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Year: 2015
Understanding the historic divergence between productivity and workers pay
Wage stagnation experienced by the vast majority of American workers has emerged as a central issue in economic policy debates, with candidates and leaders of both parties noting its importance. This is a welcome development because it means that economic inequality has become a focus of attention and that policymakers are seeing the connection between wage stagnation and inequality. Put simply, wage stagnation is how the rise in inequality has damaged the vast majority of American workers
Occupational wage declines since the Great Recession: Low-wage occupations see largest real wage declines
On this Labor Day 2015, the U.S. labor market has shown considerable healing since the Great Recession. Private sector employment has expanded steadily, and the jobless rate has continued to fall. Yet, underlying weaknesses persist, as evidenced by the historically low employment rate of prime-age workers and the stubbornly high number of individuals unemployed for longer than six months. The “real” unemployment rate—which includes those working part time who want full-time work, and those who have stopped searching but if offered a job would take it—remains in excess of 10 percent.
Low income workers see biggest drop in income
Despite steady gains in hiring, a falling unemployment rate and other signs of an improving economy, take-home pay for many American workers has effectively fallen since the economic recovery began in 2009, according to a new study by an advocacy group that is to be released on Thursday.
The surging ranks of America’s ultrapoor
By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries.
The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That’s according to “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1.
As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in the Middle East
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The Pacific Coast Farm-Worker Rebellion: From Baja California to Washington state, indigenous farm workers are standing up for their rights
A burned-out concrete blockhouse—the former police station—squats on one side of the only divided street in Vicente Guerrero, half a mile from Baja California’s transpeninsular highway. Just across the street lies the barrio of Nuevo (New) San Juan Copala, one of the first settlements of migrant farm workers here in the San Quintín Valley, named after their hometown in Oaxaca.
Frank E. Petersen, first black general in the Marines, dies at 83
Frank E. Petersen Jr., who suffered bruising racial indignities as a military enlistee in the 1950s and was even arrested at an officers’ club on suspicion of impersonating a lieutenant, but who endured to become the first black aviator and the first black general in the Marine Corps, died on Tuesday at his home in Stevensville, Md., near Annapolis. He was 83.
Amelia Boynton Robinson, activist beaten on Selma bridge, dies at 104
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who led voting drives and ran for Congress as a civil rights activist in Alabama, and whose severe beating by police during the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., shocked the nation, died Aug. 26 at a hospital in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Guatemala’s corruption investigations make swift strides
GUATEMALA CITY — Just about every weekend for months, Jorge Castiglione, a 70-year-old engineer with a thinning ponytail, has gone to the Plaza de la Constitución here to support what has become a ritual in this nation: weekly protests calling for the resignation of the president and an end to political impunity.
