July 31st is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, the day that marks how long into 2017 an African American woman would have to work in order to be paid the same wages as her white male counterpart was paid last year.
Amid endless political cacophony in Washington, D.C., House Republicans are quietly advancing legislation that would drive a freight train through a central tenet of New Deal-era labor law: overtime. With Obama’s landmark overtime expansion blocked in the courts, conservatives roll out a plan that would undo overtime pay as we know it.
The wage gap between men and women in the U.S. shrunk drastically in the 1980s and early 1990s, as women joined the workforce in increasing numbers and earned degrees at higher rates, but the gap has remained relatively stagnant since the mid- to late 1990s. There's one major detriment to financial equality that women can't seem to shake: motherhood.
Benchmarks to beat in order to claim policy-driven improvements to American wages and employment
A new report links the drop in union membership with the rise in income inequality. But labor activists are finding new ways to help workers.
A majority (53.1 percent) of workers earning less than $12.16 per hour—the bottom 30 percent of wage earners—earn so little on the job that they must rely on public assistance to make ends meet.
While new labor contracts cover only 140,000 unionized employees at the Big Three carmakers, they could lift pay standards for the nearly 1 million people who work in the U.S. auto industry and may also spur wage gains through the broader labor market. The deals come after a decade without raises for senior workers and lower wages and benefits for new hires--which almost completely eliminated the wage premium autoworkers once enjoyed over the average American worker.
This interview discusses wages, the struggle for $15/hr, stagnating worker incomes, and TPP’s attack on wages in the US and develops into a much broader critique of the current system’s political economy, a way to fundamentally alter the way we produce, distribute, and consume. It is not enough to bargain with capitalists. We must instead look to how workers can take over the means of production and employ them for the benefit and wellbeing of all.
If companies want to grumble about creeping socialism, they could always choose, at their own free will, that tried-and-true market-based solution to poverty wages: paying their workers enough to live on.
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