Jobs and Wages

How Much America’s Biggest Corporations Have Stolen From Their Own Workers

June 17, 2018 Branko Marcetic, Jacobin Educate! Capitalism, Jobs and Wages, New Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

How do the biggest corporations earn such massive profits? They’d like you to think it’s the result of delivering a superior product or service. But one part of that story is years of wage theft from their employees. Good Jobs First, a policy resource center focused on government and corporate accountability, recently carried out a year-long investigation into wage theft by large employers, compiling information from collective action lawsuits brought by groups of ripped-off workers, as well as actions brought by the department of labor and state-specific regulatory agencies. The results, brought together in a report released this week titled Grand Theft Paycheck: the Large Corporations Shortchanging their Workers’ Wages, are eye-opening: 4,220 cases since the turn of the millennium with penalties totaling $9.2 billion.

Welfare Beats Jobs When It Comes to Poverty Reduction

June 14, 2018 Nathaniel Lewis, People's Policy Project. Educate! Jobs and Wages, New Economy, Poverty

When it comes to poverty reduction, increasing employment and increasing social spending can both help. But which is the more effective of the two approaches? In this piece, I use data from the OECD to attempt to answer this question. What I find is that social spending is far more effective at reducing poverty than jobs are. Before we get into the numbers, let’s define our terms here. Poverty refers to the percent of people with incomes below 50 percent of a country’s median income. For this analysis, I use both market poverty, which refers to how many people are in poverty when only counting income from market sources such as wages and dividends, and final poverty...

Hiding The Real Number Of Unemployed

June 11, 2018 Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder Educate! Jobs and Wages, New Economy, Unemployment

A better indication of how many people have found work is the “civilian labor force participation rate.” By this measure, which includes all people age 16 or older who are not in prison or a mental institution, only 62.7 percent of the potential U.S. workforce was actually in the workforce in May, and that was slightly lower than the previous month. This is just about equal to the lowest this statistic has been since the breakdown of Keynesianism in the 1970s, and down significantly from the peak of 67.3 percent in May 2000. You have to go back to the mid-1970s to find a time when U.S. labor participation was lower. This number was consistently lower in the 1950s and 1960s, but in those days one income was sufficient to support a family. Now everybody works and still can’t make ends meet. And that brings us to the topic of wages. After reaching a peak of 52 percent in 1969, the percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product going to wages has fallen to 43 percent, according to research by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve. The amount of GDP going to wages during the past five years has been the lowest it has been since 1929, according to a New York Times report.

Young People Leading Growing Movement Against Low Pay And Precarious Work

June 3, 2018 By Helen Blakely and Steve Davies, The Conversation Resist! Jobs and Wages, Youth Activism

Strikes have taken place at McDonald’s and TGI Friday’s restaurants across the UK in recent months. These strikes are the first of their kind in the UK, instigated by a new generation of trade union members fighting for better pay and fairer working conditions. At the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD for short), we’ve been following these strikes on social media and at the picket lines, to discover what’s driving this fledgling movement, and how it differs to those that went before. Most young people in the workforce have experience with low pay and zero hours contracts. At TGI Friday’s, table staff were told earlier this year, with two days’ notice, that 40% of their tips from card gratuities would be taken and redistributed among kitchen staff, as part of the move towards a central pool of tips called a “tronc”.

Why Are CEOs Paid 361 Times More Than Their Average Employees?

May 28, 2018 By Paul Ausick, 24/7 Wall Street Educate! CEO Pay, Inequality, Jobs and Wages, New Economy

In 1980 the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 42:1. In 2017 the ratio was 361:1. Total CEO compensation averaged $13.94 million last year, compared to just $38,613 for the average production and non-supervisory worker. We’ve all seen numbers like this so many times now that we barely even blink at a new set. There is, however, new research that may partly explain why this gap has gotten so wide. The CEO-to-worker pay data were reported Wednesday morning by the AFL-CIO in an update to the union’s Executive Paywatch database and website. The data were compiled from disclosures by companies of the ratio of CEO pay to the median worker’s pay required for the first time last year in federal financial filings. New research by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Nathan Wilmers, published Wednesday by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, indicates that increased pressure from large corporate buyers suppresses wages for the workers in the buyer’s network of suppliers. Thus, large corporate buyers like Boeing and Walmart exercise outsized influence on the wages of their suppliers’ workers.

Student Loans, 21st Century Indentured Servitude

December 17, 2017 Julian Vigo Educate! Education, Jobs and Wages, New Economy, Student Debt

I have seen the student loan crisis up close from both sides of this polemic. First, as an extremely young student who was “sold” the only way to get an education—in addition to joining the U.S. Army and working throughout my degree—I was able to earn my first degree. And then later as a university professor who witnessed the student loan industrial complex rise, especially in its abetting the marketing campaigns for graduate programs from the 1990s onward. Such marketing strategies were personalized to arouse anxiety within the public, targeting the insecurity of individuals who “only” had a Bachelor’s degree.

‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Just Beginning

November 26, 2017 Matt Townsend, Jenny Surane, Emma Or and Christopher Cannon, www.bloomberg.com Educate! Bankruptcy, Finance and the Economy, Jobs and Wages, New Economy

By Matt Townsend, Jenny Surane, Emma Orr and Christopher Cannon for Bloomberg. The so-called retail apocalypse has become so ingrained in the U.S. that it now has the distinction of its own Wikipedia entry. The industry’s response to that kind of doomsday description has included blaming the media for hyping the troubles of a few well-known chains as proof of a systemic meltdown. There is some truth to that. In the U.S., retailers announced more than 3,000 store openings in the first three quarters of this year. But chains also said 6,800 would close. And this comes when there’s sky-high consumer confidence, unemployment is historically low and the U.S. economy keeps growing. Those are normally all ingredients for a retail boom, yet more chains are filing for bankruptcy and rated distressed than during the financial crisis.

In 40 Years: CEO Pay Up 937%, Worker Wages Stagnant

July 23, 2017 Alexandra Jacobo, www.nationofchange.org Educate! Economic inequality, Income inequality, Inequality, Jobs and Wages, New Economy

By Alexandra Jacobo for Nation of Change. US inequality problem continues to be the worst in the industrialized world. A new report, published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) this week, shows that while wages for American workers have essentially remained stagnant for decades, CEO pay has soared at an “outrageous” clip. A study by the Pew Research Center (PRC) in 2014 found that economic analyses show a “lack of meaningful wage growth.” Looking at five decades worth of government wage data, PRC showed that wages have been flat or even falling since the 1970s, regardless of changes in the economy and job markets. Now EPI’s Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder have found that between the years of 1978 and 2016, CEO pay rose 937 percent. Over that same period, worker compensation grew by a measly 11.2 percent. The CEOs of America’s largest firms made an average of $15.6 million, 271 times the annual average pay of a typical American worker.

Minimum Wage Tracker

July 5, 2017 Staff, www.epi.org Create! Jobs and Wages, Minimum Wage, Workers Rights and Jobs

By Staff of The Economic Policy Institute - The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. In the absence of action at the national level, many states and localities have raised their own minimum wages. Explore the map to see how these rapidly changing laws differ across the country, and read EPI’s recent research explaining the benefits of raising the minimum wage and eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers.

Are Robots Keeping Wages Low?

June 22, 2017 Jesse Ferreras, www.globalnews.ca Educate! Jobs and Wages, New Economy, Robots

By Jesse Ferreras for Global News - It used to be the case that when employers had trouble hiring, wages would increase in places with low jobless rates. Then came the rise of machines. These days, employees aren’t being paid much more than they were in the past, a BMO economist said in a report released on Friday. In a report titled “Wage Against the Machine,” economist Sal Guatieri looked at the effects of robots and automation on wages using data from the U.S. and the OECD. Hourly compensation per hour in the U.S. grew “smartly” in 2015, he wrote, but since then it has “barely kept pace with inflation.” Colorado and North Dakota, he noted, have “some of the lowest jobless rates and slowest wage gains in the country.” Wages could still grow, Guatieri said. But he went on to say that the national jobless rate only hit 4.3 per cent or less twice in the last 50 years: first, between 1965 and 1970, and second, between 1999 and 2001. The cost of labour went up in both of these periods. But now, “new automation is working its way up and down the skills’ chain,” and threatening more jobs than it used to. Previously, robots threatened jobs in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, office support and retail. Now, they’re inching into tasks that involve thinking.

Fight For $15 And Movement For Black Lives Plan Nationwide Action

March 26, 2017 Fight for $15 and Movement for Black Lives, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Civil Rights, Jobs and Wages, Racism, Worker Rights

By Fight for $15 and Movement for Black Lives. MEMPHIS -- The Fight for $15 and the Movement for Black Lives will take to the streets nationwide April 4 – the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination – in a two-dozen-city “Fight Racism, Raise Pay” protest. Thousands of underpaid workers, local racial justice activists, elected officials and clergy will hold rallies, marches, teach-ins, and other demonstrations to stress that the push for economic and racial justice remains as deeply linked today as when Dr. King was killed in 1968 supporting striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn. The coast-to-coast protests will culminate in a march by thousands of workers, national civil rights leaders and politicians on the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, where they'll hold a memorial at the site of Dr. King's assassination 49 years ago.

It’s Time to Scrap NAFTA, Not ‘Tweak’ It

February 26, 2017 Victor Suarez and Alejandro Villamar, www.fpif.org Educate! Canada, Farm Workers, Jobs and Wages, Mexico, NAFTA, Trade, United States

By Victor Suarez and Alejandro Villamar for Foreign Policy in Focus. Some politicians and “experts” still don’t understand — or don’t want to understand — that a great deal of popular discontent in the United States, Mexico, and Canada alike is rooted in undemocratic policies that have produced inequality, unemployment, migration, food dependency, and pollution. NAFTA isn’t the only factor — but it’s one of the most powerful. The reason is that NAFTA was never designed for the development of our peoples through trade, but instead to advance the narrow corporate interests of multi-national firms and the governments that serve them. In the case of Mexico, it was negotiated and signed by an authoritarian government that only served the interests of large Mexican and global corporations, and which turned its back on productive sectors linked to the domestic market.

How Americans Became Poor

January 9, 2017 Chris Kanthan, www.nationofchange.org Educate! Capitalism, Jobs and Wages, Poverty, Wealth Ineqaulity

By Chris Kanthan for Nation of Change. If we want to create a vibrant middle class, we have to abandon slogans and simplistic solutions and understand the bigger picture. There is no doubt that majority of Americans have gotten poorer over the last few decades even while the top 10% or so have done extremely well. In a world of slogans and minuscule attention span, the media and the pundits either completely deny this fact or justify it by focusing on advancements in technology or turn it into a partisan blame game. The reality is that multiple developments contributed to this decline of prosperity, much of it due to deliberate but gradual social and financial engineering. Without assigning ranking or weight, here is a look at twelve major reasons why Americans became poor.

Reducing Inequality In The Trump Era

December 30, 2016 Josh Hoxie, www.otherwords.org Strategize! Donald Trump, Jobs and Wages

By Josh Hoxie for Other Words - In a lot of ways, 2016 was a big year for reducing inequality. Five states raised their minimum wage through citizen-led ballot initiatives. A job-killing free trade agreement, the TPP, was blocked as a result of massive public demonstrations against it. More recently, the city of Portland, Oregon passed the first ever municipal-level check on runaway CEO compensation, a tangible step several other cities and states will likely follow. These were just a few of the many victories that those who care about reducing the gap between the richest and the rest of us can claim this year.

Lost Credibility In Fly-Over Country

December 3, 2016 Ben Lilliston, www.iatp.org Educate! 2016 Elections, Food and Agriculture, Health Care, Jobs and Wages, Trade

By Ben Lilliston for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The power of the so-called fly over states in the election is impossible to ignore. The electoral maps tell the story. A swath of red, often mostly rural, states in the middle and south of the country, bookended by blue states on the coasts. Even within the few Midwest blue states like Minnesota and Illinois, you can see the stark divide between how urban and rural counties saw the candidates. A look back at the 2012 electoral map tells us this divide is not new, but perhaps wasn’t taken seriously by many Democrats because President Obama won. As the Daily Yonder reports, the long-standing urban-rural voting gap is widening. At least part of this voting gap can be attributed to the Democratic Party’s loss of credibility on a number of core issues that affect the lives of rural communities in those so-called fly over states.

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