Despite Friday’s unemployment rate dropping to 5.9 percent nationally, New York City is still home to the dead-end kids.
Half of the city’s 600,000 recent college graduates are either underemployed or out of work, according to New York Fed researchers.
Most of this 50 percent are working in jobs they are overqualified for — no college degree required — and that are often low-pay, part-time and without benefits. It’s a vast jobs wasteland out there for this Millennial generation. [...]
The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The unbanked are usually poor, often minorities, and find themselves shunned by banks that can’t make money off them. Typically, they end up turning to predatory check cashers and payday lenders. Many also feel a great sense of social division between themselves and those who have bank accounts.
While the de Blasio administration and the City Council work through the details of a bill that would prohibit employers from reviewing the credit histories of potential hires, liberal advocates are pushing for passage of the strongest possible version of the legislation.
Fewer American high school students are working summer jobs and part-time jobs than a decade ago, and that will likely mean lower wage-earning capacity in their futures, research indicates. In 2000, about 34 percent of high school students age 16 and older held jobs, but that share had fallen to 18 percent by 2012, data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate.
It’s the classic Catch-22 of the doomed job search: How do you get a job? You need experience. And how do you get experience? Get a job. But for many, the unemployment cycle gets further twisted when it intersects with the debt cycle. When prospective employers run credit checks, a bad report becomes a financial scarlet letter. ...
A bill that aims to “prohibit discrimination based on one’s consumer credit history” by banning employers from doing credit checks on job applicants will be the subject of a City Council hearing set for 10 a.m. Sept. 12 at City Hall. [...]
According to an article by Amy Traub titled “Discredited: How Employment Credit Checks Keep Qualified Workers Out of a Job,” the practice of checking credit on prospective employees is legal under federal law.
President Obama should sign a Good Jobs executive order to encourage contractors to improve workplace benefits and respect their employees’ rights to bargain collectively.
Workers at many of the nation’s largest and most profitable employers struggle to get enough work hours (and sufficiently stable hours) to make ends meet, making fair scheduling as important as raising wages for millions of workers.
In May 2013, low-wage workers in federal buildings in Washington began walking off the job in a series of one-day strikes. Employed by concessionaires and janitorial contractors at places like the Smithsonian and the Ronald Reagan Building, the workers said their rock-bottom wages weren't enough to survive on. Like the Walmart and fast-food workers also going on strike, they asked for better working conditions and a greater share of the spoils.
Los Angeles lawmakers were expected to vote Wednesday on a proposal to renegotiate or terminate an interest rate swap deal from the mid-2000s that critics say now costs the city millions of dollars a year in fees. If successful, the initiative could make the city the nation's largest to challenge ballooning Wall Street levies that accompany similar interest rate swap deals throughout the nation.
Today, President Obama will sign an Executive Order that will encourage federal agencies to not contract with companies that violate labor laws, and require federal contractors to disclose any record of wage, labor and anti-discrimination law violations.
When Walmart pays its workers so little that they need food stamps to survive, they're also investing in a steady profit stream. Even though their prices are roughly the same or even more than their local competition, Walmart's excessive marketing of "low prices" makes them a first-choice supermarket for people living in poverty, including their employees.
Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years.
Demos Policy Analyst Robert Hiltonsmith testifies before the Congressional Progressive Caucus on wage theft and its effects on the earnings of low-income workers.
Embedded gender and racial discrimination and lack of bargaining power are major causes of not only low pay for home health care aides but for many of the country’s low-wage, fast-growing occupations.
The state-appointed Detroit Emergency Manager has commenced a program of shutting off the water of a large portion of the 138,000 delinquent accounts, up to 90,000 of which are poor households and largely African-American.