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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.
Today, Vice President Biden and others from the Obama administration, are meeting with human-resource executives from companies that are part of the president’s effort to address the problem of long-term unemployment, including Citigroup Inc., CVS Caremark Corp. and Boeing
Last week, AT&T agreed to pay $80 million to customers who had been overbilled for charges they had not authorized. This was an all-too-rare case of a perpetrator brought to book: In recent decades, Americans have increasingly been hit with fees they know nothing about, which have contributed to a crisis of consumer debt. We must hope we are entering a new era of regulatory activism that will shine a light on hidden fees.
The New York Timeseditorial was unequivocal: “the [New York City] Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio should unite behind this worthwhile bill” to ban the discriminatory practice of employment credit checks. After all, as the Times pointed out, “The worst of the recession is behind us, but the damage lives on for millions of Americans who are hobbled by bad credit… Does membership in the club of beleaguered borrowers inevitably make someone a risky hire or an unreliable employee? Hardly.
Today’s Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Professor Jean Tirole for his work in industrial organization, and how to best regulate such industries that are dominated by powerful firms, like finance and technology. It’s an important recognition of this work, because the economics profession has long relegated industrial organization, and the study of oligiopolistic markets, to a theory that, sure, it exists in practice— but who cares about practice?
Just a month before the election, voting rights have been on a wild ride. The Supreme Court began its term by reinstating voting restrictions in Ohio and North Carolina after federal appeals courts put these laws on hold for unfairly burdening voting rights, particularly for people of color.
Six years after America sank into the deepest economic downturn since the 1930s, the jobless rate has fallen to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008. But one demographic group — African-American men — seems to be stuck in a permanent recession.
Deportations reached another record high last year. This is a striking development in light of the fact that illegal immigration and Border Patrol apprehensions have been falling for over a decade, and when — despite intransigence among some House Republicans — for several years there has been broad support for a fundamental restructuring of deportation policies.
For decades, free high-school education helped strengthen the middle class and generate prosperity. So isn’t it time to extend the same thinking to college?