Yesterday, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visited Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston, where she called for stronger election administration practices to protect voters. Along with asking Congress to reboot the Voting Rights Act—which had “its heart … ripped out” by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, Clinton said—she called for mandatory voter registration and at least 20 days of early voting.
The rising cost of attending college has had a serious impact on the finances of most students and their families, but the burden has been distributed unequally.
More than 1.9 million Black Americans work in retail, accounting for 11 percent of the industry’s total workforce. Despite being the second-largest source of employment for Black workers, new data from the NAACP and equality advocacy organization, Demos, finds that the industry is rife with racial inequality and poor earning potential.
Since America’s founding, the franchise has been dramatically expanded in waves: first, universal suffrage for all men (first, through the abolition of property ownership requirements for white men, then the 15th Amendment) then the expansion of suffrage to women and finally the Voting Rights Act, which abolished poll taxes and literacy tests.
After banning the box last year, the D.C. Council will consider a bill that would prohibit employers from checking an applicant’s credit history during most of the hiring process.
No one gets a job as a retail cashier or shopping assistant to get rich.
While the retail industry is known for its paltry pay across the board, skin color has an alarming influence on how many raises and promotions a worker receives.
White retail workers earn $15.32 an hour, on average, while African American and Latino retail workers average less than $11.75, according to a recent analysis of government data by NAACP and Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
The reason is simple: white workers are mor
Nine dollars an hour, by the way, is still poverty wages. On that wage, if an employee were working 40 hours per week every week of the year they would make just under $19,000 per year -- still below poverty.
The missing link in the inequality debate is not financial stability, but financial domination of the broader economy, what has come to be called “financialization.” Financialization, as a new Demos report demonstrates, is not only measurable by risk and volatility or by the mere expanding volume of financial activities; rather, it should also be measured by how the non-financial economy—the economy of jobs and wages, production and enterprise growth—is increasingly dist
While the highest income bracket noticed a drop another source that analyzes the wealthiest one percent found that in 2008, 99 percent voted, which shows that the very peak of wealth controls most of what happens in America.
Chanting "$15.00 and a union," thousands of federal contract workers walked off their jobs yesterday, led by the Senate's cafeteria workers who serve Senators their food. They were joined by Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Keith Ellison (D-Minn) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz). Sanders announced they were introducing legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
The implications of a state labor board's July 22 decision to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15 an hour from $8.75 are clear: Other industries with low-wage workers could find themselves facing a similar pay hike soon.
Next up is likely the retail industry, followed by home care, child care and even adjunct professors, said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank.
"The patchwork of wage hikes by locality and industry, as well as the falling unemployme
But it is the recent, explosive growth of Uber and other "sharing economy" companies that have attracted the most concern.
HomeJoy recently announced it would shut down in the face of four lawsuits alleging it should treat the people who clean homes on its behalf as employees rather than as independent contractors not entitled to the same workplace protections.
"If a technologist wants to disrupt an industry that has middle-class jobs and replace them with insecure, not-as-good jobs, there has to be a conversation about that,"
What would America look like if donors didn’t rule the world? It’s an interesting question and one worth pondering as the 2016 Presidential campaigns kick off. Available data reveals that donors not only have disproportionate influence over politics, but that influence is wielded largely to keep issues that would benefit the working and middle classes off of the table.
Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which has been both sword and shield for racial equity and inclusive democracy. And yet today, the right to vote for millions of Americans is in more danger than at any time since the passage of the law, thanks to the Supreme Court decision two years ago that struck down the most important part of the law and cleared the way for states to enact targeted voting restrictions.
New U.S. Census data released on July 19 confirm what we already knew about American elections: Voter turnout in the United States is among the lowest in the developed world. Only 42 percent of Americans voted in the 2014 midterm elections, the lowest level of voter turnout since 1978. And midterm voters tend to be older, whiter and richer than the general population.