The table below summarizes the hourly wage distribution for all workers and for workers by gender and race, based on an analysis of the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s extract of the Current Population Survey’s Outgoing Rotation Group for 2013. One of the most striking features of the graph is that wage gaps both […]
Well, another long spell without a blog entry. I’ve just updated my publications page with some recent writing. I also wanted to post a link to a talk I gave as part of a panel on “What Policies for the Middle Class?” at a conference on “The Squeezed Middle Class in OECD and Emerging Countries–Myth […]
Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott introduced a bill yesterday that would increase the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $12.00 by 2020. In a paper also released yesterday, David Cooper and Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute and I assess how a minimum wage of $12 […]
I have a chapter on state-level labor-market regulations in a new ILR Press book edited by David Jacobs (Morgan State University) and Peggy Kahn (University of Michigan, Flint). The book is called Disunited States of America: Employment Relations Systems in Conflict, and the title of my chapter is “Differences in the ‘inclusiveness’ of state labor market […]
In a new CEPR report out today, I argue that the US labor market is failing on two fronts. The first failure is the decades-long stagnation of real wages at the middle and the bottom of the wage scale –even as earnings at the top have grown rapidly. The second failure, only apparent since the early 2000s, […]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its estimates of union membership and union coverage for 2014 this morning. Last year, the share of U.S. workers who were members of a union fell 0.2 percentage points to 11.1 percent, continuing a decades-long decline in unionization in the United States. My CEPR colleague, Cherrie Bucknor, and I […]
On New Year’s Day, the cap on the Social Security payroll tax increased to $118,500 per year (up from $117,000 in 2014). Workers pay Social Security tax until their annual earnings reach the cap and then pay no additional Social Security tax after that (until the following year, when the clock restarts). One way to […]
The Inter Press Service news agency has published an interview with me by journalist Peter Costantini focusing on the minimum wage. There’s a longer version here and a shorter version in English here and in Spanish here. My favorite part is the title, which is a cleaned-up version of something I said in the course of […]
On Christmas Day, the New York Times ran a great story on the “tougher road to employment” for black recent college graduates. The piece featured research by my colleague Janelle Jones and me, which originally appeared as a CEPR report (pdf) back in May. Of course, I liked that the piece used our numbers (in 2013, […]
