Yesterday, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) got off to an auspicious start as chair of the Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy by doing something that is all too novel—inviting people with the most at stake in economic policy decisions to testify in Congress.
Dramatic new public policy initiatives are needed to accomplish two broad interrelated goals: to ensure that all Americans have a chance to move into the middle class and, second, to ensure greater security for those in the middle class.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has just released the third iteration of its Better Life index with a fantastic data visualization tool that allows you to compare the 34 existing member countries based on 11 different indicators of human well-being: material conditions including housing, income, and jobs and quality of life conditions including community, education, environment, c
When fast food workers went on strike recently in Washington State, they weren't just protesting low wages. They were also protesting the lack of enough work hours and reliable schedules.
Like low-wage employers everywhere, restaurant chains in Washington go to great lengths to limit their workers to under 30 hours a week. Once an employee goes over that threshold, they qualify for benefits that even low road employers feel they have must offer.
(New York, NY) – In light of Walmart’s illegal retaliation and intimidation tactics against the members of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), who recently announced their plans to strike for better work place practices, Demos Vice President of Policy and Outreach Heather McGhee issued this statement in support:
With a contracting retirement income system, rapidly rising health-care costs, and the prospect of long-term care expenses, one would have thought that people approaching retirement would be paying off their credit card debt and closing out their mortgages. But surveys suggest that people are entering retirement with more debt than ever before and relying on borrowing to cover expenses in retirement.
Around the world, wealthy countries might be creating jobs but they’re worse jobs that pay lower wages and offer fewer benefits. In the United States, one of the largest employers of low-wage workers is Walmart. About 1.4 million Americans work for Walmart — the company has about two million employees worldwide. And the average hourly wage for a Walmart associate? An estimated $8.81 an hour.
Worried about your ability to set money aside for retirement? You should also worry about what happens to the money you do manage to put away. According to a report fromDemos, the typical two-earner family with an employer-sponsored account will end up paying some 30 percent of its retirement nest egg – a total of $155,000 – to Wall Street money managers in 401(k) fees and charges.
It’s hard enough for any specific anti-poverty policy to achieve its mission, let alone work in tandem with other policies to tackle a problem that tends to be complex and entrenched. That's why Washington State’s food stamp program is remarkable, and a candidate for national expansion, if only Congress could agree not to slash SNAP funds in the latest iteration of the Farm Bill.
You probably haven’t seen the terms of the new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal currently being negotiated by the Obama Administration. Unless you’re one of “600 trade ‘advisers,’ dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators” the deal is secret and we know its terms only through select leaks, according to Lori Wallach and Ben Beachy of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
The fight to raise wages for fast food workers has now spread to the American West, with employees of a Seattle Taco Bell walking off the job on Wednesday night, forcing the store to close.
Workers at other fast food restaurants in the city walked off their jobs on Thursday.
In the study Robert Hiltonsmith and I recently completed, we find that taxpayers underwrite nearly 2 million poorly-paid jobs through federal contracts and other funding streams that channel our public dollars to private companies that perform work on behalf of America, but treat their employees in a very un-American way, failing to pay enough to support a family.
Americans don't like inequality and the want to do something about this problem. But they aren't crazy about using government to redistribute wealth and income. Instead, they would rather see bigger investments in education to expand opportunity and have businesses pay higher wages.
Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it's not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the suburbs means they've "made it," and overcome the economic stumbling blocks that kept them in cramped city apartments.
Apparently Justin Bieber has nothing to do with the new Los Angeles billboard that uses his image and name to oppose raising the minimum wage, on the grounds that such a hike would keep the teenage unemployment rate high.
Apple always seemed like the perfect company. Not so fast. When CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress on May 25, he didn’t come to talk about Apple’s latest amazing gadget or the need to grant more visas to computer programmers. Rather, in his maiden voyage to Capitol Hill as Steve Jobs’s successor, Cook had to defend the company’s tax-avoidance efforts. What should have been a triumph for Cook was instead an awkward encounter. [...]
For all the talk about inequality over the past two decades, scholars have known surprisingly little about what Americans think about the growing class divide and what they'd like to do about it, if anything.
It used to be that many Americans entered retirement having paid off their mortgages and most of their other debts. This should have been senior citizens' Golden Years.
Nowadays, more and more people over the age of 65 are struggling with mounting debt levels, fueled primarily by mortgages and credit cards. The average debt held by senior citizens has ballooned to $50,000 in 2010, up 83% since 2001, according to Federal Reserve data crunched by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. [...]
On May 21, I had the opportunity to testify before a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on how federal dollars drive inequality by paying contractors who pay too many of their workers too little. The hearing was driven by a study from Amy Traub and her colleagues at Demos, a New York based think tank, that issued a report exposing the many ways that federal contracting often adds to the burden of the low income, especially those who earn less than $12 an hour, or less than $25,000 a year.