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Tag: wage growth

Raising the minimum wage works

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Hey, what do you know! It turns out that raising the minimum wage … raises pay for low-wage workers. Somehow, in the United States of America, this needs to be said.

The Economic Policy Institute looked at wage growth for the lowest-paid 10 percent of workers across the states, and it turns out that, for states that raised their minimum wage at least once between 2013 and 2018, it “was more than 50 percent faster than in states without any minimum wage increases (13.0 percent vs. 8.4 percent).” The effect was bigger for women than for men, which makes sense, since women are likely to be paid less.

Bar graph showing wage growth at the bottom 10% comparing states with minimm wage increases between 2013 and 2018 and those without.

This blog was originally published at DailyKos on March 9, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.


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Worker wages remain stagnant as wealthy executives are rolling in cash

Posted on by ThinkProgress Staff
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Congressional Republicans and President Trump continue to push their sole legislative accomplishment, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, as a game-changer for average working Americans — but the benefits of that bill appear to be going mostly to the people at the top.

Rather than delivering an “economic turnaround of historic proportions,” as Trump boasted last week, the bill will likely end up costing well over $1.4 trillion dollars and will instead provide corporations and the wealthiest Americans a giant hand-out.

A recent Politico review of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings also revealed corporate executives, who often receive most of their compensation in stock, have been profiting enormously off the bill, which slashes the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.

Following the bill’s passage in December last year, Oracle Corp. CEO Safra Catz sold $250 million worth of shares in her company, the “largest executive payday this year,” according to Politico. The company’s president of Product Development,  Thomas Kurian, also sold $85 million worth of shares, directly after the company announced a $12 billion share repurchase.

Oracle isn’t the only company whose top brass have benefited from the tax bill: in May, Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga sold $44.4 million of stock. Only a few months earlier, the company had announced it would buy back $4 billion in shares. According to Reuters, Mastercard also announced that month it had “increased its quarterly cash dividend to 25 cents per share, a 14 percent increase over the previous dividend of 22 cents a share.”

Similarly, after Eastman Chemical announced in February it would purchase $2 billion of its own stock, its CEO, Mark Costa, sold 55,000 shares, raking in at least $5.4 million in the process.

Data from Americans For Tax Fairness found that powerful Fortune 500 companies have spent a total of over $238,244,348,330 in stock buybacks since December. The numbers showed few corporations have actually used their respective tax windfalls to benefit workers directly, as many pledged they would do.

Out of the over 1,500 companies from which Americans for Tax Fairness collected data, only 359 of them actually promised to increase wages for their employees. Of those that promised to bump wages, the majority only offered an increase up to $15 an hour in entry-level pay — which, by all accounts, should already be what companies pay entry-level employees in a tightening labor market.

Despite what Republicans in Washington have suggested, stock buybacks do absolutely nothing to help struggling middle America. Instead, they traditionally enrich both the company buying back shares and those who own corporate stock, which typically means the already-rich. The wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all shares, while the top 1 percent own 40 percent. Roughly one-half of American households don’t own stock at all.

The AFL-CIO’s annual Executive PayWatch database, released in May, also revealed just how stark income inequality is among CEOs and their workers. On average, data showed, CEOs are paid 333 times more than an average employee at their company.

The disparity between CEO and worker pay is consistent with income inequality on a wider scale. While average worker wages have been stagnant for decades, the top 1 percent of U.S. income earners have “more than doubled their share of the nation’s income” since the 1970s, the Institute for Policy Studies observed.

The Trump administration continues to tout the nation’s record low unemployment rate as a sign that the country’s economy is thriving. But as former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich detailed in a recent op-ed for The Guardian, 80 percent of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

“The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation,” Reich wrote. “When Republicans delivered their $1.5 trillion tax cut last December they predicted a big wage boost for American workers. Forget it. Wages actually dropped in the second quarter of this year.”

About the Author: Rebekah Entralgo is a reporter at ThinkProgress. Previously she was a news assistant on the NPR Business Desk. She has also worked for NPR member stations WFSU in Tallahassee and WLRN in Miami.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on July 30, 2018. Reprinted with permission. 


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With All Eyes on DACA, the Trump Administration Is Quietly Killing Overtime Protections

Posted on by Michael Arria
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On September 5, the administration of Donald Trump formally announced that they won’t try to save Obama’s overtime rule, effectively killing a potential raise for millions of Americans. This disturbing development has largely slipped under the radar during a busy news week, marked by Trump’s scrapping of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Twenty-one states and a number of business groups sued the Obama administration last September, after the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the new rule, accusing the former president of overreach.

That lawsuit led to Amos Mazzant, a federal Obama-appointed judge in Texas, putting the rule on hold last November, shortly before it was set to become law. On August 31, Mazzant struck the rule down, and—less than a week later—Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to challenge the District Court’s decision. In a court filing, a DOJ lawyer said that the administration would not appeal.

The Obama administration’s rule would have raised the overtime salary threshold considerably. The threshold hadn’t been increased by any administration to adequately reflect wage growth or inflation, which means that many workers only see overtime pay if they make less than about $23,660 a year. Obama had scheduled that number to be bumped up to about $47,476 after reviewing 300,000 comments on the subject.

“The overtime rule is about making sure middle-class jobs pay middle-class wages,” former Labor Secretary Tom Perez told reporters on a call after the rule was announced in May 2016. “Some will see more money in their pockets … Some will get more time with their family … and everybody will receive clarity on where they stand, so that they can stand up for their rights.”

While the overtime rule faced predictable opposition from Republicans and business groups, it also received backlash from some liberal advocacy organizations. In May 2016, U.S. PIRG, the popular federation of non-profit organizations, released a statement criticizing Obama’s decision. “Organizations like ours rely on small donations from individuals to pay the bills. We can’t expect those individuals to double the amount they donate,” said the group.

Critics of the statement pointed out that U.S. PIRG’s opposition suggests they have employees not being paid for overtime despite their low wages. The group was slammed by progressives for supporting a regressive policy when it benefited their economic interests.

The DOL claimed that the rule would mean a pay increase for about 4.2 million Americans, but the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) contends that the DOL’s figure is far too low. According to EPI, the DOL’s analysis fails to take the impact of George W. Bush’s overtime policies into account and relies heavily on statistics that were generated before he took power. EPI estimates that, because of changes to employee classifications in 2004, roughly 6 million workers had their right to overtime destroyed.

The EPI’s study of the overtime rule determined that about 12.5 million workers would have been impacted if it had been implemented. A wide range of workers would have potentially seen a pay increase, including 6.4 million women, 1.5 million African Americans and 2.0 million Latinos, the EPI concludes.

“Once again, the Trump administration has sided with corporate interests over workers, in this case, siding with business groups who care more about corporate profits than about allowing working people earn overtime pay,” Heidi Shierholz, who leads the EPI’s Perkins Project on Worker Rights and Wages, told In These Times.

The Trump administration’s move might be disappointing for workers’ rights advocates, but it’s hardly surprising. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump vowed to kill the overtime rule if elected. “We have to address the issues of over-taxation and overregulation and the lack of access to credit markets to get our small business owners thriving again,” he said in an interview. “Rolling back the overtime regulation is just one example of the many regulations that need to be addressed to do that.”

While many pundits have focused on Trump’s unrelenting series of failures and scandals, his administration has quietly waged a fairly successful war on labor. In addition to nixing one of Obama’s most notable policy achievements, the Trump administration is also poised to stack the National Labor Relations Board with a pro-business majority, has proposed major cuts to the Labor Department and has rolled back safety protections for workers.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Trump’s Labor Department had created an office specifically designed to reconsider government regulations. The office will be run by Nathan Mehrens, the anti-union lawyer who is also in charge of the department’s policy shop.

Trump geared much of his campaign rhetoric toward the U.S. worker, vowing to dismantle exploitative trade agreements and bring back jobs. However, his administration has simply emboldened the anti-labor forces that have dictated economic policy for decades.

This blog was originally published at In These Times on September 7, 2017. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Michael Arria covers labor and social movements. Follow him on Twitter: @michaelarria


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Prescription Drug Spending is Consuming a Bigger Share of Wages

Posted on by Dean Baker
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Prescription drugs are a large and growing share of national income. While it is generally recognized that drugs are expensive, many people are unaware of how large a share of their income goes to paying for drugs because much of it goes through third party payers, specifically insurance companies and the government.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) produce projections of national expenditures on prescription drugs through 2025, along with historical estimates dating back to 1960. As shown below, prescription drug spending from 1960 to 1980 was equivalent to about one percent of total wage and salary income. In the years leading up to the passage of the Bayh-Dole act in 1980, wage income was rising faster than spending on prescription drugs. As a result, the share of wages spent on prescription drugs was actually falling, reaching a low in 1979 of 0.86%.

However, after 1980, prescription drug spending rose rapidly relative to wage income. The ratio of drug spending to wages rose each year from 1980 to 2007. In 2007 wage growth finally outpaced drug expenditures, with the ratio again increasing in the Great Recession. By 2010, prescription drug spending had climbed above four percent of wage income.

The three percent of annual wage income lost to higher drug spending over the past 40 years makes a big difference to working individuals and families. This increase in annual spending averages out to roughly $2,400 per household. CMS projections, combined with projections on wage income growth from the Congressional Budget Office, suggest that spending on prescription drugs will increase further through 2025. This ratio is expected to exceed five percent by 2024.

While an aging population has been a factor increasing spending on drugs, demographics alone cannot explain the sharp increase in prescription drug spending. Inflation-adjusted prescription drug spending per household has increased more than eightfold since 1980, far outpacing any demographic trend surrounding age. The share of people over age 65 in the population has increased from 9.2% in 1960 to 14.8% in 2015. This can at most explain a small part of the increase in spending on drugs over this period.

It is important to recognize that the high cost of drugs is the result of a conscious policy decision to give drug companies monopolies in the form of patents and other forms of exclusive marketing rights. Without these protections drugs would almost invariably be cheap, likely costing on average less than one fifth as much as they do now. Even worse, the perverse incentives resulting from patent monopolies distort the research process and can lead drug companies to misrepresent evidence on the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.

 This blog was originally published at CEPR on June 27, 2017. Reprinted with permission. 
About the Authors: Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer, Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, The United States Since 1980, Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot), and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. His blog, “Beat the Press,” provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan. Brian Dew holds a B.A. in Psychology and Organizational Sciences from the George Washington University and an M.A. in Economics from American University. His previous research has focused on international trade, network analysis, and open-economy macroeconomics, while his current research interests include domestic trade, employment, and monetary policies. Brian worked previously for the International Monetary Fund.


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Seattle’s $15 minimum wage raised pay with zero effect on restaurant jobs, new study shows

Posted on by Laura Clawson
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Raising the minimum wage does not kill jobs, no matter what Republicans tell you—and a new study of the Seattle restaurant industry, where some businesses are already paying a $15 minimum wage, provides another data point showing just that. According to the University of California, Berkeley, study, the increased minimum wage had employment effects that were “not statistically distinguishable from zero,” which is a fancy way of saying “we looked and we could not find a damn thing.” The Seattle Times reports:

Indeed, employment in food service from 2015 to 2016 was not affected, “even among the limited-service restaurants, many of them franchisees, for whom the policy was most binding,” according to the study, led by Berkeley economics professor Michael Reich. […]

It can be hard to separate what impact the wage law had on employment in Seattle versus the effect of the city’s white-hot economy and tight labor market, but “we do our best,” Reich said.

The study compares the wage and employment growth rates in Seattle to a control group of counties, in Washington state and across the U.S., that had similar growth rates as Seattle in the years shortly before the minimum-wage law took effect.

A report issued last year found indications that the increased minimum wage did slightly restrict job growth, but we don’t know if the difference comes from differing methodologies or from the studies covering different time frames. Both studies have to contend with Seattle’s booming economy, which could conceivably mask lowered growth of the job rate for low-wage workers … but which itself refutes the Republican talking points against raising the minimum wage. Because “it’s hard to tell if even more low-wage workers would otherwise be employed because the economy is so darn good” does not exactly back up claims that having the minimum wage be a living wage will destroy the economy.


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The Trump Economy Myth and Job-Killing Policies

Posted on by Dave Johnson
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Making America Great Again; every time a U.S. company hires a hundred people, or even a dozen, President Trump’s support network blasts out the message that this is what he’s doing. Now they’re crowing that unemployment fell to 4.5 percent in March, even though many say this number underrepresents how many people are actually out of work.

Only 98,000 jobs were actually gained in the month, about half of what economists had expected. And even if these new jobs are something to crow about, it’s not as if they have anything to do with Trump.

Propaganda is one thing, but Trump’s actual policies will hurt job and wage growth once they kick in.

Obama Momentum

Remember when President Obama had been in office a few months, and the fiscal year 2009 deficit was reported to be $1.4 trillion? Right-wing propaganda outlets showed charts drawn to convey that the 2009 budget deficit was his fault.

The 2009 fiscal year budget ran from October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2009. Obama’s first budget year began the following month. The 2009 budget deficit wasn’t an “Obama deficit,” is was a Bush deficit. Obama did not have time to do anything. For the same reasons, the 2017 economy, and any health it has, is still Obama’s.

In fact, when Obama DID do something this is what happened:

That job reversal was the result of actual policies put in place by Obama, not Republican propaganda.

Propaganda, Not Policies

Like almost everything Republican, the Trump administration is almost entirely about propaganda, not actual, rubber-meets-road policy. Healthcare is the best example of this. After years of propaganda opposition to Obamacare, Republicans had no actual coherent, alternative policy plan to put forward, and were unable to come up with one when the opportunity came for them to do it. The actual policies they finally came up with would have caused 24 million Americans to lose their healthcare.

Propaganda might achieve a propaganda goal, policies get actual things done.

As of today, there is no real Trump economic policy in place. He has submitted a ridiculously extreme budget proposal. He has proposed to “study” trade. He has no real “trillion-dollar” infrastructure plan – his budget proposal actually cuts infrastructure spending – and his tax “reform” plan does nothing more than give corporations and wealthy people huge breaks.

Actual Trump Policies Undercut Jobs And Wages

Trump’s actual policies will undercut job and wage growth. Right off the bat, Trump’s budget proposal would eliminate as many 200,000 federal jobs.

Trump is trying to reverse the “overtime rule” that increases the salary threshold for receiving overtime pay from $23,660 per year to $47,476. This rule is a big deal and would mean that would immediately boost the pay of 12.5 million workers, if Trump allows it to go into effect. Even with the rule the percent of workers who are eligible for overtime pay would still be lower than it was in 1975.

Trump’s executive orders also undercut job and wage growth. He has removed protections against wage theft and rights violations by federal contractors, affecting one in five workers.

Another example of actual Trump policies affecting jobs is in the energy sector. Calling climate change a “hoax,” Trump wants to promote oil and coal jobs at the expense of wind and solar jobs. But the U.S. solar power industry now employs more workers than coal, oil and natural gas combined. He wants to gut the auto fuel economy rules, undercutting opportunities for renewable-fuel companies like Tesla to innovate.

Stocks Up But Trump Economy Is A Myth

The stock market has risen under Trump; Tomahawk missile-maker Raytheon stock just went way up. Cruise missile strikes aside, bumps like these aren’t based on economic fundamentals or sound projections, but instead on the expectation of windfalls for corporations and the already-wealthy stock-owning investor class through the huge tax cuts Trump has promised.

But beyond momentary market gains,  the idea of a booming Trump economy is a myth – at least for people who work. There are no actual policies, existing or on the horizon, aimed at actually boosting jobs and wages. Only bluster. In fact, Trump has said we need to reduce American wages to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. Yes, he said that.

His executive orders so far undercut jobs and wages. His budget eliminates jobs. His dramatic cuts in the things government does to make our lives and economy better — education, scientific research, regulation, etc. — will eat the seed corn of our future prosperity.

Trump does not offer real policy, only the propaganda of the moment, to be reversed at the next moment if convenient.

This post originally appeared on ourfuture.org on April 10, 2017. Reprinted with Permission.

Dave Johnson has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.


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98,000 Jobs Added to the Economy in March, Unemployment Is 4.5%

Posted on by AFL-CIO Now
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The U.S. economy added 98,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate declined to 4.5%, according to figures released this morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While the job growth was tepid in March, and the revisions for the numbers for January and February are weaker than earlier reported, the economy is continuing close to the trend of job growth that started under President Barack Obama. If we continue the trend of job growth over the past seven years he established, the economy will add another 25 million jobs in eight years. Oddly, the claim President Donald Trump has made is that he will create 25 million jobs.

Still, wage growth needs time to recover as does the share of workers employed so household incomes can recover to their 1999 peak. With modest job gains in March, the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve that sets monetary policy needs to pause ahead of its proposed interest rate hike in June. The higher interest rates are meant to signal a return to normal, but we are not there, yet.

The biggest gains were in professional and business services (+56,000) and in mining (+11,000), while retail trade lost jobs (-30,000). Other sectors of note include health care (+14,000) and financial services (+9,000). According to BLS, construction employment saw little change in March (+6,000).

Employment in other major industries, including manufacturing, wholesale trade, transportation and warehousing, leisure and hospitality, and government, showed little or no change over the month.

Among the demographic groups of working people, the unemployment rates for adult women (4.0%), white people (3.9%) and Hispanic people (5.1%) declined in March. The jobless rates for adult men (4.3%), teenagers (13.7%), black people (8.0%) and Asian people (3.3%) showed little or no change.

This blog was originally posted on aflcio.org on April 7, 2017. Reprinted with permission.


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