover the growing masses of uninsured leading up to the historic election of President Barack Obama in 2008, as well as political trifecta for Democrats in Washington.
For over a year, advocates labored to pass the new law that would eventually expand coverage to 25 million more people, bringing the number of uninsured Americans to a historic low and ushering in the largest expansion of government healthcare since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. Yet, despite its accomplishments and the popularity of individual provisions like pre-existing conditions protections and Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act never reached consistent majority support from voters until President Donald Trump tried to repeal it in 2016.
The fight to save the ACA validated what healtchare advocates have known for years: when it comes to healthcare, most voters don’t like big change—especially changes that would take away healthcare or give the insurance industry more power to jack up prices, deny benefits and discriminate against the sickest people.
Trump’s relentless attacks on the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid turned healthcare into a key election issue in 2018, as well as a driver of Democratic success in regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. The tremendous attention to healthcare in the first two years of the Trump era opened a window into a much larger healthcare debate that serves as a proxy for an alternative vision of the economy and our democracy—one that challenges trickle-down economics and the supremacy of free market ideology.
From the margins to the mainstream: A review of Broader, Bolder, Better
Let’s start with the ending: It can be done. And, spoiler: It works.
“It,” in the new book Broader, Bolder, Better (Harvard Education Press, June 2019), is Integrated Student Supports (ISS), or “initiatives that provide wraparound services that attend to the early-childhood years along with nutritional support, physical and mental health care, and enriching after-school and summer activities in children’s K-12 years” (p.24). Authors Elaine Weiss and Paul Reville are devoted to decipher this “it”, or ISS, in a manner that can only be of help for all communities in the country, especially for those confronting similar challenges. They explain that ISS are not unique, but diverse in most respects. They exist in communities that are small and large, new and old, southern and northern, rural and urban, progressive and conservative. The 12 initiatives—working in school districts such as Joplin, Missouri; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Montgomery County, Maryland; Pea Ridge, Arkansas; or Vancouver, Washington; in part of them, including Austin, Texas; Durham, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New York City, New York; or Orlando, Florida; or across multiple school districts, such as Eastern (Appalachian) Kentucky—that are described in the book in a systematic, transparent, cohesive, and constructive manner are success cases—models that can be used to create “whole-child systems of education” (p.24). The book classifies the cases by their various types of ISS strategy they employ, including community schools, Promise Neighborhoods, Bright Futures USA, and PROMISE Scholarships. They tailored the services and supports they needed to tackle their specific unmet needs, and found the components, wisdom, resources, and agreements needed to offer those services.
The 12 cases exemplify that these practices can be adopted elsewhere, provided certain commonalities are found. What the successful cases share includes, in the first place, that all communities deeply care about the root problem: poverty in any of its shapes and manifestations (pp. 3-21, and others). There’s no question that all of the communities want to break the vicious cycle that promises to link today’s merit and education performance with future wellbeing, but gluing students’ current social class to their educational opportunities and their progress in school really works more backwards than forward. The 12 communities also show a serious understanding of what it takes to redress the consequences of being born in poverty, i.e., that the efforts need to be holistic, continued, sufficient, and shared. The communities also present ISS provided as surpluses, not as deficits, helping overcome the old belief that poverty was sort of an excuse, sidelining it as the core driver of achievement gaps, as Elaine Weiss explained in the release event of the book at EPI. In addition, these communities, which heavily rely on evidence-based effective solutions, implemented systems to monitor the interventions—including systems that allowed for developmental, individualized, inputs, and outcomes. This information is essential because it is what demonstrates the success and the continuous benefits of doing this right. Lastly, knowledge and creativity are also typical as they can help trim down the exact menu of supports and services, as well as the ideal ISS strategy, that each community needs. Though the authors acknowledge that “no single system can serve as a template,” (p. 43), another view of this is that any could become such template for a given community, or that certainly all validate ISS as a model that works and can be implemented.
Presenting EPI’s ‘Budget for Shared Prosperity’
Today EPI is participating in the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s “Solutions Initiative,” along with several other research and policy institutions. For this project, we submitted a model tax and budget plan. The revenues were scored by the Tax Policy Center (TPC) and the spending was scored by former officials of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Normally in DC policymaking discussions, model tax and budget plans are constructed near-solely for the purpose of showing how a mix of tax increases and spending cuts can lead to lower budget deficits. But, while bending revenues closer to spending in a spreadsheet is a fairly trivial exercise, the real-world effects of changes in taxes and spending are often not trivial at all. To take just one example, the poverty rate of elderly households fell extraordinarily rapidly as Social Security spending rose in the mid-20th century. Ignoring this tremendous progressive achievement and instead seeing Social Security as just a budget line-item that can be trimmed to move expenditures and revenues closer together would be an extraordinarily myopic way to think about economic policy.
To ensure that we were keeping the big picture in mind while constructing our plan, we began by undertaking a diagnosis of the most-pressing economic problems facing the vast majority of U.S. households. We identified them as follows:
- Economic growth has been slow for almost two decades. The roots of this slow growth are too-slack aggregate demand for most of this period and anemic growth in productivity caused largely by weak private investment.
- Slow growth in recent decades has not been accompanied by any progress at all in reversing the huge upward redistribution of income that characterized previous decades—in fact, by many measures inequality has continued to rise.
- Taxes and spending in the United States are far smaller than in most other rich countries around the world. We expend far less fiscal effort in income support programs that fight poverty, social insurance programs that provide broad-based economic security, and public investments that spur growth.
- The most-glaring outcome of the small fiscal footprint in the U.S. economy is a health sector that is inefficient and unfair. Our health care system provides coverage to a smaller share of our population, delivers less health care, obtains worse health outcomes, and yet places a far greater economic burden on households than in almost any other rich country.