We begin today's roundup with
The New York Times calling for higher wages in its editorial today:
It is hard to overstate the extent to which work no longer results in a decent paycheck and a rising standard of living in this country. The portion of the economic pie that goes to working people is currently near the smallest on record, in data going back to 1947. Similarly, the gap between worker pay and labor productivity has widened since the 1970s. In a healthy economy, wages and productivity would rise in tandem, but in recent decades, productivity gains have flowed increasingly to executive compensation and shareholder returns, rather than wages.
These dynamics are not inevitable. Low-wage employers, in particular, pay low wages because they can and the main reason they can is that Congress has failed, over decades, to adequately update the minimum wage and other labor standards, including rules for overtime pay, employee benefits and union organizing.
Jared Bernstein at The Washington Post examines The Raise the Wage Act and the data supporting wage increases:
The Raise the Wage Act would raise the federal minimum wage $0.75 in 2016 to $8.00 an hour and raise it an additional $1 per year for the next four years. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 37.7 million workers would benefit from the cumulative five-year increase. [...]Given our partisan divide, I don’t expect this proposal to be warmly embraced up on Capitol Hill, but you never know. Raising the minimum wage is a highly popular policy—recent poll results show that 75 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, support an increase that’s even larger than the new proposal.
So I welcome the Raise the Wage Act and hope that this time around we can do a more well-informed dance.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Sara Mead at US News:
National research suggests that roughly seven in 1,000 children are expelled from preschool. But black children are twice as likely to be expelled from pre-K as white children, and boys are 4.5 times as likely to be expelled as girls.
Expelling children from preschool seems ludicrous. What can a three or four-year-old do to merit being kicked out of school entirely?
But high rates of expulsion suggest that, even as early as three and four years old, educational institutions already view and treat young black boys as potential threats. This attitude likely affects how black boys perceive both themselves and their relationship to authority figures.
Equally problematic, high preschool expulsion rates mean that these little boys are denied opportunities to build early academic, executive function and social-emotional skills that provide a foundation for later school and life success. Without these skills, children run a greater risk of struggling in elementary school, becoming frustrated, exhibiting behavior problems, and being held back a grade, placed in special education, suspended or expelled and ultimately dropping out. This trajectory is the reality for far too many young black men, putting them on a track that leads to unemployment and run-ins with the criminal justice system, rather than success in college, careers and life.
Deepak Bhargava at The Nation highlights a new campaign for economic justice:
On Wednesday, CCC, Working Families Organization, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Jobs With Justice are unveiling a bold new agenda called Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All. This initiative takes the major crises of our time and turns them into opportunities for change. [...] Today, our country is more aware than ever before that our entire economic system is out of balance. We have reached a time in history where the need, the opportunity, and the energy are all here to create an economy that works for our families—now we need the will and the dedication of the American public to make it happen.
And
studies like this show why we need action on income inequality now:
The researchers' data showed that California workers at the lowest end of the pay scale have seen significant declines in their earnings over the last three decades, after adjusting for inflation. Workers in the highest income brackets, meanwhile, have seen enormous gains. [...]
For example, the bottom 20% of workers have seen inflation-adjusted wages decline 12% since 1979, while the top 10% of California workers have seen wages grow 35%.
Susan Milligan at US News:
During the height of the modern industrial era, someone without a college degree could get a secure, well-paying job at an automobile factory. Now, many of those jobs have moved overseas, where labor is cheaper, and the higher-tech jobs here require education not all American workers have.
“The root cause from our perspective is reduced bargaining power,” says Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Labor union membership has shrunk, and governors across the nation have been successful in weakening the bargaining power of public sector unions, he notes. That, he said, is a major reason the minimum wage, in real terms, is lower than it was in 1968, while productivity has increased 80 percent since then.
On a final note, over at Slate,
Michael Kazin analyzes the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for president and how he'll possibly change the debate:
Count on Sanders to fight for reforms that will discomfort the comfortable. He will demand a minimum wage of $15 an hour, legislation to make it easier to organize unions, a big increase in Social Security payments largely paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy, the aggressive development of renewable energy sources, and an end to the dominion of big money in politics. The senator from Vermont is one of the sponsors of a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case. He might even call for prosecuting and jailing the people whom he blasted in a marathon 2010 speech as “the crooks on Wall Street whose actions resulted in the severe recession … whose illegal, reckless actions have resulted in millions of Americans losing their jobs, their homes, [and] their savings.”