Hillary Clinton just released a bold plan to return the United States to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers.
Executive action on paid sick days for employees of federal contractors would be in keeping with Obama’s steps to raise workplace standards for contract employees.
Treating these issues as mutually exclusive obscures part of why student debt is a major issue for so many, and what debt-free college would hope to achieve.
The New York fast food wage board today recommended a wage increase in a series of steps to $15 an hour by 2018 in New York City and by 2021 in the rest of the state.
Entire movements are based around these economic realities: the minimum wage is too low to live on. Eligibility for overtime pay must be broadened so that workers are fairly compensated for all of the time they work. Basic workplace standards need to be improved.
Common retail practices perpetuate racial inequality, fostering occupational segregation, low pay, unstable schedules, and involuntary part-time work that disproportionately harm people of color in the retail workforce.
We’ve allowed the price of college and its attendant debt to rise well beyond the point where it is actually helpful in getting people through college.
The fast food industry is the main driver of compensation inequality in the most disparate sector of the economy, with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 2013 of over 1000-to-1.
The most important fact about higher education is that only a minority of people go to college. That fact would change if college was affordable for more people.
Popular theories for rising tuition like administrative “bloat” and student aid are at most minor contributors to tuition increases. Here's the real causes.
Credit checks are one of many barriers faced by Black job seekers; and the implicit biases of employers have proved hard to legislate. That's why New York City just joined other cities and states in banning credit checks.
In the case of for-profits, not only has the government been unable to properly force institutions to account for their behavior, but it has been unable to stop providing the majority of money that keeps these colleges standing in the first place.
Policies like this would incent states to return to an era when college could be funded through a summer job, part-time employment, and maybe modest savings when available, for the largest and most diverse generation of students in our history.
Inequality is growing because the increased wealth of the wealthiest no longer spawns income opportunities for the less well-off households and may actually diminish them.