Anemic gains in wages have plagued U.S. workers not just since the Great Recession ended seven years ago but for years before it as well. The underlying factors vary, but research just out suggests that a major culprit is lost in the noise over jobs going offshore, immigration and the minimum wage.
There’s this notion out there that unions are great for union members, and that’s pretty much it. But a new report from the Economic Policy Institute looks at how the decline in labor unions has affected nonunion workers. Professor Jake Rosenfeld says that strong unions mean higher wages for both union members and nonmembers.
Pay for private-sector workers has barely budged over the past three and a half decades. In fact, for men in the private sector who lack a college degree and do not belong to a labor union, real wages today are substantially lower than they were in the late 1970s.
In 10th grade, Adia Harvey Wingfield took her first sociology course. “It changed my life,” she says. “It really spoke to me and had a real impact on how I thought about a lot of things.” She also was interested in the dynamics of race that she saw playing out as she grew up in 1980s post–civil rights North Carolina.
Moms get—better than anyone—that we can’t have everything running smoothly all at once. But in the U.S., where working mothers have some of the most inadequate support systems in the world, we still feel guilty when we can’t do it all. Professor Caitlyn Collins sayas that the United States has the most family-hostile public policy of any country in the developed world
Professor Jake Rosenfeld on New York Times: similar to a provision in the Massachusetts new law, California recently passed legislation that prohibits employers from penalizing workers who discuss wages and salaries.
THE white working-class men who are planning to vote for Donald J. Trump this November have been called many things: xenophobic, racist, misogynist, dangerously naïve. But even if those descriptions are true, it doesn’t mean these men were fated to be Trump supporters. Professor Jake Rosenfeld's report is quoted in this issue.
One of the biggest policy battles between Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has been about the minimum wage -- not whether to raise it, but how high it should go. Professor Steven Fazzari would likely support a $15 minimum wage.
Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. Professor Steven Fazzari comments on this.
A new study suggest that the stated aspirations of companies to become more diverse haven’t changed how they go about hiring, and that minority candidates responding to job openings that welcome diverse backgrounds might find their prospects of being hired just as limited as before. Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield says the study’s results aren’t surprising.
Donald Trump’s recent refusal on CNN’s “State of the Union” to disavow Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has reignited debates over the Klan’s role in national politics. That’s not surprising. Its long history has been marked by spectacular rises and falls, from its terrorist origins in the aftermath of the Civil War to its massive revival as a nativist movement in the 1920s and its refashioning as a brutal anti-civil-rights vigilante squad in the 1960s.
Sociologist Mark Rank, with his co-author Thomas Hirschl, have developed an on-line poverty risk calculator. You can enter information about your personal situation and learn what social science data tell you about the risk of poverty you face over different future horizons.