Phil Ashburn started working at Western Electric in 1972 and stayed there for 30 years, even after the company split up. Eventually he ended up at a phone company called Pacific Bell. “It was a great company to work for. The company took care of you and you took care of the company,” he said.
In response to Walmart's announcement to raise the wage for 500,000 employees, Demos Senior Policy Analyst Catherine Ruetschlin issued the following statement:
Walmart just gave half a million people a raise. Could you be next?
The retail giant announced on Thursday that it would increase the minimum pay for its workers to $10 an hour, affecting roughly a third of its 1.4 million employees. [...]
By law, employers in the U.S. cannot make hiring decisions based on applicants' age, race, sex or religion. But what about their credit history?
A disturbing new report by the think tank Demosexplains how companies across the country are using credit checks to vet potential employees. Researchers found that one in seven people with poor credit reported being told they wouldn't be hired for a job because of their financial history.
It’s early, but arguably the most important paper of the year has already been released. The author, Michael Jay Barber, finds persuasive evidence that those who donate more than $200 (.22% of the population in 2014), wield more influence over our political system than anyone else.
Mayor Bill de Blasio's vision for the five boroughs is to move past the "tale of two cities," to create "a city where everyone has a shot at the middle class," he said during his State of the City address earlier this month.
But just who is part of New York City's middle class? It is not an exact science. Here's why. [...]
A City Council report from 2013, however, expanded the definition of middle class upward to a family earning roughly $200,000.
Last week’s New York Times reported that the Hillary Clinton campaign has tapped more than 200 experts to solve a problem: how to address the public’s anger over income and wealth inequality without “overly vilifying the wealthy.” We are left to ponder whether the campaign might vilify the wealthy some, but not too much.
Two new studies by political scientists offer compelling evidence that the rich use their wealth to control the political system and that the U.S. is a democratic republic in name only.
After years of hardship, America’s middle class has gotten some positive news in the last few months. The country’s economic recovery is gaining steam, consumer spending is starting to tick up (it grew at more than 4 % last quarter), and even wages have started to improve slightly. This has understandably led some economists and analysts to conclude that the shrinking middle phenomenon is over. [...]
As they strive to solve the public crisis of police use-of-force incidents, illuminated again by the deaths of several black victims last year, officials from the White House on down have coalesced around "community policing." When it comes to influencing the national conversation on a local issue like this, it doesn’t get more official than the U.S. Conference of Mayors, or USCM.
Much of the current ballyhoo in higher-education circles has centered on President Obama's announcement earlier this year to make community college free for all Americans "willing to work for it." The move, however, is a part of a larger suite of reforms that the White House hopes will make college more affordable and accessible.
Today, citing clear evidence that the State of California is violating its federally-mandated responsibility to offer California drivers and ID card holders the opportunity to register to vote, attorneys from Demos, Project Vote, ACLU Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and the global law firm Morrison & Foerster sent a pre-litigation notice letter to the California Secretary of State on behalf of the League of Women Voters of California, ACCE Institute, California Common Cause, the National Council of La Raza, and several individual California citizens.
For companies hiring staff, pitches from online security firms sound appealing enough: Running a credit check before signing up a new employee will “offer insight into an applicant’s reliability and a sense of their personal responsibility,” insists employeescreen.com.
Another security firm swears employers using credit checks will “find out what you need to know.”
The wheels of justice have been said to turn slowly. Andfew things move quickly here in Cleveland, Mississippi, a town of 12,000 people with no movie theater and a quaint commercial district that’s shuttered on Sunday. But when a deadline on a school desegregation suit—originally filed in 1965—came and went last month with opposing sides still unable to agree on a resolution, some locals admitted frustration.
It’s been more than two decades since Congress passed the so-called Motor Voter Act requiring state DMVs to let residents register to vote at their offices — but the ACLU of California says the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is falling asleep at the wheel, and it’s threatening to sue.
Eric Holder and his team announced a $1.4 billion settlement with Standard & Poor’s regarding its ratings of mortgage backed securities and its role in the crash of 2008. There is no question of the venality that dictated behavior at S&P and probably the other major rating agency, Moody’s. The financial and econometric models used by S&P were allowed to yield rosier results and to ignore risks despite internal concerns, and a major motivator was the drive to maintain market share in the massive mortgage marketplace.