Clinton supports raising the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour. Despite minimum wage hikes by many state and local governments, and by high-profile employers like Walmart and Target, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 per hour, the same rate it has been at since 2009. Many advocates of a higher minimum wage, including Clinton competitor Bernie Sanders, want a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour nationwide.
“The financial crisis and the Great Recession and its aftermath are hopefully the most significant economic calamity that this generation will experience,” said labor economist and policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City [and Demos fellow].
Robert Hiltonsmith, senior policy analyst at Demos, a progressive think tank, expects the positive trends to continue -- even if Tuesday’s survey suggests employers overall aren’t relenting on tough and irregular scheduling demands. “I think it’s a slow burn, but the pressure’s mounting,” he says.
But, rising rents may shift that balance—making widows or single senior women particularly susceptible to market trends. And, as one Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report notes, 84% of single senior households—mostly senior women—are financially vulnerable.
That figure is derived from the Senior Financial Stability Index, administered jointly by the public policy think-tank Demos and Brandeis University. The most recent data, from 2011, notes that among single senior women only, 47% were deemed “insecure” in 2011, up from 35% in 2008.
Among mortgage professionals, it is widely held that owning a home is how many Americans build wealth. As the private mortgage market has failed to make loans available to Black homebuyers, our community suffers from a limited ability to create wealth through this reliable and proven method.
I propose a far-reaching agenda to fix Quarterly Capitalism, equal to the task of shifting traderscorporate America away from an obsession with short-termism and toward creating shared productivity. These proposals are complementary and non-exclusive, but the problem of Quarterly Capitalism and short-termism is so embedded in the economy that a layered approach is needed.
But praise for Clinton fades to disappointment because her solution to quarterly capitalism, an adjustment to capital gains tax rates, holds little promise of getting the job done. What’s needed are new restrictions on Wall Street and changes to how corporations do business, territory occupied so far by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). The fact is that we have all knuckled under to Wall Street so that we have an economy that increasingly is based on finance without even asking whether Wall Street is investing in us.
Bill Clinton's interview provoked Wallace Turbeville, a former lawyer and investment banker turned financial reform advocate, to contradict him.
"His statement is flat wrong," Turbeville wrote in a blog post for the liberal think tank Demos. "The Graham-Leach-Bliley Act that President Clinton signed had everything to do with the crisis."
Wal-Mart recentlymadeheadlines for increasing the starting salary of workers from $9 to $10 an hour, which would boost the wages of 500,000 employees, along with other boosts in specialized sections.
Heather McGhee, President of Demos, said: "Incredibly, working a full-time job is no longer a guarantee that you will be able to afford basic necessities—much less provide for your family. We applaud Governor Cuomo’s leadership in calling for a $15 minimum wage, and the community and labor groups who have worked tirelessly to make this a reality. This proposal will lift the living standards for the many families who have been struggling to stay afloat and will bring us one large step closer to a more equitable New York.”
Nevertheless, Walmart has had to make concessions to the pressure upon the business, mostly from OUR Walmart. It is in the process of enacting a series of wage hikes, starting with boosts to $9 an hour this year and $10 next year for a half-million of its lowest paid workers (out of 1.4 million), changes in scheduling policy, more accommodating pregnancy policies (after OUR Walmart’s “Respect the Bump” campaign).
Consumer advocacy groups have long complained that there is no link between bad credit and job performance. They argue that such checks lead to discriminatory hiring.
The system is profitable but imperfect, and for decades critics have attacked it for all sorts of offenses. In 1969, Columbia University legal scholar Alan Westin testified to Congress that the companies violated Americans’ right to privacy and that their inaccuracies damaged lives.
The image chosen also appears to be deliberately misleading,Robbie Hiltonsmith, senior policy analyst for left-leaning think tank Demos, told Mic via email.
The co-counsel in the case, Jenn Rolnick-Borchetta of Demos, a progressive policy organization, told POLITICO New York, the need to give information to people who have been stopped by the police “has been ordered, but what that is going to look like isn’t yet figured out.”
“The pilot form has a blank space for officers to fill in their information," said Borchetta, who said that creates a potential problem because “we know officers don’t give their info, or the right info.”
Millennials have an average credit score of 625 (based on the Experian VantageScore 3.0 credit score), compared to 650 for Generation X and 709 for those over 50 years old. They also use an average of 43 percent of their credit limits—compared to 34 percent nationally—and their average debt (excluding mortgages) totals 77 percent of their income, compared to 49 percent nationally.
But it is the recent, explosive growth of Uber and other "sharing economy" companies that have attracted the most concern.
HomeJoy recently announced it would shut down in the face of four lawsuits alleging it should treat the people who clean homes on its behalf as employees rather than as independent contractors not entitled to the same workplace protections.
"If a technologist wants to disrupt an industry that has middle-class jobs and replace them with insecure, not-as-good jobs, there has to be a conversation about that,"
The implications of a state labor board's July 22 decision to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15 an hour from $8.75 are clear: Other industries with low-wage workers could find themselves facing a similar pay hike soon.
Next up is likely the retail industry, followed by home care, child care and even adjunct professors, said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank.
"The patchwork of wage hikes by locality and industry, as well as the falling unemployme