Media

An industry that’s one of the largest employers of women and one of the fastest job creators in the country also has a huge pay gap. The average female retail salesperson makes $10.58 per hour, while her average male colleague makes $14.62, according to a new study from Demos, a think tank focused on income inequality.

In recent days the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, often working through independent contractors, has started cutting off service to up to 120,000 delinquent citizens, while giving a pass to major corporate laggards. The Great Recession has crushed the people of Detroit, with unemployment rates soaring as high as 35 percent in this period. At the end of 2013, 47 percent of the mortgages were still under water. They simply cannot pay. How could such draconian measures be justified?

In the coming days, you will be hearing a lot about working women. Not the women leaning in, not the women opting out, but the working women living in or near poverty.

NEW YORK, NY— A new report by the national public policy organization Demos reveals prevalent business practices in the retail sector such as low pay, erratic scheduling and scarcity of basic benefits are keeping millions of hard-working women and families near poverty.

At the McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting on May 22, CEO Don Thompson claimed that his company “has a heritage of providing job opportunities that lead to ‘real careers.’”

The left and right will never agree on many economic questions -- like how government can best stimulate growth -- but when you get down in the weeds there are places for a real conversation. At least with a smart guy like Michael Strain, who's a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a chapter on reducing unemployment in the new conservative manifesto, Room to Grow.

This is the face of today's fast food workers -- 70% of whom are over the age of 20, nearly 40% have children and a third of them have spent some time in college, according to U.S. census data. [...]

Public policy group Demos says CEO compensation in the industry just since 2000 quadrupled to $24 million, while average fast food worker's wage only increased 0.3%.

Fast food CEOs also make 1,000 times more than the average worker in the industry.

It was certainly a nice theory that the Founders had: make Congress more responsive to the people by putting members of the House up for re-election every two years. With so many state elected offices also up for the grabs, and the staggering of Senate terms, midterm elections became even more consequential over time than the Founder probably ever imagined. 

The media shouldn't be scaring students away from going to college, because the alternative of not going is worse. Unfortunately, our move to a debt-for-diploma system is doing a good enough job of that itself.