Media

It's no secret that the employment data released monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is basically a joke because BLS wildly undercounts the number of people who have given up looking for work or otherwise faded from the full-time labor force. 

Seniors are getting squeezed in so many ways. Healthcare and other basic expenses are rising. Fewer have pensions to supplement their Social Security income in retirement. Low interest rates mean what savings they do have isn’t growing quickly — unless they are willing to invest in higher-risk financial products.

Paying workers more would lead to lower profits and layoffs for America's biggest corporations, right? Not necessarily. 

Critics of a minimum wage hike cite a commonly held belief that forcing low-paying employers such as Wal-Mart to boost compensation would lead to greater economic suffering. Higher labor costs, they argue, would require higher prices, prompting layoffs and more pain.

Are people better off than they were before the recession?

Walmart employees and their supporters have planned national protests today to demand an increase of their wages. Here is why the average American should support the workers’ demands.

President Barack Obama wants workers to make more money. Walmart and other low-wage employers also want to make more money.

They could both get what they want if the federal minimum wage goes up.

After decades of seeing their incomes shrink, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are starting to band together and fight back — and it’s one of the most important economic stories of our time.

It's hard to believe in the power of organized labor if you've grown up over the past thirty years, a period of steady union decline. Conventional wisdom hold that the new service economy is inherently hostile terrain for labor organizers and, more broadly, that Americans just aren't the joiners they used to be. (Lots of civil society institutions have withered, not just unions.)