Media clips
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Many workers aren’t even getting the pay they’ve been promised for the work they do. Complaints of wage theft, like that experienced by NFL cheerleaders, jumped by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011. It’s rampant in some industries: 89 percent of fast food workers say they’ve been made to work for free off the clock, denied overtime pay, or simply paid less than minimum wage. More is stolen from low-wage workers than is robbed from banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined. Lawmakers in a handful of cities and two states, Colorado and New York, have passed anti-wage theft ordinances to crack down on companies that steal wages and make it easier for workers to bring claims.
But that’s just a start. There are other ways to reconnect hard work and decent pay that don’t involve government action, but instead hand employees more power so they can ask for more. Historically unions have played a significant role in this equation. But falling unionization rates have coincided with a drop in middle class incomes and an increase in income inequality. It’s become harder to unionize, but easing the way for workers to band together and demand better pay would start to balance the power. “We’re not really going to get wages to grow in line with productivity without a more robust system of collective bargaining,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told me. One way to get there would be to “develop a system where collective bargaining can emerge that covers an entire occupation or an entire industry,” he suggested, rather than shop by shop as it is now, particularly in sectors like fast food, where each location is owned by a different franchisee. (Although the path to unionizing fast food workers may now be easier with the National Labor Relations Board saying that McDonald’s is responsible for what happens in all of its stores, franchises or no.)
The New Republic August 8, 2014 -
Retail workers who don’t have a supervisory role earned an average of $14.02 an hour in 2013, according to calculations of government wage data compiled for NBC News by the Economic Policy Institute. There were 12.9 million such workers in the U.S. in 2013, according to EPI, accounting for nearly 86 percent of all retail workers.
After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 12.2 percent decrease from the average hourly wage those workers earned in 1979.
Over that same period, the overall pool of similar production and nonsupervisory workers — who accounted for nearly 83 percent of all private-sector workers in 2013 — saw hourly wages increase by 6.2 percent, according to EPI’s calculation.
The declines follow a period in which retail wages grew substantially. According to EPI, average wages for those nonsupervisory retail workers increased by 62.7 percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 1947 and 1979.
That was a time when department stores and other retail innovations were coming into vogue, providing relatively good jobs both to men and to the growing number of women coming into the workforce, Plunkett said.
Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, said the wage declines that followed are at least partly a result of the dramatic changes that took place after that, when retail became more concentrated among big-box stores competing to get Americans their favorite goods for the lowest price.
NBC News August 1, 2014 -
Nearly 40 million Americans — almost 40% of the private-sector workforce — don’t have paid sick leave, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. And two-thirds of them are at the bottom 25% of the pay scale — the country’s lowest earners, according to the Labor Department.
CNNMoney July 31, 2014 -
In fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, the vast majority of unaccompanied children crossing the border are designated for deportation once they come before a judge. The problem is that wait time for a hearing in immigration court is measured not in weeks or months, but in years.
According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), there was a backlog of 375,503 cases in the immigration court system as of the end of June. That’s more than twice the number of pending cases in 2008. It also translates into an average wait time, according to TRAC, of 587 days for an initial hearing, with wait times in some jurisdictions averaging much longer.
The Fiscal Times July 28, 2014 -
If you’re familiar with American history and housing policy, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The explicit housing discrimination of the mid-20th century has left a mark—arguably a scar—on the landscape of American homeownership. The combination of redlining, block-busting, racial covenants, and other discriminatory measures means that, even now, a majority of blacks live in neighborhoods with relatively poor access to capital and mortgage loans. What’s more, this systematic discrimination has left many black households unable to afford down payments or other housing costs, even if loans are available.
And in the event that black households are able to save and afford a home, they aren’t as financially secure as their white counterparts. To wit, middle-class African-Americans are more likely to belong to the lower middle class of civil servants and government workers—professions that, in the last five years, have been slashed as a consequence of mass public-sector downsizing. All else being equal, a black schoolteacher who loses her job to budget cuts is less likely to have savings—and thus a safety net—than her white counterpart.
Slate July 28, 2014 -
US poverty (less than $19,090 for a family of three): 46.5 million people, 15 percent
Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 23 percent of all children, including 39.6 percent of African-American children and 33.7 percent of Latino children. Children are the poorest age group in the US
Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including 7.1 million children
People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2012: 61.8 million (program kept 15.3 million people out of poverty)
Moyers & Company July 28, 2014 -
The long-term unemployment rate, which soared in 2009 to heights not seen since the Great Depression, is finally declining rapidly. The proportion of the work force that has been unemployed for at least 27 weeks has fallen to 1.98 percent, less than half the record high of 4.4 percent reached in 2010.
Since the end of 2013, “the long-term unemployment rate dropped 0.5 percentage point, thereby accounting for almost the entire decline” in the overall unemployment rate, pointed out two Federal Reserve Board economists, Tomaz Cajner and David Ratner, in a note published by the Fed this week.
As a result, for the first time in five years, less than a third of all unemployed workers have been out of work for at least six months. In the first six months of 2014, that figure dropped at the fastest rate in more than half a century.
“The improvement in the labor market is reaching the long-term unemployed,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “They are benefiting from the modest but measurable improvement in the labor market.”
The New York Times July 28, 2014 -
Evidence, however, tells a different story, namely that the economy is and has long been too weak to create enough jobs, even for experienced and skilled workers and for young people graduating from college. According to the latest federal labor data, there were still more than twice as many job seekers as job openings in May. That means that if all the job openings were filled tomorrow, more than five million of the nation’s 9.8 million officially unemployed workers would still be out of work, as would an estimated six million nonworking people who are not included in the unemployment statistics but who most likely would be working or looking for work if the labor market were stronger.
Equally telling, unemployed workers outnumber job openings in every industry. Even in health care, a field that creates many jobs, there are significantly more jobless workers than job openings. Such findings indicate that the problem is lack of demand for workers, not a widespread lack of skills. In addition, if there were a skills gap in the economy, wages and salaries would be rising in fields where employers had to compete for scarce skilled labor. Wages and salaries have long stagnated, even for college-educated workers.
The New York Times July 28, 2014 -
Their struggles point to a broader lack of demand in the labor market, economists say.
“These are the most technologically competent, recently trained skilled workers,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington economic think tank. “If they don’t have jobs at rising wages, then employers must not be desperate for them.”
Cody Hounanian graduated in 2013 from UC Santa Barbara and has a steady job as a manager at Whole Foods in his hometown of Santa Clarita.
He’s happy to be working, but he had planned for an entry-level position at a law firm — the first step toward applying for law school. But the competition was steep.
“There’s a lot of people fighting for those jobs,” he said. “I don’t dog on myself; I think I’m doing pretty good. But I could be a lot closer.”
Los Angeles Times July 24, 2014 -
Stagnating tipped wages lead to other inequalities, according to a report released this month from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Tipped workers are more likely to be in poverty and on government services than other workers. The majority of tipped workers are female and over 25 years old.
When adjusting wages for minimum wage, the situation is more poignant.
“There are certain places where tipped workers are doing quite well,” according to David Cooper, an economic analyst at EPI. “It’s wages at diners in rural Pennsylvania that are really suffering from this policy.”
Wall Street Journal July 24, 2014