Retail workers — sales clerks, cashiers and stock people — account for one in six jobs in the United States and a large share of the new positions created in the years since the recession. Many of the jobs are low-paying, making retail a major culprit in one of the most difficult challenges confronting the economy: stagnant wages.
Forty-seven years after the Poor People’s Campaign ended, political discussion in liberal activist circles has bifurcated in unnecessary ways. There are separate economic and racial justice movements, and as my Salon colleague Joan Walsh points out, political leaders too often speak to only one or the other. But these movements are different facets of one fight; if black lives matter, surely their economic lives matter too.
The second largest source of jobs for black people in the country is also one of the worst industries to work in. Although big retailers tout their “entry level” positions as a path to the middle class, retail work is built on dead-end jobs that perpetuate racial inequality.
According to a new report, minorities who work in retail earn less and are less likely to be promoted than their white counterparts. The study, released yesterday by the NAACP and public-policy group Demos, found that retailers pay black and Latino full-time salespeople about 75 percent of what they pay white workers in the same positions.
The NAACP and Demos, a public policy organization, have partnered to produce a new paper, “The Retail Race Divide: How the Retail Industry is Perpetuating Racial Inequality in the 21st Century” that finds a disproportionate number of Black and Latino workers in the retail industry live below the poverty line.
“Like the overall retail workforce, the vast majority of Black retail workers are adults,” says the report in its Key Findi
The overall unemployment rate is 5.5%, and the rate for African Americans and Latinos is still higher than the rate for whites, coming in at 10.2% and 6.7% respectively. The unemployment rate for whites is currently 4.7%.
Jeff Jacoby ends his June 29 column by asserting that black citizens’ right to vote “is no longer endangered anywhere in America.” What America is he talking about?
Having to register to vote is a practical barrier for some people, especially those who are poor and marginalized. So shifting that burden to the state leads to more people voting.
North Carolina’s recent voting law changes will disproportionately affect black voters in the state, according to a study published Wednesday by Dartmouth University.
“The study provides powerful ammunition for the pending legal challenges,” says Brenda Wright, a voting rights expert with the liberal think tank Demos. “It shows that virtually every key feature of North Carolina’s election legislation will disproportionately cut back on registration and voting by African Americans in North Carolina as compared to whites.”
One effect of the ruling is that it’ll now be easier to sue an employer over an expensive 401(k) plan, turning up the legal pressure a notch.
Those expenses matter. A 2012 study by Demos, a New York City-based think tank, found that over a lifetime, 401(k) fees cost a two-earner family with a median income nearly $155,000 — and consume nearly one-third of their investment returns.
While income is distributed unequally in the country, what few people know is how much more unequally wealth, financial assets and inheritances are distributed.
In the wake of the recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act, partisans were quick to jump on the opportunity to restrict unfavorable voters. Across the country, conservatives in particular have debated fiercely whether to pursue voter suppression to remain competitive in an increasingly diverse electorate.
The lack of retirement security for middle-class and low-wage workers is a growing crisis that Washington has refused to address, even though it demands immediate attention.
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."
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."