Federal contracting with private vendors supports about two million low-wage private sector jobs, according to Demos, a national research institute, in their study, "Underwriting Bad Jobs." That is "more than the number of low wage workers at Walmart and McDonald's combined."
A group of congressional Democrats introduced a resolution on Tuesday seeking to ensure that students who attend public colleges and universities can graduate without debt.
Several top congressional Democrats will embrace on Tuesday a loose plan to make public colleges a debt-free proposition—and will receive an immediate boost from progressive activists who are hoping to shape the 2016 Democratic agenda.
The rationale behind the ban is simple: it’s unfair and useless to use a person’s credit history, which is often inaccurate or misleading, when assessing their job qualifications.
"You are in a Catch-22," said Emmanuel Caicedo, a senior campaign strategist with Demos, one member of a coalition of 79 labor and civil rights organizations that formed the NYC Coalition to Stop Credit Checks in Employment.
"You can't pay your bills and so your credit is bad. And then you can't get a job to pay your bills because of your credit."
In April 2015, Walmart implemented a $9 an hour minimum wage for all of its 1.3 million U.S. workers, and committed to pay all current workers at least $10 per hour by February 2016.1 This is an important step from the country’s largest employer and in particular for the retail industry, where low-wage, unstable employment is the norm.
Middle class income stagnation, and the inequality that it causes, is the principal economic challenge for the nation — and finance is to blame for it.
Late Tuesday, news broke that yet another unarmed American, a black man named Walter Scott, was killed by a white police officer. As with Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Rodney King nearly 25 years ago, the brutality was captured on video for the world to see. The New York Times put the damning evidence at the very top of its homepage and it quickly spread throughout social media networks provoking outrage, disgust, horror, grief. These reactions have come most vocally from black Americans.
Black Twitter is a force. It’s also not particularly well understood by those who aren’t a part of it. The term is used to describe a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, interconnectedness, and unique activity.
In an op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, University of Colorado law professor Paul F. Campos offered a provocative answer to the frequently asked question: why is college so expensive these days?
A recent report titled “The Racial Wealth Gap” examined, in conjunction with other factors, the role education plays in the persistent wealth gap between minorities and their White counterparts in this country.