“Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it,” announced President Obama in last month’s landmark economic address in Galesburg Illinois. Now consensus seems to be building around one thing President Obama can indeed use his executive powers to do to boost hundreds of thousands of workers into the middle class: raise their wages.
The case for raising the pay of low-wage workers usually focuses on the here and now: The biggest low road employers have plenty of profits to spare and sharing them more equitably with their workers would do a load of good, including for the economy as a whole by stimulating more spending and growth. But cast an eye out into the future and you'll see an equally compelling case for upping pay: To avoid an unprecedented poverty crisis among tomorrow's seniors.
Here's something alarming to imagine: One day, your investment advisor at Merrill Lynch doesn't show up to his job. No warning, no nothing. He just doesn't show.
A tight labor market is the great conservative answer to the low-wage jobs crisis. If we can just get the economy booming again, the logic goes, wages will rise along with demand for low-skilled workers.
Bill O'Reilly told me that earlier today, when I taped a segment at Fox on the economy.
Of course, many progressive economists will tell you the same thing, even if they have very different ideas about how to spur growth and how to share prosperity.
Yesterday I wrote about why a tight labor market may not return any time soon to raise wages. But here's another scary thought: What if tight labor markets no longer push up wages like was once the case?
The Cato Institute came out with a big study recently that argues the familiar point that generous welfare payments undermine incentives to work. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities promptly replied with a four-page paper rebutting key aspects of the report.
One effect of the ruling is that it’ll now be easier to sue an employer over an expensive 401(k) plan, turning up the legal pressure a notch.
Those expenses matter. A 2012 study by Demos, a New York City-based think tank, found that over a lifetime, 401(k) fees cost a two-earner family with a median income nearly $155,000 — and consume nearly one-third of their investment returns.
Black and Hispanic retail workers make less than their white counterparts and are presented fewer opportunities to move up the ranks, according to a report released today.
A "racial wage divide" exists among front-line retail workers, such as salesclerks and cashiers, says the report by the NAACP and Demos, a progressive think tank in New York City.
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"I think this is a particularly egregious practice," said Catherine Ruetschlin, a Demos senior policy analyst,
Retail workers — sales clerks, cashiers and stock people — account for one in six jobs in the United States and a large share of the new positions created in the years since the recession. Many of the jobs are low-paying, making retail a major culprit in one of the most difficult challenges confronting the economy: stagnant wages.
Forty-seven years after the Poor People’s Campaign ended, political discussion in liberal activist circles has bifurcated in unnecessary ways. There are separate economic and racial justice movements, and as my Salon colleague Joan Walsh points out, political leaders too often speak to only one or the other. But these movements are different facets of one fight; if black lives matter, surely their economic lives matter too.
The second largest source of jobs for black people in the country is also one of the worst industries to work in. Although big retailers tout their “entry level” positions as a path to the middle class, retail work is built on dead-end jobs that perpetuate racial inequality.
When it comes to equal pay and promotion opportunities, it appears blacks and Latinos are losing out in the retail industry.
Minorities tend to hold fewer managerial roles and suffer from a significant pay gap when compared with white workers, according to a new paper from Demos, a left-leaning think tank, and the NAACP.
African-American and Latino cashiers, salespeople and first-line managers are paid less, are less likely to be promoted off the floor and more likely to be poorer than their white counterparts in the retail industry, a new study showed Tuesday.
The study, done by the NAACP and Demos, a public policy organization, found that in the major jobs held by retail workers, African-Americans are paid the least, followed by Hispanics. They also are less likely to get full-time jobs instead of part-time and are underrepresented in management positions.
When it comes to U.S. retail workers, a new study finds there's a significant wage gap.
According to public policy organization Demos and the NAACP, black and Latino workers are paid less than their white counterparts. (Video via Voice of America)
According to a new report, minorities who work in retail earn less and are less likely to be promoted than their white counterparts. The study, released yesterday by the NAACP and public-policy group Demos, found that retailers pay black and Latino full-time salespeople about 75 percent of what they pay white workers in the same positions.
As 2016 Republican frontrunners continue to dismiss the wage gap as a speculative topic, a new study published on Tuesday further proves just how real the rift is for people of color.
A recent study released by public policy group Demos and the NAACP found that retailers pay black and Hispanic full-time salespeople just 75 percent of what they pay white employees in the same positions. When it comes to cashiers, black and Hispanics make about 90 percent of what their white colleagues earn.
Currently, there are 10 million non-Hispanic whites, 2. 3 million Hispanics, 1.9 million African Americans and 800,000 Asian workers in the retail industry.
The NAACP and Demos, a public policy organization, have partnered to produce a new paper, “The Retail Race Divide: How the Retail Industry is Perpetuating Racial Inequality in the 21st Century” that finds a disproportionate number of Black and Latino workers in the retail industry live below the poverty line.
“Like the overall retail workforce, the vast majority of Black retail workers are adults,” says the report in its Key Findi
It’s well known that graduating college students in recent years have faced student loan debt at unprecedented levels far exceeding that of previous generations of American graduates. Nonetheless, a new report released by the New York-based Demos public policy organization documents the patterns of debt along racial and class lines with Black, Latino, and low-income students taking out higher loans than Whites and more likely to drop out with significant debt.
