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* Find your state’s minimum wage using EPI’s Minimum Wage Tracker.

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If you get the flu can you take a paid sick day? Do you know in advance when you are going work and what you will get paid? Do you have the right to take your employer to court if you are discriminated against or harassed at work? Take this quiz and find out how your job stacks up in an age of eroding worker rights.

Data sources and additional resources

The data in this quiz come from Celine McNicholas, Samantha Sanders, and Heidi Shierholz, First Day Fairness: An Agenda to Build Worker Power and Ensure Job Quality, Economic Policy Institute, August 22, 2018; Josh Bivens et al., How Today’s Unions Help Working People: Giving Workers the Power to Improve Their Jobs and Unrig the Economy, Economic Policy Institute, August 24, 2017; and “The Productivity–Pay Gap” (web page), Economic Policy Institute, updated August 2018. The salary thresholds for different wage percentiles in question one are as of 2016. The union membership rate in the quiz is for wage and salary workers as of 2017. The union wage advantage is relative to comparable workers in the same sector. If you are not in a union but are interested in learning more, visit this link.

In addition to these sources, you can find more information on worker rights issues in EPI’s Minimum Wage Tracker and EPI’s Worker Rights Preemption in the US map, from EPI’s “Right to work” web page, and in the EPI report on mandatory arbitration by Alexander J.S. Colvin, The Growing Use of Mandatory Arbitration: Access to the Courts Is Now Barred for More Than 60 Million American Workers, Economic Policy Institute, April 6, 2018.

EPI’s Autopilot Economy Tracker provides a set of real-time benchmarks to help Americans gauge how well the public officials elected to serve them are performing as stewards of the U.S. economy. The benchmarking is provided by a set of charts that show changes in key indicators of economic health relative to how the indicators would have changed had the economy simply been on autopilot. By “autopilot” we mean how the indicators would have changed under a continuation of the trends already underway before the Trump administration took the wheel.

In each chart, the trajectory of the preexisting trend (the “autopilot projection”) constitutes the baseline against which to judge policymakers’ performance at any point in time. If the indicator measured is above or below the baseline, policy decisions likely had an effect and policymakers can claim credit—or shoulder blame. We focus on changes between now and 2019 because we think any projection of developments beyond 2019 are too unreliable to include. Our hope is that this tool helps people make fair and informed evaluations of economic policymakers’ decisions.

Unemployment rate

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Unemployment

Unemployment rate

Current: 3.8%

Autopilot: 4.4%

Target: 4.0%

During the Great Recession, the unemployment rate shot up as millions of working people lost their jobs, but it has fallen steadily since late 2010. As the labor market has improved, the rate at which unemployment has fallen has gradually slowed, and this should continue. If the unemployment rate continued to fall at the current pace of improvement, it would hit 4.0 percent in 2019.

Most forecasters, including the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) think that unemployment cannot, or at least will not, fall much further from today’s level. The expectation behind this stalled downward march in projected unemployment is an assumption that the Federal Reserve will slow the economy by raising interest rates. And the Fed certainly could raise rates (regardless of whether it should raise rates). The CBO projection has the unemployment rate leveling off before reaching recent historical lows. However, we think it is important to compare performance on unemployment with EPI’s autopilot projection. Our projection shows that unemployment could hit its recent historic low of 4.0 percent by January 2019 if it continued to fall at the same rate it did from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016.

It is not obviously unrealistic to think that the unemployment rate could reach 4.0 percent. During the late 1990s and 2000s, the unemployment rate dipped below 4.0 percent for five months, and it averaged 4.0 percent in the full year 2000. During this period, inflation-adjusted wages rose across the board—for the only time in the last generation. This should be the type of labor market we aspire to have. Decisions by the Federal Reserve or by fiscal policymakers that thwart progress toward this goal would rob tens of millions of workers of the opportunity to be pulled back into the labor force or enjoy stronger wage growth.

See race and ethnicity breakdown

Unemployment rate by race and ethnicity

Unemployment

Workers of color, as well as young workers and less credentialed workers, suffer from higher than average unemployment rates in both good times and bad. For example, it was only in July 2015 that the black unemployment rate finally ducked below where the white unemployment rate was at its peak in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Only when the labor market is tight enough to deliver sustained rising wages for all workers—regardless of gender, race, or educational attainment—should we say our work is done. So, while the economy is the strongest it’s been in years, there are still a lot of workers sitting on the sidelines and underutilized. The projections shown here indicate the continuation of group-specific recent trends. For communities across the country to feel the full extent of the recovery, the Federal Reserve needs to keep their foot off the brakes and let the economy reach full employment.

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Share of prime-age population (25–54) with a job

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EPOP

Prime-age employment-to-population ratio

Current: 79.2%

Autopilot: 78.9%

Target: 81.6%

After falling dramatically in the Great Recession, the share of the prime-age population with a job has been recovering steadily, since 2011. Preexisting trends would sustain this recovery and drive the share to 79.4 percent by 2019.

The prime-age employment-to-population ratio (EPOP), which shows the share of the population age 25 to 54 with a job, is a key indicator of labor market health. Our projection shows that if the prime-age EPOP continued on the same pace of recovery as it has over the last year, it would reach 79.4 percent in 2019. Ambitious policymakers should aim for further improvement, as the EPOP has averaged as high as 81.6 percent (as it did over the 12-month period ending in 2000). At the current rate of improvement, it will not hit that 81.6 percent benchmark until 2022.

See gender breakdown

Share of prime-age population (25–54) with a job, by gender

EPOP

For both men and women, the prime-age EPOP, the share of the population 25-54 years old with a job, continues to lag behind other major indicators in this recovery. While men continue to participate more than women in the formal labor market, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio for each gender is still far lower than would be expected in a stronger economy. The projection illustrates group-specific recent trends moving forward. As the economy continues to strengthen, we would expect more men and women will be pulled off the sidelines and back into the labor force and into employment.

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Year-over-year growth in wages

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Earnings

Nominal wage growth

Current: 2.7%

Autopilot: 2.8%

Target: 3.5–4%

Wage growth was sluggish and essentially unchanged for years following the Great Recession but has picked up slightly, to an average of 2.6 percent in 2016. As the economy continues to tighten, preexisting trends indicate that wage growth will continue to improve. At the current pace of improvement, by 2019 we should be significantly closer to the Fed’s wage-growth target of 3.5 to 4 percent.

The horizontal shaded area in the chart represents growth of 3.5 percent to 4 percent—nominal wage growth consistent with the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target and a labor share of income at historic norms (given 1.5 percent trend productivity growth). We would need to see consistent wage growth above this range before there is a hint of upward pressure on prices stemming from too-tight labor markets. Hence, as long as wage growth is below this healthy target, policymakers—including the Fed, President Trump, and Congress—should do nothing to slow economic growth.

See nominal wage growth for production workers

Nominal wage growth for production/nonsupervisory workers

Earnings

While the pace of wage growth has picked up this year as the economy strengthens, it is still below levels consistent with the Fed’s target inflation rate and trend productivity growth. This is true when measured by either nominal average hourly earnings for all private-sector workers (above) or private-sector production/nonsupervisory workers, who make up roughly the bottom 80 percent of the workforce. While the private-sector wages in general have picked-up over the last year, production/nonsupervisory wages have changed little. The different projections reflect difference recent trends in the two different wage series. We need to see consistent wage growth for all groups of workers in the target range before there is a hint of upward pressure on prices stemming from too-tight labor markets.

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Total number of jobs in the economy: Payroll employment

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Payroll

Monthly growth in payroll employment

Current: 223,000

Target: 208,000

After shedding millions of jobs in the Great Recession, the economy has added jobs every month since 2010. Factoring in both a return to what it considers full employment as well as demographic trends, the CBO estimates the economy will have 148 million jobs by 2019.

On the graph, the green line represents CBO’s projection for payroll employment. In January 2017, President Trump announced a new goal to create 25 million new jobs in the next 10 years, as shown by the orange line. Creating 25 million new jobs in a decade would require adding an average of 208,000 every month. In the long run, this is clearly unrealistic. As explained by a January 2017 EPI blog post, Trump’s job goals would require massive immigration or forcing elderly Americans to work at unprecedented rates. For the next two years, however, adding 208,000 jobs a month would still leave the economy below historic peaks in employment. Because monthly new job numbers in Trump’s projected range are clearly possible in the next two years, the Trump projection line approximates the autopilot projection line against which to measure job growth.

*January 2017 monthly growth in payroll employment value represents 3-month average from November 2016 to January 2017.

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Thank you for taking action to hold Donald Trump and the GOP controlled Congress accountable to working people.

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Thank you for taking action to oppose Andrew Puzder as the next secretary of labor.

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Sign the petition today opposing Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary. #AntiLaborSecretary

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Buy the book

Shop online at Bookshop.org or Barnes & Noble; and these unionized independent booksellers, Politics & Prose, The Strand, Powell’s, BookPeople, Half-Price Books, and Seminary Co-op.

In The Color of Law (published by Liveright in May 2017), Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America—the incessant kind that continues to dog our major cities and has contributed to so much recent social strife—is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

Rothstein was a panelist on an EPI webinar, July 9, 2020, discussing his book and Reconstruction 2020: Valuing Black Lives and Economic Opportunities for All. Click here to watch the webinar.

The Color of Law was designated one of ten finalists on the National Book Awards’ long list for the best nonfiction book of 2017.

Highlighted media

• Richard Rothstein discusses The Color of Law on Fresh Air
• Richard Rothstein in conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates

To scholars and social critics, the racial segregation of our neighborhoods has long been viewed as a manifestation of unscrupulous real estate agents, unethical mortgage lenders, and exclusionary covenants working outside the law. This is what is commonly known as “de facto segregation,” practices that were the outcome of private activity, not law or explicit public policy. Yet, as Rothstein breaks down in case after case, private activity could not have imposed segregation without explicit government policies (de jure segregation) designed to ensure the separation of African Americans from whites.

A former columnist for the New York Times and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, as well as a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Rothstein has spent years documenting the evidence that government not merely ignored discriminatory practices in the residential sphere, but promoted them. The impact has been devastating for generations of African-Americans who were denied the right to live where they wanted to live, and raise and school their children where they could flourish most successfully.

While the Fair Housing Act of 1968 provided modest enforcement to prevent future discrimination, it did nothing to reverse or undo a century’s worth of state-sanctioned violations of the Bill of Rights, particularly the Thirteenth Amendment which banned treating former slaves as second-class citizens. So the structural conditions established by 20th century federal policy endure to this day.

At every step of the way, Rothstein demonstrates, the government and our courts upheld racist policies to maintain the separation of whites and blacks—leading to the powder keg that has defined Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and Chicago. The Color of Law is not a tale of Red versus Blue states. It is sadly the story of America in all of its municipalities, large and small, liberal and reactionary.

As William Julius Wilson has stated: “The Color of Law is one of those rare books that will be discussed and debated for many decades.”

NOW AVAILABLE!

What readers of The Color of Law have written:

“Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law is one of those rare books that will be discussed and debated for many decades. Based on careful analyses of multiple historical documents, Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation.” (William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged)

“Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers an original and insightful explanation of how government policy in the United States intentionally promoted and enforced residential racial segregation. The central premise of his argument, which calls for a fundamental reexamination of American constitutional law, is that the Supreme Court has failed for decades to understand the extent to which residential racial segregation in our nation is not the result of private decisions by private individuals, but is the direct product of unconstitutional government action. The implications of his analysis are revolutionary.” (Geoffrey R. Stone, author of Sex and the Constitution)

“A masterful explication of the single most vexing problem facing black America: the concentration of the poor and middle class into segregated neighborhoods. Rothstein documents the deep historical roots and the continuing practices in law and social custom that maintain a profoundly un-American system holding down the nation’s most disadvantaged citizens.” (Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity)

“Through meticulous research and powerful human stories, Richard Rothstein reveals a history of racism hiding in plain sight and compels us to confront the consequences of the intentional, decades-long governmental policies that created a segregated America. The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book.” (Sherrilyn A. Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund)

“Racial segregation does not just happen; it is made. Written with a spatial imagination, this exacting and exigent book traces how public policies across a wide spectrum―including discriminatory zoning, taxation, subsidies, and explicit redlining―have shaped the racial fracturing of America. At once analytical and passionate, The Color of Law discloses why segregation has persisted, even deepened, in the post–civil rights era, and thoughtfully proposes how remedies might be pursued. A must-read.” (Ira Katznelson, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Fear Itself)

“This wonderful, important book could not be more timely. It shows how federal, state, and local government housing policies made the United States two societies, separate and unequal, and used public power to impose unfair, profoundly damaging injuries on African Americans. The book is filled with history that’s been deliberately buried even as its tragic consequences make headlines in Ferguson, Tulsa, Dallas, Staten Island, Charleston―and throughout the country. With its clarity and breadth, the book is literally a page-turner: once one begins on this journey with Richard Rothstein, one is not likely to stop before the conclusion, with a determination that the injustices described must be redressed fully and immediately.” (Florence Roisman, William F. Harvey Professor of Law, Indiana University)