"I really enjoyed my time at Oberlin and I felt like I was learning, but I wasn't progressing towards a job at the end of graduation," said Ned Lindau, a 2011 graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. He noted that his liberal arts education focused on students exploring subjects that they were interested in learning, not the practicality of a job after college.
President Barack Obama will announce during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address that he's raising the minimum wage for workers under federal contracts to $10.10 per hour, an administration official told The Huffington Post.
If Congress won’t act on jobs and the economy, President Obama promises that he will—a message he’s expected to push in Tuesday’s State of the Union. The problem is, there’s not much the president can do his own.
In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama will announce his intention to issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10.
President Obama plans to sign an executive order requiring that janitors, construction workers and others working for federal contractors be paid at least $10.10 an hour, using his own power to enact a more limited version of a policy that he has yet to push through Congress.
Heather McGhee, president of Demos: When Sheryl Sandberg and Jill Abramson—women leading powerful institutions in male-dominated industries—ignite our most robust media conversations about gender equality, we feminists face a quandary. Of course feminists want women who are tantalizingly close to the top to break through, and of course we know that the paucity of women leading our institutions is a glaring symbol of enduring gender hierarchy. But women will not succeed in dismantling one hierarchy by climbing to the top of another.
Today's polarized debates about the role of government often boil down to a single issue: the size of government compared with the size of the overall economy, as measured in gross domestic product.
Stymied by the partisan gridlock, President Obama’s recent directives to bar federal contractors from discriminating against gay employees and to cut carbon pollution are bold examples of how presidents have used their executive powers to address critical issues when Congress has failed to adopt much-needed legislation.
To Bene’t Holmes, the White House Summit on Working Families was personal, not just another event designed by President Obama and his fellow Democrats to draw a policy or political contrast with Republicans this election year.
“I believed everything he said,” the 25-year-old single mom said of the president’s pitch.
DALY: Our mismeasured economy. "Today's polarized debates about the role of government often boil down to a single issue: the size of government compared with the size of the overall economy, as measured in gross domestic product....But such comparisons are not very meaningful: The way we measure government’s role in the economy is limited, inaccurate and unrealistic....We make the case that, in at least four critical ways, this G.D.P.
As we mentioned during the rollout of Paul Ryan's poverty plan last week, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the few anti-poverty measures both parties can agree about (even if they can't come to an agreement on how to fund it).
It's fair to say most people think of giving to charity as a good thing to do. If we have extra resources, it feels right to help people who are less fortunate.
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.
For a moment last week, it looked like Walmart CEOs were getting enlightened. The company promised to “end minimum-wage pay” for its lowest-paid sales workers and touted a plan to ‘”invest in its associate base” and maybe even offer more bonus opportunities.
The soaring pay of corporate chief executives is spurring efforts to pass laws to limit their compensation and close the widening gap in earnings between workers and top executives.
Such laws have been proposed in at least three states, including Massachusetts, as well as in Switzerland. Proponents have yet to succeed in enacting these measures, but they vow to keep pressing the issue. [...]
One of the issues that helped fuel last week's national fast-food workers strikes is the growing income disparity between rank-and-file workers and the chief executives in charge of those multi-billion-dollar companies.
Boosting the federal minimum wage would be great news for the workers who’d receive a higher paycheck. Not so much for those who’d be out of a job. That anxiety sums up much of the debate around increasing the minimum wage.