...while fast food may be an extreme case, it is hardly the only industry – in New York or nationwide – where front-line workers are underpaid and inequality is metastasizing. In fact, our economy is increasingly built on job growth in the most unequal industries: a trend that concentrates more and

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.

No one gets a job as a retail cashier or shopping assistant to get rich. While the retail industry is known for its paltry pay across the board, skin color has an alarming influence on how many raises and promotions a worker receives. White retail workers earn $15.32 an hour, on average, while

Getting poor, minority children hooked on junk food is just one way the fast-food industry is getting over on us. Workers in the fast-food industry get paid among the lowest wages of any occupation. In New York, most fast-food occupations pay an average of around $9.00 an hour. This is why, as a

Nine dollars an hour, by the way, is still poverty wages. On that wage, if an employee were working 40 hours per week every week of the year they would make just under $19,000 per year -- still below poverty.

A new paper from the think tank Demos and the NAACP examines race in the retail industry, finding major inequities between black and Latino workers on the one hand and their white counterparts on the other.

More than 1.9 million Black Americans work in retail, accounting for 11 percent of the industry’s total workforce. Despite being the second-largest source of employment for Black workers, new data from the NAACP and equality advocacy organization, Demos, finds that the industry is rife with racial

On the importance of college education and the new reality of unlivable working-class wages.