In October, the Trump administration published a proposed rule regarding tips which, if finalized, will cost workers more than $700 million annually. It is yet another example of the Trump administration using the fine print of a proposal to attempt to push through a change that will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. We also find that as employers ask tipped workers to do more nontipped work as a result of this rule, employment in nontipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3% and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.2%, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being nontipped to being tipped. Given that back-of-the-house, nontipped jobs in restaurants are more likely to be held by people of color while tipped occupations are more likely to be held by white workers, this could reduce job opportunities for people of color.

The background: Employers are not allowed to pocket workers’ tips—tips must remain with workers. But employers can legally “capture” some of workers’ tips by paying tipped workers less in base wages than their other workers. For example, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but employers can pay tipped workers a “tipped minimum wage” of $2.13 an hour as long as employees’ base wage and the tips they receive over the course of a week are the equivalent of at least $7.25 per hour. All but eight states have a subminimum wage for tipped workers.

In a system like this, the more nontipped work that is done by tipped workers earning the subminimum wage, the more employers benefit. This is best illustrated with a simple example. Say a restaurant has two workers, one doing tipped work and one doing nontipped work, who both work 40 hours a week. The tipped worker is paid $2.50 an hour in base wages, but gets $10 an hour in tips on average, for a total of $12.50 an hour in total earnings. The nontipped worker is paid $7.50 an hour. In this scenario, the restaurant pays their workers a total of ($2.50 + $7.50) * 40 = $400 per week, and the workers take home a total of ($12.50 + $7.50) * 40 = $800 (with $400 of that coming from tips).

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In recent weeks, a number of policy analyses of progressive economic policies—a surtax on high-incomes, a wealth tax, and Social Security expansion—have claimed these policies would damage economic growth. Policymakers should give these analyses very little weight in debates about these issues, for a number of reasons.

First, and most important, is the fact that all of these analyses are grounded in an economic view of the world that sees growth as constrained by the economy’s productive capacity (or the supply side of the economy) and not by the spending of households, businesses and government (the economy’s demand side). These estimates have other problems too—they are not even particularly convincing supply-side estimates and even if the economy’s growth really was constrained by supply, these estimates would still be misleading about the effects of these policies on welfare. But the biggest reason why policymakers should give these analyses zero weight is because they assume that growth is almost never demand-constrained.

Before the Great Recession, the assumption that growth was nearly always supply constrained was almost universally held by economists and macroeconomic policymakers. It was recognized that demand (or aggregate spending) could occasionally be too weak to fully employ the economy’s productive capacity and hence cause rising unemployment, but it was generally thought that such periods were rare and would end quickly after the Federal Reserve sensibly cut interest rates. Because shortfalls of demand relative to supply were rare and short and easy to fix, the reasoning went, any real constraint on the economy’s growth over the long-run must be the pace of growth of supply. Growth in supply is generally driven by growth in the quality of the workforce, the productive stock of plants, equipment and research, and growth in technological progress, which together lead to growing productivity—or the amount of income or output generated in an average hour of work.

The assumption that supply constraints are much more likely to bind overall growth than demand constraints drove almost all macroeconomic policymaking in the decades before the Great Recession. For example, the Federal Reserve for decades feared lower unemployment far more than lower inflation. Lower unemployment was a signal that demand was rising relative to supply, and if one thinks growth was generally supply-constrained, this meant that demand growth would quickly outstrip supply growth and lead to rising inflation. Lower inflation, conversely, meant that supply growth was outpacing demand growth—but that was always a temporary and easy-to-fix condition. The decades-long bipartisan overreaction to rising federal budget deficits is also a byproduct of assuming the economy’s growth is supply constrained. Deficits boost demand growth. If one assumes that demand is generally marching in lock-step with supply, then larger deficits that boost demand imply that supply constraints will soon bind and cause inflation (or interest rate increases). Smaller deficits, conversely, reduce demand growth. But if the danger of demand growth slowing too much is low and easy-to-fix, then that’s not a problem.Read more

Last week, the Senate Budget Committee passed a bipartisan set of budget reforms out of committee. While they include some important steps forward, such as effectively eliminating the archaic debt limit, their centerpiece is a deeply damaging provision that, if passed into law, would make recessions far more damaging by forcing Congress to consider steep cuts just when the economy would be most hurt by them.

Under the reforms, instead of passing a budget every year, Congress would be on a two-year budget cycle. This is not totally objectionable. The damaging provisions are the “special reconciliation instructions“ provided in the second year of this budget cycle. In the first year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) would project the debt-to-GDP ratio from the budget. In the second year, CBO would report on whether the federal government is meeting those debt-to-GDP targets, and if not, trigger the special reconciliation instructions. These instructions would require the Senate Budget Committee to recommend an amount of deficit reduction in response to missing the debt-to-GDP targets and create a fast track for passing those deficit reductions.

Others have rightly focused on the extent to which this could line up budget cuts to programs that U.S. families rely on, like Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. For example, revenues have come in even lower than CBO expected following the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). If this reform bill were in place, Congress would be expected to respond to these larger-than-expected tax cuts for the rich with deficit reduction. This has been in the Republican leadership playbook all along, as they have made it abundantly clear that cuts to vital programs for low- and moderate-income families are the intended next step after passing regressive tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Read more

The Trump administration’s harsh enforcement tactics and human rights violations at the border have rightly gotten most of the attention in press coverage about immigration lately, and enforcement has been the basis for the very few questions that Democratic presidential candidates have been asked about immigration so far in the primary debates. What’s gotten less attention and no discussion after five Democratic primary debates are the 17% of workers in the U.S. labor force who are foreign-born, including the 5% of the workforce who are vulnerable to wage theft and other abuses because they lack an immigration status, or the 1% who have an immigration status that is mostly owned and controlled by their employer, by virtue of being employed through U.S. temporary work visa programs.

Only a miniscule number of mentions have been made in the candidates’ published immigration plans about the intersection of immigration and the labor market, and there’s been no discussion on the debate stages about what the Democratic candidates would propose to reform future U.S. labor migration—i.e., migration for the purpose of work. In the past this has sometimes been referred to as “future flows” of migrants: the pathways available to persons from abroad who want to come to the United States to be employed, or avenues for employers that wish to hire migrants, either through temporary work visa programs or as permanent immigrants.

The fifth Democratic Presidential Primary Debate on November 20 was no different than the past four: virtually no discussion of immigration in general—with only one narrow question about the border wall—and no discussion at all about labor migration. Will this change during the sixth debate in December? I hope so, because a positive vision of U.S. labor migration that is fair to immigrants and Americans and fosters solidarity—rather than a corporate-driven race to the bottom on wages and labor standards, which employer groups often push for—is something worth talking about and an argument that progressives can win.

Migrants in the United States are living and working during a time when the president in office clearly doesn’t value their contributions, but nevertheless benefits economically from their labor: President Trump has hired undocumented workers at his companies—some of whom have alleged they were exploited—as well as guestworkers with temporary visas in programs he has expanded, where migrant workers are tied to employers and often underpaid—all while demonizing and scapegoating migrants as criminals and rapists. For the most part, President Trump has gotten a pass on his blatant hypocrisy.

By failing to bring up labor migration issues, the Democratic presidential candidates have not managed to expose Trump’s glaring weakness on the issue. While a significant share of the blame for not discussing the topic at the debates falls at the feet of the moderators, the candidates are making a mistake by not mentioning the contributions that migrant workers make or the challenges they face in the workplace. The candidates also haven’t offered many details about how they would re-make the immigration system so that future migrant workers can enter the U.S. labor market with equal rights and fair pay in their plans for immigration that are published on their campaign websites. A quick summary of what’s included in the immigration plans of a few of the major candidates makes this abundantly clear.Read more

November 20 is Latina Equal Pay Day, the day that marks how long into 2019 a Latina would have to work in order to be paid the same wages her white male counterpart was paid last year. That’s nearly 11 months longer, meaning that Latina workers had to work all of 2018 and then this far—to November 20!—into 2019 to get paid the same as white non-Hispanic men did in 2018. Put another way, a Latina would have to be in the workforce for 57 years to earn what a non-Hispanic white man would earn after 30 years in the workforce. Unfortunately, Hispanic women are subject to a double pay gap—an ethnic pay gap and a gender pay gap. And, this pay gap widened over previous year when it “only” took until November 1 for Hispanic women catch up to non-Hispanic men.

The date November 20 is based on the finding that Hispanic women workers are paid 53 cents on the white non-Hispanic male dollar, using the 2017 March Current Population Survey for median annual earnings for full-time, year-round workers. We get similar results when we look at average hourly wages for all workers (not just full-time workers) using the monthly Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group for 2018—which show Hispanic women workers being paid 56 cents on the white male dollar.Read more

There is a growing bipartisan consensus that noncompete agreements harm workers and the economy. This bipartisanship scarcely seemed possible back in 2015 when we were government lawyers coordinating investigations by the Offices of the Illinois and New York Attorneys General into Jimmy John’s use of noncompete agreements for sandwich makers and delivery drivers. But earlier this month, in what seems like the first bipartisan federal effort in far too long, Senators Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced a bipartisan bill that would effectively stop the abuse of noncompete agreements. This builds on a year in which six state legislatures also passed significant noncompete reforms.

The growing use of noncompete agreements

Employer use of noncompete agreements has mushroomed in recent years. These agreements prevent people from working for their former employer’s competitors, and they were once used sparingly to prevent, for example, executives with trade secrets or confidential business information from sharing them with new employers. Now, they’re often used indiscriminately to chill job mobility for employees with no access to such information. A 2015 study found that 40% of Americans have had a noncompete agreement at some point in their career. As lawyers, we’ve worked on cases involving noncompete agreements used for janitors, receptionists, customer service workers, fledgling journalists, even employees of a day care center.

Why are noncompete agreements so bad? They fly in the face of our fundamental American belief that anyone can work hard, gain skills, and move on to a better opportunity to build a better life. Noncompete agreements can trap workers in jobs they want to leave—whether because of sexual harassment or other poor working conditions, or even just a bad boss. They limit the talent pool, preventing employers from hiring the best worker for the job. Noncompete agreements can also stifle economic dynamism, blocking people from starting their own businesses.

Workers’ inability to leave their jobs because of noncompete agreements and similar limitations has also contributed to the wage stagnation of recent decades. Two studies released just last month found that noncompete agreements adversely affected wages and job mobility. This makes sense, given that the agreements erode the leverage that workers typically get from the threat of leaving their jobs to work elsewhere. That threat is now empty for millions of Americans subject to these provisions, showing that noncompete agreements aren’t really about trade secrets anymore. They’re about limiting workers’ bargaining power.Read more

Proponents of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) made bold claims about the effects that the TCJA’s corporate rate cuts would have on the paychecks of U.S. households. The economic theory rests on corporate rate cuts bringing forth enough additional savings to finance new investment spending. Specifically, higher after-tax corporate profits are passed down to shareholders in the form of higher dividends. These higher dividends attract more savings from abroad and incentivize U.S. households to save more. These extra savings finance new investments in plants and equipment, which boost the productivity of workers, and eventually that increased productivity boosts workers’ wages.

We pointed out at the time that in practice, this theory wasn’t likely to hold. After the TCJA passed, we indicated that by increasing deficits, the specifics of the TCJA didn’t even conform to the economic theory that was supposed to support it.

But that wasn’t enough to stop the TCJA’s proponents from making disingenuous arguments about the effects it was having on the economy. Proponents pointed to corporate claims that they were giving out bonuses or raising wages in the wake of the TCJA. The economic theory above shows clearly how this was nothing but a corporate PR ploy. Even in theory, it takes time for corporate profits to trickle down into worker wages, and we weren’t the only ones pointing this out. Unsurprisingly, data since then show those bonuses didn’t materialize for workers.Read more

The uneasy question on everyone’s lips these days seems to be about when the next recession is coming. Ironically, every month that gets added to the longest economic recovery in modern history brings increasing scrutiny to even the slightest sign of a downturn. As we turn our attention to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) October Employment Situation Report this week, two of those signs—a drop in payroll employment and a slowdown in nominal wage growth—are deserving of deeper exploration.

First, we expect some noise in the October payroll estimates due to two temporary, but fully anticipated and measurable effects. According to the BLS CES Strike Report, October payroll estimates will be reduced by 46,000 because of the General Motors (GM) strike, which started in mid-September 2019 and ended last Friday. What that means, in practical terms, is that private sector payroll employment for the month of October, in the absence of the GM strike, was actually 46,000 higher than what will be reported. Another event that could have some effect on the number of jobs added in October will be temporary hiring for the Decennial Census, which could potentially inflate the number of public sector jobs.

While the October jobs report may not be the most straightforward indicator of current job growth patterns, in August BLS reported a major downward revision in the number of jobs added over the past year. Specifically, the release of the preliminary estimate of its benchmark revision to payroll employment revealed that there were a half million fewer jobs created between April 2018 and March 2019 than was originally reported. Given weaker private sector employment growth in September relative to the prior 3- to 6-month averages, we will be watching for whether October employment growth, net of the effects of the GM strike and Census hiring, is stronger or weaker than recent trends.Read more

Josh Bivens, director of research at EPI

Earlier this month, Olivier Blanchard—the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an influential figure in macroeconomics—suggested that the Federal Reserve should consider targeting inflation in nominal wages rather than (or in addition to) inflation in prices. I was predictably intrigued by this: I proposed a nominal wage inflation target for the Fed a few years back.

This edition of the newsletter quickly sketches out the logic of a nominal wage inflation target to guide Fed decision-making on interest rates, and it highlights one particularly important detail: the assumed rate of productivity growth used to specify the target. If the rate of productivity growth is endogenous to the degree of labor market slack (as some evidence indicates), then using real-time estimates of productivity growth as an input into the wage target could threaten to lock in the damage to wage growth done by too-slack labor markets.

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Donald Trump ran for president promising to uplift workers. But his actions have done the exact opposite.

According to a new EPI report, Trump appointees on the board of a small, independent agency called the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—and the NLRB’s Trump-appointed general counsel (GC)—are working hard to undermine workers’ rights to join together in collective action to improve pay and working conditions.

“Scabby the Rat,” Chad Laird, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As authors Celine McNicholas, Margaret Poydock, and Lynn Rhinehart warn, Trump’s appointees have ticked off one by one the 10 items on a U.S. Chamber of Commerce hit list of NLRB policies to overturn. And they’re not done yet: The NLRB plans to go after more worker protections in the months ahead.

Under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), most nonsupervisory private-sector workers have the right to join together in collective action—whether that is through forming a union or some other means—to negotiate with employers about the terms and conditions of their employment. The NLRB was established to safeguard those rights by investigating and prosecuting violations of the law.

Instead, the three Trump appointees to the agency’s board and the agency’s Trump-appointed GC are systematically rolling back workers’ rights through a flurry of employer-friendly case decisions, rulemakings, and guidance memos. At the same time, the agency has downsized by 10 percent of its staff: The ratio of covered workers to NLRB staff is now roughly 96,000-to-1, up from 65,000-to-1 in 2011.

Here, in general terms, are just a few of the things the Trump NLRB is doing (those of you who know your way around labor law can go directly to the report):Read more

For all of the hype surrounding U.S. electoral debates, the flashy cable news forum and gladiator-style tone of the questions often lead to candidates jostling for soundbites rather than debating actual substance.

Economic inequality and the erosion of worker power are not only central to EPI’s mission, they are also key to the American political landscape today. With that in mind we tapped our experts for a bit of a wishful thinking exercise, collecting questions on a variety of issues that are core to our research.

Here are seven issues we would like to see raised in tonight’s presidential debate:

1. Stagnant wages are one of the main challenges facing American workers. What do you see as the chief culprit and what policies would you implement to address this problem?
2. What do you see as the key causes of income inequality, and what are your top two solutions? Is CEO pay too high? What would you do to rein it in?
3. How do you plan to address America’s racist institutions, and the persistent lack of minority and woman representation in the most powerful offices of the land?
4. Trump’s trade policies are chaotic, but he appears to have tapped into a problem that resonates with voters—trade deals that favor corporations over people. What is your positive alternative to Trump on trade?
5. Name one way in which your thinking about the economy has changed over time. What’s an economic policy you’ve supported in the past that you no longer support?
6. Teachers in Chicago are on the brink of a massive strike, part of a nationwide trend, as they push for social and educational justice for students of color. What is your long-term plan to fully support America’s public schools and how would you ensure that students of color get additional resources needed to overcome decades of disinvestment?
7.  Upon taking office, you will inherit a humanitarian crisis at the border that is mostly the result of Trump’s draconian policies and his administration’s mismanagement. What would you do to address the reports of human rights violations by agents of the United States government and to end the poor conditions inside ICE immigration jails and Border Patrol facilities?

On August 12, 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, “I’ve done the MATH, it’s not immigrants taking our jobs, it’s automation. Instead of blaming immigrants, let’s give our citizens the means to thrive through the fourth industrial revolution.” This, like much of Yang’s and others’ current discourse regarding automation, is focused on an exaggerated fear that automation can and soon will replace workers’ roles in production, resulting in widespread job loss. But for hundreds of years, technological progress has continually reshaped the way work is done—and yet this progress has never resulted in a long-term decline in the labor force. Focusing on overstated risks of job loss from automation distracts from efforts to advocate for higher wages, better benefits, and increased bargaining power—issues that have been, and will continue to be, essential to the well-being of workers and their families.

However, while there is no reason to believe that automation will lead to widespread, sustained decline in the overall number of jobs, there will be specific jobs, industries, and workers for whom the impact of automation will come with real costs, at least in the short term. One industry in which concerns about automation may be warranted in the near term is transportation. Ford and Volvo have both announced plans to put fully autonomous vehicles on the road as early as 2021; Honda has announced a partnership with GM to begin developing autonomous vehicles; and Nissan recently introduced “no-hands driving” on highways in its ProPilot 2.0. While consumer skepticism may slow down the industry’s timelines, many advances have already been made: Most new cars have computerized driver assistance options; Tesla’s Autosteer has logged at least one billion miles of supervised autonomous driving; and Caterpillar is already producing autonomous vehicles for hauling mining materials.Read more

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release September’s numbers on the state of the labor market. As usual, I’ll be paying close attention to nominal wage growth as well as the prime-age employment-to-population ratio, which are two of the best indicators of labor market health. Friday’s report will also give us a chance to examine the “teacher shortfall”—the gap between local public education employment and what is needed to keep up with growth in the student population.

Thousands of local public education jobs were lost during the recession which began in 2008, and those losses continued deep into the official economic recovery, even as more students started school each year. This has been true of public sector jobs in general—continued austerity at all levels of government has been a drag on public sector employment, which has failed to keep up with population growth.

Teacher strikes in several states over the last few years have highlighted deteriorating teacher pay as a critical issue. My colleagues Sylvia Allegretto and Larry Mishel find that average weekly wages of public school teachers have fallen over the last two decades and the teacher wage penalty continues to grow, reaching a record 21.4% in 2018. My colleagues Emma García and Elaine Weiss have further documented shortcomings and teacher shortages and recently how much teachers have to pay out of their own pockets for school supplies for their classrooms. Low pay makes it harder to attract and retain teachers who have the qualifications associated with teacher effectiveness in the classroom.

The costs of a significant teacher employment gap are high, consequences measurable: larger class sizes, fewer teacher aides, fewer extracurricular activities, and changes to curricula. Last year, the local public education job shortfall remained large. To solve this problem, state and local governments need to fund more teaching positions and raise pay to close the teacher pay gap and attract and retain the qualified teachers our children deserve. On Friday, I will compare where jobs in public education should be, using the pre-recession ratio, student population growth, and the most recent jobs numbers.

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The state income data from the American Community Survey (ACS), released this morning by the Census Bureau, showed that in 2018, household incomes across the country rose—albeit more slowly, and in fewer states, than in the previous year. From 2017 to 2018, inflation-adjusted median household incomes grew in 33 states and the District of Columbia (14 of these changes were statistically significant.) This marks a decline from the broader growth seen between 2016 and 2017 when median household incomes grew in 40 states and the District of Columbia, with 24 of those changes being statistically significant.

The ACS data showed an increase of 0.2% in the inflation-adjusted median household income for the country as a whole—an increase of just $130 for a typical U.S. household and a slowdown in growth compared to the past three years: household incomes increased by 3.8% in 2015, 2.0% in 2016, and 2.5% in 2017. [i] Despite these increases, households in 23 states still had inflation-adjusted median incomes in 2018 below their 2007 pre-recession values, which makes this year’s slowdown particularly disappointing.

From 2017 to 2018, the largest percentage gains in household income occurred in Idaho, where the typical household experienced an increase of $2,085 in their annual income—an increase of 3.9%. Maryland remains the state with the highest median household income at $83,242, having experienced a slight increase (0.6%) from 2017 to 2018. The District of Columbia has the highest median household income in the country at $85,203—though comparing D.C. to states is problematic, since D.C. is a city, not a state. Read more

The 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) data released today shows that the slowdown in income growth from 2017 to 2018 reported earlier this month by the Census Bureau also indicates a slowdown in progress reducing poverty in many states. From 2017 to 2018, the poverty rate decreased in 36 states and the District of Columbia, with 14 of those states experiencing statistically significant declines. For comparison, from 2016 to 2017, poverty fell in 42 states plus the District of Columbia, with 20 states and the District of Columbia having statistically significant reductions.

The poverty rate rose in 14 states, with increases of 1.3 percentage points in Rhode Island, and 0.8 percentage points each, in Connecticut and Arkansas—although only Connecticut’s increase was statistically significant.

The continued reductions in poverty rates for most states are welcome news; however, most states have still not recovered to their 2007, pre-Great Recession poverty rates. Moreover, 38 states had higher poverty rates in 2018 than in 2000.

The national poverty rate, as measured by the ACS, fell 0.3 percentage points to 13.1 percent in 2018, making it nearly the same as the ACS poverty rate in 2007, when it was 13.0 percent. It remains 0.9 percentage points above the rate from 2000.

Between 2017 and 2018, West Virginia had the largest decline in its poverty rate (-1.3 percentage points), followed by Delaware (-1.1 percentage points), Louisiana (-1.1 percentage points), Idaho (-1.0 percentage points), and Arizona (-0.9 percentage points). Poverty increased most in in Rhode Island (1.3 percentage points), Connecticut (0.8 percentage points), Arkansas (0.8 percentage points), Maine (0.5 percentage point), Montana (0.5 percentage point), and Iowa (0.5 percentage point). Read more

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor announced its final overtime rule, which will set the salary threshold under which salaried workers are automatically entitled to overtime pay to $35,568 a year. The rule leaves behind millions of workers who would have received overtime protections under the much stronger rule, published in 2016, that Trump administration chose to abandon.

For quick details on the history of this rulemaking, see this statement. The two tables below show just how many workers this administration is turning its back on with this rule, and how much money workers will lose. Using the same methodology used by the Department of Labor in their estimates of the economic impact of the rule, I estimate that 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the 2016 rule will be left behind by the Trump administration’s rule, including 3.2 million workers who would have gotten new overtime protections under the 2016 rule and 5.0 million who would have gotten strengthened overtime protections under the 2016 rule. As the table shows, this administration is turning its back on 4.2 million women, 2.7 million parents of children under the age of 18, 2.9 million people of color, and 4.6 million workers without a college degree.

With this rule, the Trump administration is cheating workers out of billions. The annual wage gains from this rule are $1.4 billion dollars less than they would have been under the 2016 rule—and these annual earnings losses balloon over time because the Trump administration neglected to include automatic indexing in their rule. Once again, President Trump has turned his back on the working people of this country.

The Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board proposed a rule last week that would rob graduate teaching assistants and other student employees of the rights to organize and collectively bargain. This is just the most recent example of the board’s attack on working people. Last month, the board determined that misclassifying workers as independent contractors does not violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Before that, the General Counsel’s office released a deeply flawed memo that found that Uber drivers were not employees under the NLRA.

The trend with the Trump board seems to be to take a statute which broadly protects private sector workers and whittle away at its scope. At a time when worker advocates are demanding more workers have the right to a union and collective bargaining, the Trump board’s graduate teaching assistant proposal demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the modern workforce.

Had the Trump board considered any data or conducted any meaningful analysis of the academic workplace in developing the proposed rule, it would have discovered that the last several decades have seen significant changes in labor conditions. Universities have increasingly relied on graduate teaching assistants and contingent faculty, with the growth in graduate assistant positions and non-tenure track positions outpacing the increase in tenured and tenure-track positions between the Fall of 2005 and Fall 2015.

These positions have dramatically lower compensation than faculty. The average salary of a graduate teaching assistant during the 2015-2016 school year was $35,810. Individuals who are working while enrolled in graduate school deserve livable wages. One way to address this issue is through collective bargaining—the very right the Trump board seeks to rob from these workers.

Further, in spite of the majority’s insistence that collective bargaining will harm “academic freedom,” there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Public universities have had graduate student worker unions for 50 years. In 2016, more than 64,000 graduate student employees were unionized at 28 institutions of higher education in the public sector. The colleges and universities with union represented student employees have not reported a loss of “academic freedom” as the Trump board suggests.

In reality, union-represented graduate student employees at public universities have reported that they enjoy higher levels of personal and professional support than that reported by non-union represented students. Unionized and nonunionized student employees report similar perceptions of academic freedom. However, union-represented graduate student workers did report receiving higher pay than non-union represented graduate student workers. Perhaps this is one reason why there have been so many successful organizing campaigns on campuses across the country the last few years. Student employees at several private universities have unionized and won better working conditions–better pay, better health care, better child care. The Trump board’s proposal would rob student employees of these gains.

The Trump board is committed to rolling back workers’ rights to a union and collective bargaining. They routinely advance political proposals based on flawed facts and legal reasoning. Through decisions, general counsel memos, and rulemaking the agency is making it more and more difficult for working people to have a voice in the workplace. All workers deserve the basic right to a union. The NLRB is the agency responsible for ensuring that right and we must hold them accountable for betraying their statutory duty.

Members of the public are invited to comment on the Trump board’s most recent proposal. Comments can be submitted here.

The notion that hard work is all that’s needed to achieve a prosperous or even comfortable living in the United States has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as stagnant wages for most workers have led to talk about the demise of the American Dream.

Randy Schutt, a long-time progressive activist and researcher, has created a simple model to help illustrate just how much dumb luck, mere chance and circumstance, can play a role in who becomes wealthy and who remains poor.

The project, intended to illustrate certain nuances about economic inequality to students and researchers, is called “The Chancy Islands: A Land of Equally Capable People But With Unequal Luck.”

His imaginary archipelago includes places like Rugged Island and Mercy Island, the first unforgiving, the latter much less so, and everything in between—Flat Island, Combo Island, Parity Island, etc.

“We’re always told that if you work hard and persist through adversity that you can rise above your humble (or horrible) circumstances and become wealthy. But that isn’t true,” Schutt said. “Most people are so beaten down by our economic system that they have to be lucky just to get by. And they have to be very lucky to do well and extremely well to get super rich.”

The statistics bear our Schutt’s narrative. Economic mobility, defined as the chance that someone born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution can sweat their way to the top fifth, is extremely low in the United States (around 7.5%)—and actually much lower than other rich nations, because of a much weaker social safety net.

You can explore the models for yourself by going to the website. But Schutt comes to the following conclusion after having examined all of the different combinations and possibilities exhaustively:

“It turns out that even with absolutely no differences in talent or effort, severe inequality can still arise just from the random shocks of wealth-depleting natural events such as serious illnesses, bad accidents, and natural disasters,” said Schutt. “Some households will amass vast fortunes without having done anything to justify their windfall; others will slide into poverty and homelessness without having done anything to warrant their impoverishment.”

Schutt adds, on a hopefully note, that his model also suggests “a few simple mitigation measures can almost completely rebalance such a society, essentially eliminating any long-term inequality.”

Such policies include, perhaps unsurprisingly, taxing the wealthy in ways that are becoming increasingly popular with the American electorate.

Josh Bivens, director of research at EPI

The Federal Reserve meets this week against a backdrop of mounting evidence of a slowing economy. Since the last Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, revised data on gross domestic product (the widest measure of the nation’s economic activity) and job growth have shown that 2018 saw much slower growth than previously reported.

Between April 2018 and March 2019, for example, the economy created 500,000 fewer jobs than had originally been reported. Only 105,000 jobs were created in August if temporary Census positions are excluded: this is roughly half the pace of growth that characterized pre-revision estimates of average job growth in 2018.

These clear signs of an economic slowdown raise the obvious question, “Why has growth faltered?”

While many pundits and economists have blamed the escalating trade conflict between the Trump administration and China, there are much more obvious sources of this slowdown: the Fed’s own premature interest rate increases between December 2015 and 2018 and the utter waste of fiscal resources that was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) passed at the end of 2017.

To be clear, the Trump administration’s trade conflict is stupid and destructive, and its attempt to pin the blame for the slowdown on the Fed is self-serving. And the Trump administration’s scapegoating others for the weak economy takes real hubris given that its signature economic policy initiative—the TCJA—has been such an obvious failure in terms of spurring growth.

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Yesterday’s Census Bureau report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in 2018 shows that while there was a slowdown in overall median household income growth relative to 2017, income growth was uneven by race and ethnicity. Real median income increased 4.6% among Asian households (from $83,376 to $87,194), 1.8% among African American households (from $40,963 to $41,692), 1.1% among non-Hispanic white households (from $69,851 to $70,642), and only 0.1% among Hispanic households (from $51,390 to $51,450), as seen in Figure A. The only groups for which income growth was statistically significant were Asian and Hispanic households.

In 2018, the median black household earned just 59 cents for every dollar of income the median white household earned (unchanged from 2017), while the median Hispanic household earned just 73 cents (down from 74 cents).

Based on EPI’s imputed historical income values (see the note under Figure A for an explanation), 11 years after the start of the Great Recession in 2007, only African American households remained below their pre-recession median income. Compared with household incomes in 2007, median household incomes in 2018 were down 2.1 percent for African American households, but up 0.7% for Asian households, 2.3% for non-Hispanic white households, and 13.1% for Hispanic households. Asian households continued to have the highest median income, despite large income losses in the wake of the recession.

The 2018 poverty rates also reflect the patterns of income growth between 2017 and 2018. As seen in Figure B, poverty rates for all groups were down slightly or unchanged, but remained highest among African Americans (20.7%, down 1.0 percentage point), followed by Hispanics (17.6%, down 0.7 percentage points), Asians (10.1%, up 0.4 percentage points), and whites (8.1%, down 0.4 percentage points). African American and Hispanic children continued to face the highest poverty rates—28.5% of African Americans and 23.7% of Hispanics under age 18 lived below the poverty level in 2018. African American children were more than three times as likely to be in poverty as white children (8.9%).Read more

**Correction: The SSI number in Figure B was corrected to 2,949,000 from 3,949,000.**

From 2017 to 2018, the official poverty rate fell by 0.5 percentage points, as household incomes rose modestly, albeit at a slower pace than the previous three years. This was the fourth year in a row that poverty declined, but the poverty rate remains half a percentage point higher than the low of 11.3% it reached in 2000.

Since 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau has also released an alternative to the official poverty measure known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM).

The SPM corrects many deficiencies in the official rate. For one, it constructs a more comprehensive threshold for incomes families need to live free of poverty, and adjusts that threshold for regional price differences. For another, it accounts for the resources available to poor families that are not included in the official rate, such as food stamps and other in-kind government benefits.

As shown in Figure A, a larger proportion of Americans are in poverty as measured by the SPM than as measured by the official measure. (Importantly, however, researchers who constructed a longer historical version of the SPM found that it shows greater long-term progress in reducing poverty than the official measure.) In 2018, the SPM increased by 0.1 percentage points to 13.1%. Under the SPM, 42.5 million Americans were in poverty last year, compared with 38.1 million Americans under the “official” poverty measure.Read more

Today’s report from the Census Bureau shows a marked slowdown in median household income growth relative to previous years. Median household incomes rose only 0.9%, after rising 1.8% in 2017 and following impressive gains in the two years prior: a 5.1% gain in 2015 and a 3.1% gain in 2016. Median nonelderly household income saw a similar rise of 1.0% this year after gaining 2.5%, 4.6%, and 3.6% in the prior three years, respectively.

After falling for both men and women by 1.1% each in 2017, inflation-adjusted full-time annual earnings for both men and women rose in 2018, by 3.4% and 3.3%, respectively. Men’s earnings are finally above both their 2007 and 2000 levels.

While the gains in household income are markedly slower than in previous years, they nonetheless represent another small step toward reclaiming the lost decade of income growth caused by the Great Recession. Part of the slowdown in income growth in 2017 and 2018 relative to 2015 and 2016 is driven by increases in the pace of inflation. However, as discussed below, this year’s report reminds us that the vast majority of household incomes (when corrected for a break in the data series in 2013) have still not fully recovered from the deep losses suffered in the Great Recession.

Nonelderly household incomes improve

The Census data show that from 2017 to 2018, inflation-adjusted median household income for nonelderly households (those with a householder, or head of household, younger than 65 years old) increased 1.0%, from $70,944 to $71,659, as shown in Figure A. Median nonelderly household income is an important measure of an improving economy, as those households depend on labor market income for the vast majority of their income. This continued, albeit much slower, increase after larger gains in the prior three years is better than nothing. Median household income for nonelderly households, which finally recovered to its pre-recession level in 2017, was 1.2%, or $876 above its 2007 level in 2018. It’s important to note that the Great Recession and its aftermath came on the heels of a weak labor market from 2000 to 2007, during which the median income of nonelderly households fell significantly, from $73,322 to $70,783—the first time in the post–World War II period that incomes failed to grow over a business cycle. Altogether, from 2000 to 2018, the median income for nonelderly households fell from $73,322 to $71,659, a decline of $1,663, or 2.3%. In short, the last four years should not make us forget that incomes for the majority of Americans have experienced a lost 18 years of growth.Read more

Next Tuesday is the Census Bureau’s release of annual data on earnings, income, poverty, and health insurance coverage for 2018, which will give us a picture of the economic status of working families 11 years into what is now the longest economic expansion in United States history. This data is particularly important because it gives us insight into how evenly (or unevenly) economic growth has been distributed across U.S. households. Other data sources that are released more than once a year too often provide only averages or aggregates— but next week’s Census release gives a much more textured picture of how the U.S. economy is working for typical households. In particular, next week’s release will help us chart the progress made by the typical American household in clawing back nearly two decades of lost income growth—the result of a failure of incomes to return to the business cycle peaks of 2000 during the slow early-2000s recovery and expansion, and the Great Recession. We’ll be paying particular attention to differences in the recovery across racial and ethnic groups.

What happened with incomes in recent years?

After adjusting the series to account for changes to the survey made in 2013, in 2017 real (inflation-adjusted) median incomes for American households rose just 1.8 percent and only managed to return to their pre-Great Recession peaks, even coming off of two years (2015 and 2016) of impressive across-the-board improvements. It is important to note, however, that some of the improvements in inflation-adjusted income we saw in 2015 and 2016 were driven by atypically low inflation—0.1% in 2015, and 1.3% in 2016. We didn’t get a similar boost from low inflation in 2017 (inflation increased 2.2% in 2017), and don’t expect one in 2018 (inflation increased 2.4% in 2018). We anticipate that an additional year of even modest growth will likely bring the broad middle class back to 2000 incomes. But, for non-elderly households, the latest data will be likely still below the peak reached 18 years prior.

What do we expect in this year’s release?

Given the data we’ve seen for 2018 from other sources, it is likely that earnings, income, and poverty in the 2018 Census data will show some improvement over the past year. But it is also likely that this pace of improvement will be significantly slower than the average of the previous three years. As the economy steadily strengthens, we’ve seen progress in key labor market indicators, including participation in the labor market and payroll employment, which should boost household labor earnings. The unemployment rate ticked down another 0.5 percentage points in 2018, similar to the drop between 2016 and 2017. The overall labor force participation rate was unchanged between 2017 and 2018, but the employment-to-population ratio continued to increase, 0.3 percentage points overall and 0.8 percentage points for the prime-age population (25-54 years old). These are similar to the increases found between 2016 and 2017.

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There’s a reason millions of American workers are still feeling left out from what on the surface looks like a fairly strong economy: a distinct absence of consistently strong wage growth.

The unemployment rate has stayed at or below 4.0 percent since March 2018. But, nominal wage growth continues to be weaker than expected and, in fact, appears to be decelerating this year so far. In our nominal wage tracker that measures year-over-year changes, wage growth has flat-lined in recent months and has yet to reach the Federal Reserve’s target zone (given inflation targets and productivity potential). Looking at more-recent trends—wage growth between the first and second quarters of this year—there has actually been a deceleration in wage growth this year. The Employment Cost Index, released last month, also shows a marked deceleration in private sector wage growth.

Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also released preliminary benchmark revisions to payroll employment for April 2018 through March 2019. Each year, the BLS benchmarks total nonfarm payroll employment to state unemployment insurance tax records. While revisions in most years tend to be relatively small and don’t get officially incorporated into the historical numbers until the final revisions are released in February, this year’s revisions came in much higher. The preliminary estimate of the benchmark revision indicates a downward adjustment to March 2019 total nonfarm employment of -501,000. This means that, between April 2018 and March of 2019, there were a half million fewer jobs created than initially reported. Over the last ten years, preliminary revisions averaged about -92,000, so -501,000 is large in comparison. And, usually the difference between the preliminary revision and final is plus or minus 40,000. Therefore, it’s likely the final revisions will also be around 500,000 fewer jobs in that period.

The figure below illustrates what this means for job growth over the last two years. Here, I’m comparing April 2017 through March 2019, linearly interpolating the 501,000 losses equally over the 12-month period. Initially, it appeared that payroll employment growth increased between the year ending in March 2018 and March 2019, with monthly employment growth going from an average of 193,000 to 210,000. With these sizable downward revisions, average monthly employment growth actually fell from 193,000 to 168,000 over those two periods.Read more

Raising the federal minimum wage, which has now lapsed for the longest ever period without an increase, will benefit millions of low income workers and lift more than one million Americans out of poverty.

There is widespread agreement in the economics profession these days that, in contrast to outdated textbook theories, higher minimum wages have done exactly what they’re supposed to do: raise pay for low-wage workers with little, if any, effect on employment.

That’s why it was surprising to see Mitch Albom, a millionaire fiction author and sports columnist, argue so vocally and misguidedly against the prospect of an increase in a recent opinion piece in the Detroit Free Press.

The Raise the Wage Act, which boosts the minimum wage from the current paltry $7.25 per hour to $15 an hour by 2025, has passed the House of Representatives, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to even bring it up for a vote in the Senate.

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During the 2019 legislative session, lawmakers in a number of states including Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington passed laws limiting employers’ ability to impose noncompetition agreements (noncompetes) on low and middle-income workers. Noncompetes have traditionally been used to protect highly confidential information or trade secrets, and the trend to restrict them is in part a response to outrageous examples of employer overuse of noncompetes to prevent very low-wage workers like sandwich makers and security guards and even no-wage workers like unpaid summer interns from going to work for competitors. These new laws are important steps to safeguard employees’ ability to move jobs and employers’ ability to hire qualified candidates.

Yet while noncompetes matter tremendously, they are only one part of a larger story about how anti-competitive contracts—sometimes not even disclosed to workers themselves—are negatively impacting workers’ wages and mobility in our economy.

As Dr. David Weil documented in his landmark book, The Fissured Workplace, as companies have grown increasingly more specialized, our workplaces have concurrently grown more fragmented. For example, during most of the twentieth century, a commercial bakery would have employed almost every person in the line of production and distribution: the workers on the assembly line, the delivery drivers, the custodians, the office staff, and the accountant. Today, many of those positions would be outsourced to employees of different specialized firms: the temporary staffing company, the logistics company, the janitorial company, and the outside accounting firm.

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Soon, the Labor Department under the Trump administration will release its final rule on worker overtime. The rumor is that the administration may showcase the rule around Labor Day and claim they are taking steps to help workers. That means an important public service announcement is in order: do not be fooled! Workers would lose billions under this rule.

It is likely that the final rule will not depart radically from the proposal the administration laid out earlier this year, which was to raise the overtime salary threshold (the threshold under which salaried workers are automatically entitled to overtime pay) to $35,308 a year. This is a dramatic weakening of a rule published just three years ago. In 2016, following an exhaustive rule-making process, the Labor Department finalized an overtime rule that would have increased the salary threshold to $47,476, (which was the 40th percentile of the earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest wage census region). However, a single district court judge in Texas enjoined the Department from enforcing the rule, and the court later erroneously held the rule to be invalid. Instead of defending the threshold from the egregiously flawed logic of the judge, the Department abandoned the rule and proposed their much weaker threshold, which is roughly the 20th percentile of the earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage census region.

It’s useful to note that if the rule had simply been adjusted for inflation since 1975, today it would be roughly $56,500. This is more than $20,000 higher than the Trump administration’s level! The Trump administration’s weaker rule will leave behind an estimated 8.2 million workers who would have gotten new or strengthened overtime protections under the 2016 rule. This includes 4.2 million women, 3.0 million people of color, 4.7 million workers without a college degree, and 2.7 million parents of children under the age of 18. Further, the annual wage gains are $1.2 billion dollars less under the presumed Trump rule than under the 2016 rule—and these annual earnings losses will grow from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion over the first 10 years of implementation because, unlike the 2016 rule, the Trump administration rule almost surely will not include automatic indexing.

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It’s the beginning of the school year, a time of eager anticipation and hopeful expectations. Amid the excitement, parents are engaged in practical tasks, including opening their wallets to stock their children’s backpacks with school supplies. Teachers, too, are gearing up to go back to their classrooms by opening their wallets to buy classroom supplies. An overwhelming majority of them—more than nine out of 10—will not be reimbursed for what they spend on supplies over the school year, according to survey data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The nation’s K–12 public school teachers shell out, on average, $459 on school supplies for which they are not reimbursed (adjusted for inflation to 2018 dollars), according to the NCES 2011–2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). This figure does not include the dollars teachers spend but are reimbursed for by their school districts. The $459-per-teacher average is for all teachers, including the small (4.9%) share who do not spend any of their own money on school supplies.

Unlike the data from the more recent 2015–2016 survey (now called National Teacher and Principal Survey or NTPS), the 2011–2012 SASS microdata provide state-by-state information, allowing us to see how much teachers spend on supplies by state. The map below shows the inflation-adjusted state-by-state spending. We know that the figures in the map are not an atypical high driven by the Great Recession because the 2011–2012 spending levels are lower than spending levels in the 2015–2016 NTPS data. The figure after the map shows that teachers’ unreimbursed school supply spending has actually increased overall since the recovery.

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Last year, on the 50^th anniversary of the “Kerner Commission” report, the Economic Policy Institute, collaborating with the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University’s 21^st Century Cities Initiative, hosted a conference on “Race & Inequality In America,” not only to commemorate the report but to re-assess its findings and conclusions. The conference assembled prominent national experts in the fields of housing, employment and labor markets, criminal justice, health, and education to consider where the black-white divide has narrowed, where it has stayed the same, and where it has widened.

In The Road Not Taken we have now summarized the conclusions of these experts, adding some additional perspectives with the benefit of another year of hindsight. We focus particularly on how far we have come, or not come, in housing segregation and criminal justice disparities over the last 50 years. In particular, we examine the recommendations of the 1968 commission and note how few have ever been implemented.

The Road Not Taken notes that in some ways the last half century has seen progress—the desegregation of workplaces is perhaps the most conspicuous example, although here too, much remains to be done. In some areas, we’re about where we were—residential segregation has not diminished much, if at all. And in some areas, things have gotten much worse—the disparate incarceration of young black men, in particular.

We review the most important policies now needed to break us out of stagnation in the two most critical areas of criminal justice and housing. Reforms in both areas have been largely inadequate, partial or superficial. Unfortunately, many of the policies needed today are no different from those recommended by the Kerner Commission. Some are new. Our chief policy recommendations are these:Read more