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In November, Florida joined a long list of cities and states that have increased their minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25. Sixty-one percent of Floridians voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, a move that will bring more than 1 million residents out of poverty. However, the amendment left out a crucial group: the state’s 2 million independent contractors, who don’t fall under federal minimum wage regulations. For decades, Florida’s lack of protections for these workers has led to widespread misclassification and wage theft. Even as the state passes some of its most progressive wage legislation in decades, its exploitative independent contractor system threatens to undermine its endeavors and points to broader weak spots nationally.

Around 10 percent of the state’s population, or 2 million people, work as independent contractors — 40 percent more than the national average. Under the independent contractor framework, employers aren’t required to meet Fair Labor Standards Act requirements for minimum wage or unemployment insurance, or provide benefits. This is appealing to employers — benefits account for up to 30 percent of a worker’s salary, so employers can cut costs by reclassifying their workers as independent contractors. Offloading payroll taxes, which employers aren’t required to pay on behalf of contractors, save employers an additional 8 percent.

In theory, an independent contractor is paid for performing a specific role or completing a project. The payer can only determine the result of the project, not when or how a contractor completes the work. But because labelling workers as independent contractors saves employers so much money, workers are occasionally “misclassified,” or classified as independent contractors when they should be an employee.

While exact numbers of how many workers are misclassified are difficult to obtain, studies are very clear about misclassification’s results: Contractors in several low-wage industries earn less than their salaried peers. In construction, a field particularly prone to misclassification, independent contractors can make half as much as their counterparts on payroll.

Floridians are uniquely vulnerable to employment misclassification. Florida’s service-dependent economy has made it a particularly easy target for gig work companies, according to Alexis Davis, an analyst at the Florida Policy Institute. Roughly 1.3 million of Florida’s independent contractors are “employed” by gig work companies. Gig workers in Florida also belong to some of the state’s most at-risk groups. These workers are disproportionately people of color and 1 out of every 3 is an immigrant. Seniors, attracted by the flexibility and the need to augment their Social Security payments, also make up a large part of the state’s gig workers.

Sherri Wheeler Cliburn, 56, has been driving for Instacart since the delivery app launched in Sarasota four years ago. Like many gig workers, she was attracted to the flexible schedule and good pay that the app initially offered, which allowed her to spend time on tour with her son, who is a musician. But as the app grew in popularity, Instacart began to lower payouts across the board, forcing workers to rely on customers’ tips. And although Instacart sets a default tip for orders, Cliburn says customers will often file fake complaints to get out of paying tips, or even paying for the order at all. This leads to workers getting deactivated from the platform while the company sorts out the case.

“It could take anywhere from five to eight weeks for somebody from Instacart to get back with you,” says Cliburn. “Meanwhile, you’re deactivated. You’ve lost your income.”

Several other workers gave similar accounts to TalkPoverty from working with Uber, Lyft, and other gig platforms. While they appreciate the autonomy that the independent contractor framework grants them, when pay disputes emerge, they find themselves powerless in the face of the companies they work for. Ben E., who drives for Uber in the Tampa area, says that there were multiple occasions where Uber docked his pay without explanation, leading to a long process of negotiations with the company. Uber has not responded to a request for comment as of publication.

State law makes these abuses particularly hard to fight. Normally, a state’s Department of Labor would provide protection from misclassification and other labor abuses for workers, and handle concerns like minimum wage complaints. However, Florida’s Department of Labor was dismantled in the early 2000s by then-Governor Jeb Bush. Today, Florida is one of seven states with no minimum wage investigators.

In 2017, following a $750,000 lobbying campaign by Uber, the state legislature passed a bill that set a statewide regulations for ride-hailing apps. While the bill included limited regulations on insurance, its main goal was to preempt local legislation in Miami-Dade that would have put rideshare apps on the same regulatory field as taxi services. The bill also included provisions that doubled down on classifying drivers as independent contractors.

Cliburn felt this first-hand when she tried to file a complaint about Instacart’s delays and pay reductions, though she didn’t have misclassification in mind. She contacted the state, which told her that she would have to provide a slew of paperwork that proved her case. As Cliburn struggled to navigate through the process, it became apparent that the state had little incentive to assist her and that they viewed her complaint as a burden to be avoided. Cliburn says she struggled to get in contact with the state and that, when she did, they provided little-to-no support for filing her request. “Eventually I just said, screw it, because they don’t care here. I know other states do care about their workers but in Florida, they just don’t care,” Cliburn says.

While the future of federal minimum wage legislation remains uncertain, it’s clear that the current framework fails to address the needs of the large and growing gig worker contingent. That’s not to say there isn’t hope for this next challenge in worker rights. Several states and cities, including New York and Illinois, have passed additional protections for gig workers. In Seattle, drivers working for ride-hailing apps are now eligible for the city’s minimum wage and dispute resolution protections. And California’s landmark AB 5 would have reclassified many of the state’s gig workers as employees, giving them access to minimum wage regulations and unemployment. While the gains made by the law were undone by a ballot measure funded by Uber and other gig apps, the framework created by the bill could serve as a basis for similar legislation on a federal level.

What’s more, the Biden administration has also signaled that it is willing to take a tougher stance on misclassification, suggesting that meaningful change may be within sight.

But when cities and states take action to raise wages, they often ignore a pretty obvious problem: across most of the country, employers routinely skirt paying the minimum wage, overtime wages, or contractually promised wages, with little fear of facing consequences.

When the Broken Laws study surveyed 4,387 workers in 2008 across Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York in low-wage industries like hospitality and domestic care, they found that 44 percent had been paid less than the law required within the past year. In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that employers steal $15 billion annually from workers by paying less than the minimum wage.

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Two basic facts add up to create an environment where wage thieves operate with impunity. The first is that most wage thieves will never be caught. Workers often fear retaliation for speaking up or don’t have the resources they’d need to file a complaint or bring a lawsuit. And only a handful of local or state wage theft enforcement agencies have demonstrated an effective strategy for tracking down wage thieves, explaining why in places like Houston, Texas, and Charlotte, North Carolina, a typical year might only bring a single successful wage theft prosecution.

The second is that even when wage thieves are caught, our legal system protects business owners at the expense of workers: wealthy individuals and profitable companies get ample opportunity to claim they just don’t have the money to pay workers what they’re owed. A 15-state investigation by Politico found that workers who won their wage theft lawsuits only ultimately recovered 59 percent of the money that judges or juries had agreed they’d been owed. In New York City, ten delivery workers won a $700,000 wage theft ruling against the restaurant Indus Valley — although these workers started their complaint in 2008 and won their lawsuit before a federal judge in 2014, they say they’ve collected only about 15 percent of what they’re owed.

These are both solvable problems if we’re willing to change a legal and economic system that stacks the deck against working people.

Catching Wage Thieves In the Act

Workers know complaining about unpaid or underpaid hours can mean risking their jobs or getting shunted into a less favorable schedule. According to a 2019 report by the National Employment Law Project, 45 states lack one or more of the provisions of an effective anti-retaliation law.

Undocumented workers are especially vulnerable to retaliation. Speaking about undocumented workers in Houston, Texas, Josef Buenker, a private employment lawyer, said, “I can’t count the number of times workers have told us that that it’s an overt threat used against them, [when bosses say] ‘I’m going to report you to ICE, what are you going to do about it?’” He added, “We regularly meet with people who want to pursue their claim, but then they go home and think about it and decide not to because they’re concerned about their immigration status.” As long as the threat of deportation can be used against workers, wage theft will persist. Aggressive deportation policies undermine labor conditions for both immigrants and for their U.S.-born coworkers, whose bargaining power is undermined by their bosses’ ability to exploit those without papers.

The cost of going to court is another key consideration. Some workers are able to find free legal counsel from a local legal services agency, but these agencies are stretched thin, forced to choose between helping people in poverty avoid eviction, fight wrongful debt collection lawsuits, win wage theft cases, and gain protection from domestic violence. A worker making more than $15,000 per year is often totally ineligible for legal services aid.

Some legal aid organizations lack the funding to take on wage theft cases at all. In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, there are two organizations providing civil representation to low-income workers, the Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy and Legal Aid of North Carolina, explained Ken Schorr, Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy’s executive director, and he noted that neither organization will represent low-income workers in court for wage theft cases. Schorr explained, “The majority of our funding is grant-based for particular areas.” He added, “We haven’t been able to find funding to do employment law based work such as wage claims.” Our country considers legal representation in civil cases a privilege, not a right — which means many low-wage workers can’t use the court system to hold their employers accountable.

That’s why, as Tallulah Knopp, a staff attorney at Boston’s Volunteer Lawyer Project, points out, it’s so important for states to have clear “fee-shifting” statutes: in many states, when a worker wins a wage theft lawsuit, the employer will have to pay their back wages, but not necessarily their legal fees. A strong “fee-shifting” statute, like Massachusetts’, sets a standard where, if a worker wins their case, their employer pays the legal fees, instead of the worker having to pay the lawyer out of their recovered damages. That encourages private lawyers to come to the table on behalf of workers, Knopp explains. In a state like Texas, where filing fees are $400, and many attorneys bill at $100 per hour or more, there’s no real way to get your wages back if you’re owed just $500. That’s why Knopp and Nick Wertsch, of Texas’ Workers Defense Project, both point to fee-shifting statutes as a critical part of fighting wage theft.

But Jennifer Lee, associate professor at Temple Law School, argues that relying on workers to come forward against their bosses can’t solve wage theft by itself, even in the presence of fee-shifting.

As Lee explains, the information barriers and risks for workers to report their own wage theft remain high, even when states try to protect workers from retaliation. “The number of workers who are suffering violations versus the number of people who come forward is miniscule,” says Lee.

After investigating 141 state and local anti-wage-theft laws, she concluded that we can’t rely on workers to file complaints or lawsuits: while a worker’s “private right of action” can be part of the solution, we also need strong wage theft enforcement agencies that don’t just react to workers’ complaints, but are on the lookout for abuse.

Funding is part of the problem in some cities and states, says Lee, but she also points to cities whose enforcement agencies are dramatically underutilized. Many agencies, Lee says, wait for workers to file complaints, rather than entering the community to inform workers of their rights, and to find bad actors.

The most promising approach, says Lee, is collaboration between government agencies and workers’ centers. Although workers in the industries susceptible to wage theft often aren’t unionized, many are organized through local worker’s centers like the Domestic Worker & Day Laborer Center of Chicago and Houston’s Fe y Justicia. “Agencies aren’t always in the best position to identify which workplaces have issues or to build trust with workers,” says Lee, adding that worker’s centers are often more embedded in the community. The cooperation of worker’s centers gathers useful information about labor conditions and can encourage more workers to come forward. Lee pointed to Seattle as an example of a city that has effectively partnered with local community groups — their Office of Labor Standards selected ten community organizations to receive $1 million contracts to provide education and outreach to workers. Reporting by the Philadelphia Enquirer found that, in 2018, Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards received 10 times the number of wage theft questions and complaints than Philadelphia received, a larger city that lacked such a strategy.

Making Them Pay the Bill 

But even once wage theft is brought to light, workers don’t always get paid. Across the country, nominally “successful” wage theft lawsuits often result in empty judgments: just because a judge or jury agreed that a worker experienced wage theft, it doesn’t always mean that the worker will be able to collect her back wages.

A report by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice found at least $125 million in unpaid wage theft judgments and orders within New York City alone. Carmela Huang, a supervising attorney at New York City’s Legal Aid Society, says “it’s just far too easy for employers to transfer their assets.” As an example, Huang explains, a restaurant owner faced with a high-dollar wage theft lawsuit will recruit a friend to create a new corporation and transfer the restaurant to the new corporation. That makes the original corporation facing the lawsuit nominally unable to pay its wage debts. “For more than a decade employer-side attorneys have been advising clients on how to hide their assets — it is definitely a part of the practice to advise clients on how to make themselves judgment-proof,” says Huang. That’s why the Legal Aid Society called on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign the SWEAT Act, which would have allowed workers to place a lien on their employers’ assets while wage theft litigation was ongoing, stopping bad companies from using suspicious transfers to hide assets. Cuomo vetoed the SWEAT Act on January 2.

Our country arrests 1.5 million people for burglary and larceny per year — but workers facing stolen wages are routinely deprived of justice. Businesses can dial 911 and expect the cops to show up to arrest a shoplifter, while millions of Americans work for poverty wages, as victims of theft from their employers, with little hope of recourse. To end wage theft, we should lift the threat of deportation, guarantee workers access to the legal system, build strong wage theft enforcement agencies, and close the loopholes that allow employers to shirk responsibility to pay owed wages.

Minor League Baseball, known as MiLB, is the level where nearly every future big-league player is developed, making it a vital piece of the baseball hierarchy in America. Minor league teams not only feed the MLB teams with which they’re affiliated, they also create thousands of jobs for smaller baseball-friendly communities across the nation, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, or more remote, otherwise baseball-less locales such as Burlington, Vermont, or Keizer, Oregon.

Minor league teams are what truly allows the sport to be considered the “national pastime,” as it manages to make the game national.

So far, we’ve heard MLB’s reasoning for shrinking the minors, we’ve heard some Minor League teams respond, and we’ve even witnessed members of Congress get in on the discussion with a disapproving letter and a task force. But we haven’t heard from the players themselves. What do the players, who lack a seat at the table in all of these discussions, think of the potential loss of more than 1,000 jobs, of severing the connection between MLB and 42 communities, and of their desire for a fair wage being repaid with the loss of a quarter of their jobs?

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The initial reason for shrinking the minors, both in reporting by Baseball America and via MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, is “inadequate facilities.” Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league player with the Giants who is known for both his attempts to unionize MiLB players and his role as a lawyer representing players in a class-action lawsuit seeking unpaid wages, Senne v. MLB, believes this is an excuse “to try to push through a cost-saving measure.”

Broshuis is not alone in feeling this way. An active minor league player (who will remain anonymous to protect his identity) also believes the facilities could use a boost, but that shuttering teams isn’t the way to make it happen. “These MiLB teams are massively profitable in many cases for their owners, and they sink very little of that money back into facilities for players. There ought to be accountability for an organization to give back to the players that earn them their money,” he said.

In fact, players expecting to be paid for the value they create is the real reason behind MLB’s push; it’s using an effort by players to receive fair wages as an excuse to cut costs elsewhere and hurt smaller communities with minor league teams, all in the name of boosting profits a little bit.

In 2018, MLB successfully lobbied Congress to limit the pay of minor league players — who are paid by the major league teams themselves — to the federal minimum wage, and just 40 hours per week in-season. Even though players work more like 60-70 hours per week, they receive no overtime, and also are not paid for spring training, the postseason, or the offseason.

Understandably, there was backlash to MLB’s limiting minor-league salaries to as low as $290 for 40 hours of work, as the league’s lobbying to codify awful living and working conditions was brought to the attention of many fans who were otherwise unaware. So now, you have commissioner Manfred saying 42 teams need to be disaffiliated so that MLB teams can increase minor league pay for the remaining players, as if it’s an either/or proposition for an industry that rakes in $10 billion annually.

The reality is that paying every single minor league player an average of $50,000 per year would cost MLB teams $7.5 million. With $10 billion in revenue pouring in annually, that’s pocket change. It’s the salary of a single year of a good relief pitcher.

Kyle Johnson, another former minor leaguer, played with three of the teams on the disaffiliation list: the Orum Owlz, Burlington Bees, and Binghamton Rumble Ponies. He pointed out that the Toronto Blue Jays already increased pay for players at the lower levels, and haven’t gone broke in the process.

“The Blue Jays have shown that the model works: they’re not bankrupt, they’re not in trouble, and every single one of those guys in the Blue Jays’ organization is extremely thankful and not as stressed as I was every two weeks waiting for my paycheck when the $400 ran out,” he said. “The model can work, it can work at every single level MLB has right now.”

While the Jays’ decision to raise pay was an admirable one, by doubling player salaries they raised poverty-level wages to, well, slightly higher poverty-level wages. This is the kind of thing that happens when the players don’t have a seat at the table, and precisely why MLB is advocating for higher minor league pay now: The league can do it on its own terms, while squeezing the owners of Minor League Baseball teams for more money and concessions.

“That’s the root of the problem,” says Broshuis. “They’re talking about cutting 1,000 minor-league jobs here, and you’re talking about doing it without giving the players a voice at all. The players need a voice at the bargaining table, they need to be represented, and it’s quite unfortunate that they don’t have a voice right now. There are other examples out there of minor league players with representation, like minor league hockey has a union, and in truth those players are treated much better than MiLB players.”

Broshuis isn’t exaggerating about how much better Pro Hockey Player Association players are treated than Minor League Baseball ones: the average salary of a PHPA member in the American Hockey League — the National Hockey League’s Triple-A equivalent — is around $118,000, while the minimum is $50,000. The per diem, too, is about three times what MiLB’s players receive to feed themselves. The NHL does not pull in the kind of revenue MLB does — it has never cracked $5 billion as a league — and yet it has managed to survive while treating players like human beings.

Players are also concerned about what cutting off local communities from affiliated ball will do to the growth of the game. Johnson pointed out that staying with host families who were “super engaged with the teams” was a highlight for him. Broshuis pointed out that teams like his first aren’t located anywhere near other pro ball. “If you deprive those fans of baseball, they just aren’t going to go to a game. That’s a lot of kids that aren’t exposed to baseball games, and if you want to grow the game, and want your fan base to be young, then you would think you would want to continue to provide opportunities for kids to go to games like they do at the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes,” he said.

A study suggests 4 million fans would be cut off from pro baseball if MLB’s plan goes through. The divide between baseball-haves and the have-nots would mirror a rural/urban divide in America, too.

“On the fan side, cutting down on the minor league levels hurts every party involved. It cuts down fan bases across the country, it concentrates baseball in major cities, which hurts the nationwide appeal of the game,” said the active anonymous player. “For many people, it means they won’t get to see an affiliated baseball game live. It makes no sense for MLB teams to cut down on farm systems, in both the short and long term.”

MLB doesn’t care about any of this, though. And that’s a shame for the players, the fans, and for the future of professional baseball in America, too.

“I was homeless, looking for a place to live, and trying to get into a drug treatment program,” Gomez told TalkPoverty. “I couldn’t afford to enroll at a volunteer center and do my hours.” Her struggle to fulfill the terms led her down a rabbit hole of unsympathetic judges, sexual harassment, and dangerous working conditions.

Several recent high-profile cases have put court-ordered community service like that Lopez experienced into the headlines. So has a University of California, Los Angeles study that took a close look at how community service is used in LA County, and the wildly disparate outcomes within the county’s court-ordered community service framework. Limited research on this subject is in circulation, but the information from Los Angeles suggests tracking and quantifying data around community service nationwide might yield important insights into a little-researched aspect of the legal system. As with other elements of the criminal legal system, class and race heavily mediate the kind of service people engage in and how many hours they are ordered to complete.

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The researchers found significant racial disparities, with Latinx and Black people being more likely to serve community service as a result of disparities in citations, arrests, and charging decisions. For example, in traffic cases that resulted in community service, which involve infractions like speeding and failing to stop, 81 percent of workers were Latinx, out of proportion with LA’s roughly 49 percent Latinx population, and 8 percent were Black.

They also found a high percentage of people who could not afford attorneys (78 percent) amongst those who performed community service, while 16 percent had limited English proficiency and needed translators in court. This paints a profile of a predominantly low-income population — 89 percent of those serving community service in the cohort they studied were low-income — of color, with substantial numbers of immigrants.

Around 100,000 people are sentenced to community service in LA County every year, serving the equivalent of 4,900 full-time, paid civilian jobs and 1,800 government jobs. The number of hours of labor this represents, and the significant cost savings for community service sites, is tremendous. Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor and lead author, told TalkPoverty, “We were startled to see just how high the hours were for many people, people getting hundreds or even thousands of hours.”

The report argues this is a form of extractive labor that stacks on to existing “poverty penalties” in the criminal legal system, in addition to driving inequalities on work sites, where people completing community service work side-by-side with paid parties in everything from municipal animal shelters to for-profit nursing homes, but without the same benefits, protections, and wages.

Lopez recalled that at one placement, she was ordered to engage in unsafe activities like cleaning bathrooms with a mixture of bleach and ammonia. At another, she said she was forced to mop on her hands and knees in a kitchen surrounded by men who stared at her, but she had to “swallow that pill and push through” after the supervisor threatened to “throw out all my hours.”

“In addition to the direct displacement dynamic,” noted Zatz, referring to paid workers who might lose out on roles filled by community service, “the other dynamic at play is that these assignments function as a form of subsidy to nonprofits.” Government agencies also experience big savings through community service; over half of the cases the researchers looked at involved CalTrans, the state’s highway construction and maintenance agency.

Community service is sometimes represented to members of the public as a compassionate alternative to jail time and a way to “work off” court-imposed debts. In fact, it can create significant hardships. People may struggle to complete high numbers of hours on top of their paid jobs and other obligations, such as school and child care. When Lopez struggled to complete her service and asked for help, judges were unsympathetic; it ultimately took the help of an attorney with A New Way of Life, an advocacy organization that works with women leaving prison, to get the court to work with her. The court agreed to accept volunteer hours she served at organizations not on its officially sanctioned list, acknowledging her work with community advocacy organizations.

The researchers noted that disability can also be a factor; the study cites one disabled person who was sentenced to 60 hours of work they were unable to perform and ended up with 180 hours of “light” service. Zatz notes that people receive more credit for physically demanding work, which creates inherent inequalities for disabled people.

And some still owe court-imposed fines and fees that can’t be worked off by laboring on construction crews or organizing files at the sheriff’s office, with 86 percent of those involved in criminal cases making payments that averaged $323 on top of their service. That’s, of course, after they’ve paid the fee for placement at a community service work site recognized by the court.

Many members of the public may not be aware of the close ties between court-ordered community service and the mounting crisis of court fines and fees. Nearly every state has seen steep increases, many of which are established in rigid fee schedules that judges can’t change. In many cases, courts are offering community service as a way to “pay off” the very fines the court has imposed, though they could conduct ability-to-pay assessments to determine whether those fines are realistic. For some, the only way to resolve these debts is to work, providing free labor to participating sites.

The reliance upon free labor is troubling for the researchers. Whether people are engaged in community labor, which includes a physically demanding element like working on a road crew, or community service, like volunteering at a thrift store, they are treated as a cheap and disposable resource. Not only are they not paid for their time, they’re not provided with meaningful skills and a path to advancement, with very few people hired on by the agencies and organizations they work for. These organizations can also be choosy, indicating that they won’t work with people convicted of certain kinds of crimes, which makes it harder for them to complete court-ordered community service.

At a time when labor organizing is in resurgence, community service represents a largely unexplored aspect of the labor movement. Some participants in community service programs are working alongside union members who have fought for robust contracts that include fair pay and benefits as well as protected working conditions. Community service workers don’t benefit from those contracts and are in fact sometimes forced to sign waivers explicitly identifying them as volunteers and giving up certain workplace rights and protections.

Reforming court fines and fees to address the modern-day debtor’s prisons and coercive labor conditions across the United States is critical, as is coming up with alternatives to incarceration that do not involve exploitation. Community service as it exists now could also be reformed; people could be provided with job training, meaningful pay, and other supports to turn a court-ordered job into economic opportunity, something people like Lopez, who’s been sober three years and is currently pursuing a college education, could have benefited from.

Until then, members of the public may want to look twice at community service’s role in their neighborhoods.

During the course of his career, Scalia has denied the science behind repetitive stress injuries, prevented UPS drivers injured on the job from having the ability to form a class to sue, and — most outrageously — insisted that an employee at Ford Motor Company should soil themselves at work rather than be allowed the privacy to work from home.

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In the Ford case, Scalia defended the company against a claim that it had failed to accommodate a person with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The plaintiff had requested telework as a reasonable accommodation, which the company refused and countered with an offer to move the employee’s cubicle closer to the restroom.

When the plaintiff explained that simply standing up could trigger a loss of bowel control, Scalia argued that they should have taken “self-help steps such as using Depends (a product specifically designed for incontinence) and bringing a change of clothes to the workplace.” In other words, when an employee asked for support, Scalia argued that she should wear a diaper and be ready to change her pants.

This is not just a case for me. It is personal. As a person who has lived with inflammatory bowel disease for 34 years, I have requested and received the accommodations cited in this case. It’s not unusual for me to need quick access to a bathroom four, six, or eight times during a workday. On the days when that number is higher, I take advantage of telework. On days when it’s lower, I come to the office confident that my disability will not keep me from the work I love. Not because I’m forced to wear Depends — which would put me at risk for complications from inflammation or infection — but because of laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act that protect my right to accommodations that work for me.

Scalia’s nomination has the potential to set back disability employment policy by decades. The Department of Labor has a critical role in driving policy on disability employment, helping make the workplace safer and more accessible, and helping move the needle away from subminimum wage employment.

It might be easy to dismiss this administration’s nomination of Scalia as just one more dangerous appointment competing for our attention. That’s not what I see here. What I see is a nominee who endangers every worker’s right to reasonable accommodations. Not just the 3 million Americans who live with bowel disease, but the more than 60 million Americans with disabilities who depend on the ADA to protect them from discrimination by employers.

They want a $15 wage floor and reasonably-priced health care, and they’re united across the industry: The DCA demonstrators work for LSG Sky Chefs, which serves American Airlines at DCA. Employees at Gate Gourmet, another major industry player, joined the strike authorization; Delta Airlines and United Airlines could also be affected. Together, they account for three of the top four airlines in the United States, carrying nearly 400 million people in 2017.

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Eyerusalem Retta has been working in the bowels of DCA as an airline caterer since 1989, preparing beverages for customers like American Airlines. She said her starting wage was $5.15 an hour. After 30 years of service, she makes $13.35. “Our job is hard, we need better insurance, and for many, we want better retirements. We’re almost retired!,” she told TalkPoverty. The $15 minimum wage workers are demanding would result in a wage increase for “the majority” of airline catering workers, according to the union.

American Airlines made $1.9 billion in 2018.

Organizers are also contending with the high price of employee health insurance, especially for families; Retta pays $131 dollars weekly for her five-person family, a hardship on low pay. The health care situation is especially acute for workers with a long history of service. They are facing low wages paired with growing health issues caused by a working life of demanding physical labor that need attention. Sonia Toledo, who has worked for LSG Sky Chefs in Miami for 16 years, told TalkPoverty “I don’t have it, I don’t have any health care.”

“I’m paying for one bedroom, $1,700 a month. I have to work overtime. And sometimes, I don’t want to do it, but sometimes I need to work for Uber for extra money. It’s very tough. I’m a diabetic, I have to get medicine, I have to eat certain foods. So I gotta pay for this stuff,” said Nelson Robinson, a DCA worker who pays $50 weekly for his employer health insurance but adds that the copays are a burden.

Getting to this point has been a challenge. According to UNITE HERE, workers began negotiating a contract with Gate Gourmet in October 2017 — a company spokesperson told TalkPoverty the company “continues to work in good faith with the union” — and Sky Chefs in October 2018. But collective bargaining is difficult for airline and railway workers thanks to the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which guarantees bargaining rights in these industries with limitations. Specifically, workers can’t strike without permission from the National Mediation Board.

The union requested mediation in its negotiations with Gate Gourmet and Sky Chefs in June 2018 and January 2019 respectively as it moved into the next phase of its negotiations. Now, workers are requesting a release to strike this week, hoping the Board agrees that the parties involved are unable to agree to arbitration. Workers have signaled that they are ready to strike as soon as the 30-day cooling period is up. Passengers in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and more would notice very quickly. Several affected airports are major regional hubs, like Atlanta, where a labor disruption could be costly for airlines.

It’s not just about the pay and health insurance. Working conditions for catering crews are extremely poor. Airline food is the subject of many a late-night comedy routine, but a flight without even the basics — like water and tea — can quickly turn into an unpleasant one. In fact, airlines are legally required to provide food and water to passengers stranded in tarmac delays. Fully cleaning out and resupplying a plane from the moment it arrives at the gate to the time it pushes back is a delicate but high-speed dance; every minute counts.

The work behind that turnaround, tiny bags of pretzels, plastic-wrapped swizzle sticks, and all, can be grueling. Those working at the airport must contend with blazing tarmac heat in summer and frigid conditions in winter. Offsite locations, where food is prepared and readied for catering, are often poorly temperature-controlled as well. For those in refrigerated work environments, the cold is constant. Retta described two years with no air conditioning in the notoriously swampy climate of D.C.

Caterers also work with caustic cleaning chemicals, sharp knives, and boiling-hot industrial dishwashers, all of which expose them to the risk of occupational injuries. In 2015, a Centers for Disease Control report documented high levels of carbon dioxide in refrigerated workspaces along with lack of access to water, and noted that most entries on injury logs were “acute traumatic injuries” like knife wounds.

Gate Gourmet and Sky Chefs have both run afoul of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), most notably in cases involving the deaths of airport truck and lift operators or nearby employees, the people passengers are most likely to see while peering impatiently out the window to see if their planes are ready. In 2017, SkyChefs faced thousands of dollars in OSHA penalties for failing to maintain safe and operable exit routes.

Poor conditions are bad news for passengers, too. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration cited Gate Gourmet for “dead apparent nymph and adult cockroaches too numerous to count” in one Kentucky catering facility. It is the tip of a moldy, poorly temperature-controlled, cross-contaminated iceberg.

Without strike authorization, workers can and will continue trying to negotiate with their employers. The unions has not announced any plans to leverage slowdowns, stoppages, or sickouts — such as the large number of illnesses seen among flight traffic controllers during the 2018-2019 government shutdown. (The union made it clear that they did not “condone or endorse” such activity.) It has indicated that it will continue to pursue all legal means for resolving the labor dispute. But, the union noted in reference to the DCA action, “while we will continue this process it’s important to know that American Airlines can end this dispute right now, without the need for a strike,” by setting standards for pay and health insurance for catering workers.

In the meantime, the next time you open a stroopwafel on United, think about the hands that packaged it. 

LSG Sky Chefs did not respond to a request for comment.

These days, he’s putting in around 60 hours a week, even though his contract says he’s supposed to work 50 hours and the payroll system only counts 40 hours a week for the purpose of accruing sick leave. His managers keep giving him more to do. “They just add and add and add,” he said. “There’s no way for us to get everything done.”

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While overall his pay is higher than it was when he was hourly thanks to bonuses, those bonuses aren’t guaranteed. In terms of guaranteed pay per hour, he’s making less: He estimates that right now, it averages out to about $8 an hour, whereas the people below him make $16 an hour. And so much intense work has taken a huge toll on him. “It wears you out to work this many hours,” he said. “I’ve blown out my knee, blown out my back. I’m almost on the brink of not being able to survive physically.”

Ahlgren isn’t eligible for overtime pay because the federal threshold of $23,660 to qualify has gone without an update for decades. And without extra overtime pay for his extra hours, he’s just keeping his head above water financially. “I don’t have really enough to survive or go to the doctor or plan for the future or anything like that,” he said.

Ahlgren may be able to look forward to some relief, however. At the beginning of June, the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries released a plan to update its own overtime threshold. It would ensure that any worker in the state who makes less than 2.5 times the minimum wage — by 2026, nearly $80,000 a year — will be owed overtime pay. About 400,000 people like Ahlgren are expected to be affected.

The state of Washington had to take matters into its own hands because efforts to increase the overtime threshold at the federal level have stalled. In 2016, the Obama administration updated federal overtime rules so those making $47,476 or less would be automatically covered, both hourly and salaried. It would have been updated every three years to keep up with wage growth thereafter, likely covering those making $51,000 by early 2020.

But the update was challenged in court and ultimately struck down. Rather than defend the Obama update, the Trump administration first did nothing, and then put forward its own proposed increase to $35,308 without any automatic updates. According to the Economic Policy Institute, it will cover 8.2 million fewer people than the Obama rule would eventually have.

In the wake of Trump’s weak federal action, a number of states have stepped into the breach, because, as with the minimum wage, federal overtime law is just a floor; states and localities can go higher if they choose.

“This is a standard that is really important to the vibrancy of the middle class, and it has dramatically eroded over time,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The minimum wage raises pay and living standards for those at the very bottom, but overtime is “about the lower end of the middle class,” she said. The typical person impacted by it is the front-line supervisor in a fast food restaurant or retail store — a low-level manager who may be asked to put in 60 to 70 hours a week at no additional pay. Updating overtime therefore acts as a “companion standard” to increasing the minimum wage, she said.

Pennsylvania was the first to act when last year Gov. Tom Wolf (D) proposed raising the state’s threshold to $47,892 by 2022 and updating it automatically every three years after that. California and New York have also taken action: California‘s overtime threshold will cover everyone making less than $62,400 by 2023, while New York will raise it to $58,500 in New York City and phase it in at different rates for different parts of the state.

But Washington state has so far gone the furthest. “The Washington announcement is definitely the boldest,” said Paul Sonn, state policy program director at the National Employment Law Project. “It’s a model for how states can take strong action to protect workers from the Trump overtime rollback. We hope it’ll spur more states.”Previously, about two-thirds of the salaried workforce had to be paid overtime when they worked more than 40 hours a week. Washington’s update would cover about 44 percent, Sonn said: “It’s really quite moderate historically because it wouldn’t fully restore overtime pay to the share that had it in the 1970s.”

One of the beneficiaries in Washington would be Sidney Kenney. When he started working at a residential service provider for developmentally disabled people in a salaried position, he was told the job would be 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. “Soon you find out that’s not true,” he said. He was required to always be on call, even on weekends, holidays, and vacations. It meant keeping his phone at the ready even when at the movies or in bed. “It changes how you live,” he said.

He once took a vacation to go to a friend’s wedding but found himself having to do work on the way there, during the wedding, and on the way home. Every time he put in those extra hours, he was paid the same. “It builds resentment,” he said. “You’re angry, you feel like you’ve been lied to, feel like you’ve been taken advantage of.”

So, he decided to move to an hourly position instead. “I loved the job I was doing,” he said. “However, I realized it was not a lifestyle I could continue or wanted to continue.” Now he has a set number of hours, and if he has to come in early or stay late, he’s paid for that extra time. “My days off are my days off,” he said. “I still get phone calls from work and I still get some text messages, but I don’t have to answer them.”

“Your time is invaluable,” he noted. “I can plan things, I can enjoy my time. It’s a crazy world and nothing’s promised, so what time I do have I want to enjoy.”

But he thinks if his state’s proposed overtime update goes into effect, almost all of the positions at his job will simply be made hourly to accommodate it. “I would have stayed in the same position if it were hourly,” he noted. “If they were to extend the same position I had … but in an hourly capacity, I would go back to it.”

Ahlgren doesn’t expect that being covered by overtime regulations would reduce his hours. But it will mean extra money for his extra work. “At least I would be able to go to the doctor and take of myself,” he said. “I would be able to plan for a future where I wouldn’t just have to do this forever.”

Other states may soon join in the action. Last week Massachusetts held a hearing on a bill that would increase its threshold to $64,000 by 2026. Colorado’s labor department kicked off a comment process for whether and by how much it should raise its overtime standards, which will continue through Aug. 15. And a bill has been introduced in Maine’s legislature to increase its threshold. There may be others just waiting in the wings: Sonn noted that 16 states filed objections to Trump’s overtime update. “That shows there’s a long list of states that think it’s not enough,” he said. “We may well see them acting in the future.”

Workers in Washington also hope their state can inspire others to act. “So many businesses have built their models around having these free workers,” Kenney noted. “It’s not right, it’s not ethical, and it’s not fair.”

“I’m just hoping more states follow suit,” he said.

Advocates argue the rule is designed to suppress unions by making it more difficult to collect dues. And there’s more than union dues at stake: Home care providers could, for example, experience lapses in health coverage by failing to keep up with premiums.

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Many home care workers are family members providing home and community-based care to loved ones. Their work can include assistance with activities of daily living like bathing, dressing, and toileting, along with light housekeeping, help with errands, and other services designed to help disabled people and older adults stay in their communities. Home care is one of the fastest growing professions in the United States, with a projected growth rate of 41 percent for those working at agencies.

The median wage for home care workers is $10.49; a 2017 National Employment Law Project survey found unionized employees made $2 more per hour when examining the difference between weighted average wages. The majority are women of color, reflecting the gendered and racialized history of the field, and 28 percent are themselves on Medicaid.

In some ways, Medicaid-funded home care can act as an anti-poverty program and compensate people for care work that is normally considered unworthy of pay. “When I found out about In-Home Support Services [the California implementation of the program],” said Andrea Dudley, who cares for her son, “it was like a godsend…it’s not a lot of money, but it’s helped me.”

Home health work, like other labor that takes place in the intimate setting of the home, has been historically undervalued. When the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) passed in 1938, domestic workers were explicitly excluded from wage and hour protections, in part at the behest of Southern Democrats. In the years since, domestic workers, including those offering home health services, have fought to organize. In the 1970s, Congress amended the FLSA to cover some domestic workers, but home health aides were still left out by a provision excluding “babysitters” and “companionship services.” But recently, they’ve started making gains. They won wage and overtime protections under FLSA in 2015 and have grown home care worker union participation. In 2010 they pushed for the passage of a Domestic Worker Bill of Rights in New York, and a similar national bill to extend these protections nationwide has been introduced by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

Now anti-union proponents, pushed by groups such as the National Right to Work Committee, are on the offensive. In 2014, they won a significant victory with Harris v. Quinn, which ruled that home health care workers are not public sector employees. Therefore, those who choose not to join the union may not be required to pay service fees, enjoying the benefits of collective bargaining without the costs.

In this instance, the government argues Medicaid monies should only be paid out to providers, with exceptions for tax deductions but not for third-party payees. In response to concerned comments about the implications of this rule, the government insisted that “it in no way prevents” home health workers from paying union dues, insurance premiums, and other costs via other means. To prove their point, HHS staffers even calculated the cost of envelopes and stamps for mailing payments.

While HHS staffers dismissed concerns, worker advocates argue this rule change could make things extremely difficult for home health workers, and not just when it comes to sending in union dues. Some are unbanked, making it challenging to mail a check. Others deal with significant demands on their time and schedules that could make it hard to keep track of due dates and mail things on time. Issues like these could potentially lead to lapses in health coverage and other problems that could be easily resolved with automatic deductions. More to the point, home health workers themselves have repeatedly stated they want the option to make assignments.

The extremely targeted nature of this rule has big implications. Independent providers are difficult to organize because of their far-flung nature. They don’t have a shared office, meeting place, or workspace to network, because they labor entirely in private homes, out of the public eye. They are underpaid and vulnerable to exploitation. Union membership can change that. Dudley commented that the union helps her “stay informed” and connected with other workers.

The rule is “a blatant attack on us,” she added, asking what should make care workers in particular subject to a bar on withholdings. It’s a question shared by other worker-advocates and their allies. Unions such as the SEIU and AFSCME are organizing against it, and at least five states are suing.

“It’s our choice to take our deductions out of our checks,” said Dudley.

Uber executives’ plans to take the company public on Friday have only exacerbated the situation, so Uber drivers across the country have pledged to log out for 12 hours beginning at noon on Wednesday. Drivers and their supporters also plan to protest in front of the Uber headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

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For months, drivers have pointed to the inequities between what they earn driving, which often calculates to below minimum-wage after taxes and expenses, and the billions that executives are projected to reap once the company goes public. Silicon Valley technology website TechCrunch reported in April that Uber is seeking up to $100 billion in valuation, one of the biggest such valuations in California history.

Among those cashing in on the I.P.O. are Uber’s former CEO and founder Travis Kalanick, who was forced out in 2017 for alleged internal conflicts and poor management. Kalanick could make as much as $9 billion, while venture capitalist Matt Cohler could pocket about $11 billion, and founder Garrett Camp may make $6 billion.

While driver protests have happened before, such as the strike that saw U.K.-based drivers withdraw their labor in October 2018, the Uber strike has expanded to stretch across the world in cities such as Los Angeles; Nairobi, Kenya; and Sydney, Australia, where drivers plan to strike for at least part of the day on Wednesday. City agencies such as Bay Area Rapid Transit are encouraging potential riders to utilize public transit as an alternative, and both the San Francisco Taxi Drivers Alliance and New York Taxi Driver Alliance are joining the protest out of a sense of solidarity with their rideshare counterparts.

Mostafa Maklad, an Uber driver in San Francisco and organizer with Gig Workers Rising, who is originally from Egypt, points out the little-known fact that the Saudi Arabian royal family could stand to gain the most from the Uber I.P.O. through direct investments and holdings. “Most Uber drivers in San Francisco are from Yemen,” says Maklad. Prince Mohammad bin Salman, as Saudi Arabia’s minister for defense, has spent billions on an air campaign targeting Yemeni rebel groups, which has led to civilian casualties. “All of that money will go towards the [Yemeni Civil War], which has killed hundreds of thousands.”

In recent months, rideshare drivers with Gig Workers Rising, a project of the grassroots labor organization Working Partnerships USA, have begun pushing back against what they allege are abuses of their “independent contractor” status. This spares the company from having to provide benefits or other labor law protections to drivers.

Maklad said, “Uber has always looked at drivers as just a number or an application on a paper.”

The drivers are also agitating for more transparency around payment models, an increased wage commensurate with the Bay Area’s high cost of living, benefits such as workers’ compensation and paid time off, and a role at the bargaining table in the workplace. Their organizing comes on the heels of a rare victory, when drivers in New York City won a minimum pay rate in December as part of the City Council’s attempt to regulate ridesharing companies under the Taxi and Limousine Commission and offset the gridlock that extra cars on the road cause.

“Wages have actually gone down in years. It’s expensive year-after-year. There’s no increase [for inflation] like other workers, no benefits,” Maklad said. After Uber made changes to its payment structure in October, drivers said their overall take-home pay actually decreased. Uber told a number of media outlets at the time, such as Business Insider, that it did this to keep earnings more consistent.

Other grievances Maklad pointed to include the lengths Uber executives seem to go to assuage their customers at the expense of their drivers. He highlighted one recent case in Los Angeles, in which a passenger stabbed a driver, citing the risks that rideshare drivers take when they pick up customers. Other cases include the oft-made complaint about Uber’s passenger-skewed ratings system, and that until recently drivers could only contact Uber through an email system.

While Maklad and other drivers allege that Uber shirks responsibility for passengers’ behavior, they also allege that Uber itself is less than forthcoming when it comes to dealing with its drivers, despite the critical role drivers play in ensuring the operation runs smoothly.  “We have the right to know much money we’re going to earn before we pick a passenger. We have the right to know who we’re picking up,” said Maklad. “It seems any passenger can commit a crime and get away with it because there’s no way to figure out who a passenger is [if anything goes wrong]. Uber wants to keep everything confidential.”

Uber drivers have been accused of discriminating against passengers, but that doesn’t undermine their very real fears about assault and harassment, highlighting the failures of a platform that benefits neither driver nor rider.

In contrast, Maklad said, drivers’ accounts are automatically deactivated after they’ve been in three car accidents, regardless of whether the accidents are the driver’s fault or not. Maklad says the only course of action drivers can take is to email the company. He pointed to an incident in which one driver’s account was deactivated after his third accident — despite his not being at fault — after which drivers tried to deliver a petition to Uber headquarters in support of the driver to demonstrate their frustration with Uber’s policy.

Maklad said, “We were turned away at the door. Uber sent its security guard to tell us that they don’t accept physical deliveries, and that we had to email them.” The San Francisco Examiner reported that a guard tackled one driver/supporter.

“They refused to respond to his message, even though there were 8,000 signatures in support,” he said.

“Their business model is to find a way to avoid being responsible for employees,” said Maklad. “But we’ve never been treated like independent contractors.” A court ruling last year challenged the practice of labeling people who appear to be employees as independent contractors in California. Uber’s quite familiar with this issue: a current case concerning misclassification of drivers in Massachusetts and California is making its way through a San Francisco court, which has already seen Uber pay out $20 million in settlement fees. Another judge ruled that because the plaintiffs drove for Uber BLACK, the limousine side of Uber, and were able to have free rein over how they structured their time and when they took breaks, they couldn’t be considered employees and thus weren’t entitled to protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which doesn’t apply to independent contractors.

Wednesday’s strike looks to have a far-reaching impact beyond that of just gig workers. There is a sense that the circumstances surrounding the strike extend beyond transit, as the exorbitant amounts that executives stand to receive are reflective of the accelerating income inequality gap between workers and bosses. One U.K.-based organizer told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Uber drivers were told they are unskilled, stuck in poverty, and will never stand up. Now, a global network for drivers are working together to fight back!”

If a new pork inspection rule recently highlighted by the Washington Post passes next month, the lines will run even faster and plant employees will have to take responsibility for this visual inspection, putting workers and eaters at risk.

Though this might sound like another Trump-era regulatory rollback, it’s actually the final step in a drawn-out food safety debate that’s spanned four administrations.

The changes are part of a double-acronym mouthful, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)-Based Inspection Model Project (HIMP). These new inspection methods have been quietly piloted at a select number of pork and poultry plants for some 20 years, with the basic goal of reducing USDA inspector spot checks and moving more safety testing offsite. Big meatpackers and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety Inspection Service claim these “modernizations” will improve safety and address inspector shortages, without harming workers.

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But accounts from workers and investigations by government watchdogs and advocacy groups tell the opposite story. By speeding up processing lines and allowing meatpackers to police themselves, HIMP plants pose serious risks for food safety and increase already hazardous working conditions.

While the Trump administration faces blowback for giving plant employees greater oversight of hog slaughter, the Obama administration passed similar food inspection changes in the poultry industry in 2012, known as the New Poultry Inspection System.

These changes shift some duties from federal food safety inspectors to plant employees. Previously, federal inspectors visually checked every chicken or hog carcass for things like infected organs, fecal contamination, and other signs of diseases or defects. The new systems put plant employees in charge of those checks. For pork, large plants currently must have seven USDA inspectors; under the new rules, they would have three. For poultry, the number of required USDA inspectors shrunk from four to one.

USDA and industry groups often say that the HIMP pilot programs in both pork and poultry have proven just as, if not more, safe than the current system. But additional accounts suggest otherwise.

A 2013 inspector general report argued that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the HIMP pork pilots, and that the agency could not determine whether the pilots improved food safety. In fact, the inspector general said “HIMP plants may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”

The advocacy group Food & Water Watch also uncovered that the new salmonella testing program was flawed for all poultry plants prior to a protocol change in July 2016, bringing the HIMP poultry pilot findings into question as well. The group also obtained inspection documents for 14 HIMP pilot poultry plants through a Freedom of Information Act request, and found widespread instances of company employees routinely missing defects.

Politico reported that several poultry plants enrolled in the new poultry processing program have already failed necessary food safety testing to increase their line speeds. Food & Water Watch also revealed that these poultry plants also “fail the agency’s salmonella performance standard at a greater rate than those that have not opted into the new system.” In fact, one of the original poultry pilot locations operating at faster line speeds was forced to suspend operations in May due to food safety violations.

When it comes to pork, there are only five HIMP pilot plants, but of the top 10 pork plants nationwide with the most food safety violations, three participated in HIMP. This includes the worst performing plant, which racked up nearly 50 percent more citations than the next most dangerous plant over the course of three years.

More fundamentally, having plant employees check carcasses amounts to self-regulation and presents a clear conflict of interest. Simply put, plant owners profit more the less they stop the line, making them more reluctant to address quality concerns than federal inspectors. In a public comment, one concerned USDA inspector said, “the bottom line is that a company is out to make money and they can not do that if the line is not running. Even if it means letting something go down the line and ultimately out the back door that is not fit for human consumption.”

“If this proposal goes through and inspectors are cut, I would not feel safe enough to feed [poultry] to my family,” she added.

When a handful of powerful meatpackers ramp up line speeds, the risks extend beyond food safety to the workers who face the physical toll of processing more animals in less time.

As it stands, the USDA only assesses line speed increases for food safety outcomes. The agency is quick to note that it does not have jurisdiction over worker safety, and that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protects workers. But OSHA has been derelict in its duty to prevent workplace injuries directly tied to increased line speeds.

While OSHA has set maximum operating speeds in some industries, such as grain processing, it has not done so for meatpacking. In fact, OSHA denied a 2013 petition requesting that the agency set slaughterhouse speed standards on the grounds that it did not have the resources to study the issue.

In absence of worker-safety informed limits, line speeds continue to increase. Historically, poultry lines ran at 70 birds per minute. Today they’re up to 175, after the poultry industry petitioned the Trump administration to revoke an Obama-era decision to keep the speeds at 140. The new pork rules would lift processing speed limits entirely, and the Post reports that line speeds could increase from 18 hogs per minute to 20. In four independently conducted surveys by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Midwest Coalition for Human Rights, Nebraska Appleseed, and Human Rights Watch, workers cited increased line speeds as the top or most notable complaint in regard to workplace safety.

According to the Department of Labor, meat processors get injured five times more frequently than other workers, and are nearly 20 times more likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome. True injury rates are likely even higher: Another study by the Government Accountability Office found that federal data likely does not capture all meat processing injuries, especially because immigrants and refugees, who comprise 28 percent of meatpacking workers, are less likely to report injury or workplace misconduct due to fear of retaliation or deportation. OSHA also admits that workers with limited English proficiency “often do not get the necessary safety training on the job and do not know their rights under the OSHA law.”

No matter how you slice it, faster line speeds line meat processors’ pockets at everyone else’s expense. Their costs per animal go down the faster lines run, churning out more product per worker and per plant. The one leg meat corporations have left to stand on is the argument that they’ll pass their savings onto consumers, but recent price fixing cases prove those talking points are hogwash. The only real winners are corporate packers and their shareholders, while workers and eaters pay the price.

Historically, if two entities oversee aspects of someone’s work experience — such as wages, hours, and policies — either separately or together, they could be considered “joint employers,” which means they are both liable for labor violations. While this standard isn’t used very often, it can be a powerful tool for holding large corporations accountable.

Think contractors who work alongside direct employees, doing the same work at a site where the parent company controls hours and policies, the staffing company handles payroll and employee screening, and both have hiring and firing rights. If workers filed a complaint, a judge might determine that the worksite and staffing company are joint employers, depending on the specific facts of the case.

Now, after a failed attempt at narrowing the definition of a joint employer in Congress in 2017, the Trump administration is turning to the regulatory process to make it harder for workers to file claims that rely on this standard.

When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937, it explicitly acknowledged that some workers, in disputes over wages, hours, and child labor practices, might be in a joint employer position. The question has been a subject of back and forth litigation and rulemaking because of the high stakes. The landmark Browning-Ferris case in 2015, which briefly established more protections for people making joint employer claims, allowed workers to leverage bigger wins and push for a larger culture of change. (Currently, a combination of litigation and rulemaking have the ruling’s status in flux.)

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The Department of Labor recently announced a proposed rule to narrow the standards of who counts as a “joint employer” under the FLSA. It is extremely restrictive, requiring companies to meet a highly specific four-point test and disallowing consideration of other factors. For example, if a contract includes hiring and firing rights for the parent company but they aren’t exercised, the court couldn’t consider that, and the parties would fail the joint employer test; the parent company would not be liable for damages.

Much news coverage on the administration’s attempt has focused on what it means for fast food workers, who often work in franchises with a parent company and local owner. But the implications are even bigger, affecting millions of workers across the economy in the garment, agricultural, construction, hospitality, and building services industries, among others. It’s an especially important distinction for people caught in the dramatic increase in “contingent labor” in recent years.

It also affects third-party logistics (3PL) employees who handle outsourced elements of the supply chain such as packaging, delivery, warehouse maintenance, and more. Think forklift operators at factory warehouses and delivery drivers. 3PL is one of the biggest areas of growth, according to Tia Koonse, Legal and Policy Research Manager at the UCLA Labor Center. 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using third-party logistics agencies, outsourcing labor along with liabilities to increase profits. Nearly half of Google’s workforce, for example, is not directly employed by Google.

“I think that this [proposed rule] is aimed at workers who have spoken up, and the workers are not going to back down,” commented Jonnee Bentley, associate general counsel at SEIU. Fight for $15 worker-organizers have achieved significant victories across the U.S. in recent years; for example, there was a 2014 NLRB ruling in favor of McDonald’s workers who complained about retaliation for labor organizing.

As part of its proposed rule, the Department of Labor provided a handy breakdown of hypothetical examples for people wondering how different scenarios might be interpreted under the new rule, which reads more like a how-to on avoiding a joint employer determination. It’s also heavily stacked with examples from fast food franchises, although according to Catherine K. Ruckelshaus, general counsel at the National Employment Law Project, franchises haven’t been involved in joint employer disputes under the FLSA.

Curiously, though the rule touts cost savings for business, the only costs calculated in the current draft available for comment are $420 million in expenses associated with implementation. Under the Obama administration, franchise growth consistently outperformed the private sector, suggesting that increasing joint employer protections did not harm business growth.

Undermining the way employers and courts interpret the FLSA isn’t the only way the Trump administration is using the rulemaking process to make it harder to bring joint employer claims. Last year, the NLRB announced a proposed rule, not yet finalized, to redefine the interpretation of the joint employer standard in the National Labor Relations Act, the legislation that surrounds worker organizing and labor disputes: If workers want to start a union, complain about unionbusting activity, or get support with the fight for a fair contract, they need the NLRB.

The NLRB wants to shift the joint employer definition to one that requires direct and immediate control of working conditions, moving away from broader Obama-era guidance that also accounted for “indirect control,” such as exerting guidance over business practices or providing software used to run a business.

The change would be good news for companies such as McDonald’s, as it would make it more likely that the corporation would not be considered a joint employer of franchise employees for the purpose of trying to unionize, and would have no obligation to come to the table to bargain. The franchise operator, meanwhile, would have limited options for meeting worker demands, because of price setting and other dictates set by the corporation. It should be noted that even in a case where franchise employees did manage to prove joint employer status and win a union contract, it wouldn’t automatically apply to other franchises — but the win could help workers organizing at other locations.

That these two proposals are similar is not a coincidence, Bentley said. “They’re trying to make it easier for big corporations to avoid liability by using contractors or franchisers.” The Obama-era guidance has enabled workers to hold franchises accountable for violations in the past.

“It’s part of the systematic dismantling of gains made in the previous administration,” said Koonse. “I feel the [Department of Labor] rule does not hold joint employers accountable in the way Congress intended,” she added, noting that the definition as proposed is so narrow that it may not withstand legal scrutiny.

The push through multiple venues to make it harder for workers to hold joint employers accountable is part of a larger pattern of attacks on labor rights, such as undermining overtime rules, cutting numbers of OSHA inspectors, and cutting billions of dollars in funding from the Black Lung Disability Trust, which supports coal miners living with black lung disease. One of Trump’s earliest cabinet appointments was to name fast-food giant Andrew Puzder secretary of labor — Puzder ended up withdrawing after outcry, but the initial nomination signaled a much more business-friendly approach to worker rights and protections. Working to unwind rulemaking from prior administrations and develop more restrictive interpretations of the law fulfills the president’s deregulation mandate, at a high cost to workers.

Campaigns are often grueling affairs for staffers. There is a glorification of self-sacrifice for the greater good enforced by a hierarchical structure that is not conducive to addressing workers’ demands. Salaried pay often dips below minimum wage if calculated on an hourly basis. The CWG’s unionization efforts aim to tip the scales back toward workers’ rights.

“For many years campaign workers were treated as little more than volunteers who could be given a mere stipend rather than professionals who deserve fair pay and fair conditions,” said Ihaab Syed, CWG secretary.

The Campaign Workers Guild was publicly launched in February by current and former campaign workers, and currently has 28 bargaining units in 18 states across the country.

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North Carolina is a particularly notable victory because it is both a swing state and a “right to work state,” which means workers do not have to pay dues for the benefits they receive from being in a unionized workplace.

Unionization rates in those states are significantly lower than they are elsewhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, non-unionized workers make 20 percent less than unionized workers on a weekly basis.

CWG’s first victory was the unionization of the Randy Bryce’s congressional campaign, the union ironworker running to take Speaker Paul Ryan’s House seat in Wisconsin. It has also unionized the state coordinated campaigns in Ohio and Minnesota.

Many of the staffers in North Carolina were familiar with CWG’s organizers from their time on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and reached out to begin their unionization effort. “CWG was very open about the process of a union campaign and broke it down into a timeline,” said Grayson Barnette, a field organizer and a member of CWG’s bargaining team in North Carolina.

All CWG bargaining units have been recognized voluntarily without the need for a formal union election. For Break the Majority, it was only six weeks between the initial unionization meeting and voluntary recognition.

However, most private-sector unions are recognized through the National Labor Relations Board elections process, which makes it more difficult, because those campaigns are often met with significant opposition by employers. Nearly 90 percent of employers force workers to attend anti-union events, while more than half effectively threaten plant closings. 35 percent of election requests are withdrawn prior to a vote even being held.

Overall, unfair labor practices are alleged in 46 percent of unionizing campaigns, with the NLRB agreeing that at least one charge had merit in half of those cases.

The unionizing effort in the Tarheel State was sparked by a resolution passed by the North Carolina Democratic Party’s executive council that unionization would be encouraged in the 2020 campaign. In other campaigns, though, there has been some pushback.

“They say ‘This is impossible. This is how campaigns work. I paid my dues in these miserable conditions,’” said Syed.

Contracts won by CWG have resulted in several positive changes. In addition to compensation increases, workers have won sick, bereavement, and parental leave. There are 60 members in the North Carolina unit of CWG who will receive pay and health care through the end of November, as well as a 30-minute paid break for lunch during the campaign.

One of the most significant victories for CWG has been addressing sexual harassment. “As we’ve been seeing in the news, sexual harassment is rampant in our society overall and political workplaces and campaigns are no exception,” said Syed.

CWG contracts have led to training on what can be done to prevent harassment and the rights of workers. Furthermore, there has been an implementation of a process whereby complaints can be submitted and investigated.

“Just a process in place is huge for campaigns that aren’t equipped to handle it otherwise,” said Syed.

A long-term issue CWG seeks to work on is how to make health care available year-round and find ways to continue to make campaign work sustainable. For now, though, the change in conditions is worth savoring.

“It’s more for us about having a voice. It was about bringing our concerns to the table and being heard out,” said Barnette.

However, the pay and benefits we receive do not reflect our vital role within the institution, so we voted to unionize in December 2016. The federal government certified the union election months ago, but the university has refused to come to the bargaining table. We went on strike in April to protest this denial to recognize our democratically chosen union, and we’re willing to do so again.

The inability of Columbia workers to collectively bargain for better wages and benefits has many concrete consequences. They are felt day by day, such as when one of us is sitting at the dentist, reading through treatment plans and weighing the costs.

Fillings? Have to happen. Everything else can certainly wait, right? New glasses might be in order, but aren’t covered by insurance, either.

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During the academic year, around half of our pay goes toward rent, and our summer stipends force us to stretch around $3,300 (before taxes) across three months. Stipends vary across departments, but they aren’t all guaranteed and can depend on individual advisers’ access to grant money. So we do what many of our colleagues do: Take care of only the most urgent concerns while putting everything else off.

For some, that even means putting plans to have a family on hold, since Columbia’s $2,000 annual child care subsidy, while a saving grace for those who receive it, still barely puts a dent in covering the cost of child care in New York City.

The university has not only refused to recognize our union, but also engaged in a long battle to prevent us from holding a vote in the first place. In fact, the Columbia administration argued in front of the National Labor Relations Board that graduate workers are not workers at all, and then actively propagandized in an attempt to dissuade workers from voting to unionize.

The administration lost both battles, with the NLRB affirming graduate workers’ right to unionize in August of 2016, and 72 percent of the graduate worker body subsequently voting in favor of a union in December.

It would require a minuscule fraction of Columbia’s budget to cover dental and vision insurance for its graduate workers or to increase the child care subsidy, which makes its refusal to recognize our union worse. What amounts to pocket change for a university with an endowment of $10.9 billion would mean a drastic increase in the quality of life for graduate workers.

Harvard, Brown, Cornell, NYU, The New School, Tufts, Brandeis, American University, and Georgetown have all recognized their graduate worker unions and are at various stages of negotiations or already have agreed to a contract, while Columbia remains steadfast in its attempts to deny us our rights. The contract negotiated at NYU awarded grad workers some of the benefits we deserve, such as dental coverage, and increased their stipends.

As sociologists, we know that rising inequality in the United States is making it increasingly difficult for those without privileged backgrounds to succeed. We also know that unions reduce inequality, increase wages, and improve conditions for workers of color. The issues at stake are not just material, however. For example, union organizing is helping to provide much-needed support for graduate workers experiencing sexual harassment.

Columbia’s administration is led by a Board of Trustees whose members include investment bankers and venture capitalists, high-powered lawyers, real estate developers, and a pharmaceutical executive. When they persistently — and illegally — ignore multiple NLRB decisions and refuse to bargain with our graduate worker union, it is clear that they are engaging in the same attack on workers that has led to the concentration of income and power for those at the top of the economic hierarchy.

These attacks make apparent the hypocrisy and ease with which powerful institutions depicting themselves as defenders of democracy align with some of the Trump administration’s worst policies, so as not to forgo a drop of their control and capital.

And as sociologists, we know, too, that power concedes nothing without a demand. Since the administration has made it clear that it does not intend to respect the NLRB’s rulings, and since recent Trump appointees to our nation’s courts are unlikely to side with workers, we have few options left other than withholding our labor – which, of course, Columbia claims is not labor at all. We hope a prolonged strike will tip the cold economic calculations surely underlying the administration and the Board of Trustees’ decisions.

Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and a co-chair of the prestigious National Academies of Sciences’ committee on the future of voting, has said that “Nothing is more essential to a functioning democracy than the trust citizens have in casting their ballots.” However, he and the rest of administration have not extended that principle to recognize the results of our legal, democratic vote in favor of unionization.

So our union is ready to demonstrate not only that our labor is critical to the functioning of the university, but that as workers, we have power in numbers – and the power to strike. Because when democracy is under attack, what do we do? Stand up and fight back.

While these victories are welcome for staffers who were previously working without the protections of union membership, their collective bargaining units and contracts usually omit the lowest, yet largest, rung of the newsroom labor ladder: freelancers. And without organizing freelancers, journalists’ unions rest atop a shaky hierarchy of labor, which is bound to be upset.

Finding data on the number of freelancers is tricky. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which are the best available — show that there are currently about 37,995 reporters and correspondents employed as staffers by newspapers, publishers, broadcasters, and other outlets, while about 83,968 people are self-employed writers and authors, a category which includes those who write for digital news organizations and blogs. The bureau predicts that the number of employed reporters and correspondents will decrease by 10 percent through 2026, while the ranks of freelance writers and authors will grow by 8 percent during the same period. David Hill, a freelance journalist and vice president of the National Writers Union, is confident that “every single media outlet” uses freelance writers.

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“I don’t think anyone has good numbers on this,” says Hill. “Some might quibble with how we decide to define ‘journalist’ here, because there is a lot of freelance writing that exists in the grey area between what was maybe once referred to as blogging and what we may think of as journalism, especially online.”

Coming together to bargain collectively is key for freelancers because of the many professional difficulties they face, beginning with low pay. According to the BLS, the median pay for writers and authors was $61,820 in 2017, but that figure masks business expenses and benefits, such as health care, which freelancers must independently purchase.

Without regular work as columnists or contributing writers, freelancers must jump from assignment to assignment, pitching story ideas, negotiating rates, completing articles, and then hoping for full and timely payment. And when publications go under or change their business models, freelancers are left without any recourse but to hunt for the next opportunity.

Describing the issues faced by members of the National Writers Union, Hill says, “Their issues are the same as every freelance journalist’s: low rates, waiting for many months to get paid with no guarantee of when or if the check will arrive, and a general feeling that rates are too low to make a full-time living anymore without supplementing your freelance income somehow.”

Typically, unions focus on organizing a “collective bargaining unit,” which is a well-defined body of workers who are not considered freelancers, contractors, or temps. This is often seen by labor organizers as a strategic necessity for classifying workers as proper employees whose right to unionize is legally protected. Under current law, independent contractors don’t have collective bargaining rights; regulators have even used antitrust law to go after groups of contractors who attempt to organize.

Additionally, unions usually operate on dues collected from their members’ paychecks by their employers, in a fashion similar to payroll taxes. Freelancers typically do not have any deductions made from their payments, making dues collection a more onerous process.

A branch of the United Automobile Workers, the National Writers Union is one of the only labor unions open to freelance journalists. Without a well-defined collective bargaining unit nor access to the traditional means of collecting dues, it has been creative in its approach to organizing. Members are free to join or leave as they please and must opt into paying dues. The union counts about 850 journalists among its dues-paying members.

The union is not able to collectively bargain for these writers, since they don’t work for any one outlet, but members are attracted to its other services and benefits, such as providing individual or group legal representation in specific disputes, lobbying lawmakers for legislation protecting freelancers, and negotiating voluntary agreements with publications. Most recently, the National Writers Union reached an agreement with the socialist magazine Jacobin, stipulating minimum rates, kill fees, payment deadlines, and more.

The Freelancers Union operates in some similar ways, although it is technically a non-profit organization rather than a certified union. Executive Director Caitlin Pearce estimates that 93,750 of the organization’s members are writers or editors, including journalists. Membership is voluntary and free.

“Freelancers Union offers its members a voice on advocacy issues impacting the independent workforce, resources, education, and events helping freelancers grow their network and navigate the ups and downs of freelancing, and benefits including health, dental, life, disability, liability, and retirement,” says Pearce. The organization is funded by state and private grants, donations, and paid services — the last of which has led critics to accuse the Freelancers Union of being more interested in hawking insurance products than organizing workers.

Together with two dozen other workers’ organizations, the Freelancers Union and National Writers Union were able to lobby New York City to pass the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, which went into effect in 2017. The law includes provisions requiring written contracts for freelance work, mandating a 30-day deadline for payment, and awarding freelancers double damages in court. It is touted as providing the strongest protections for freelancers anywhere in the nation.

While the Freelance Isn’t Free Act is certainly the highest profile recent victory, there are ways beyond legislation that freelancers can exert their collective power. Earlier this month, 115 members of Study Hall, an online community of freelance journalists, announced that they would cease working with The Outline after the website suddenly fired a quarter of its staffers, providing an example of freelancers self-organizing independently from any union in the industry. Similar efforts with freelancers in other sectors, such as food couriers working for Uber, have succeeded where traditional unions have failed or feared to venture.

“The nuts and bolts of how to do this is very tricky, and nobody has figured out a perfect model yet,” says Hill of organizing freelance journalists. “Labor law works against us and forces us to be creative. Whatever union freelancers end up forming will be very non-traditional.”

The trouble is, there isn’t much actual information beyond the signage—and the information being shared isn’t backed by research.

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D.C.’s overall minimum wage is $12.50 per hour, and will increase to $15 by 2020. By law, employers have to ensure that tipped workers make that amount as well—by combining the base wage of $3.33 with their tips—and if workers’ wages are too low, employers are required to supplement them. In practice, employers often fail to do this. Research by the Economic Policy Institute found that recent Department of Labor investigations of close to 9,000 restaurants resulted in workers receiving nearly $5.5 million in back pay because of tipped wage violations.

Low wages have left many tipped workers struggling to make ends meet. Roughly 1 in 4 D.C. bartenders, servers, manicurists and pedicurists, and shampooers made $11.71 per hour or less in 2017*—well below a living wage in the district. D.C.’s tipped workers are also nearly twice as likely to live in poverty compared to the city’s overall workforce.

The concerns with the tipped wage go beyond just money—the power dynamics of the tipping system allow discrimination and inequality to flourish. One study showed that black servers receive tips that average 15 percent to 25 percent less than white servers, and in D.C., tipped female workers are twice as likely as tipped male workers to live in poverty. It also paves the way for sexual harassment: 1 in 7 sexual harassment charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are in the accommodation and food service industry.

In contrast, research shows that the eight states without a tipped minimum wage have higher average earnings and lower poverty rates among tipped workers, without hurting their employment rates. Specifically, in equal treatment states, tipped workers’ median earnings are 14 percent higher and the growth of restaurants and restaurant employment is more robust compared with states that use the federal minimum tipped wage of $2.13 per hour. Research also suggests that abolishing the tipped minimum wage may be particularly advantageous for women, as the average wage gap for women tipped workers in equal treatment states is one-third smaller than the wage gap for women tipped workers in states that maintain the federal tipped minimum wage.

While the evidence is clear on the positive impacts for D.C.’s lower-wage tipped workers, the District’s high-end restaurant and bar scene, with its higher-paid workforce, has been the center of attention during much of the debate, with figures ranging from Mayor Muriel Bowser to Chef José Andrés voicing concerns that the unified minimum wage will lead to higher prices and lower pay.

It’s tough to envision that high-end establishments’ well-off clientele, wine-and-dine lobbyists, and company-credit-card-wielding business travelers will suddenly become highly price-sensitive if the cost of a meal rises slightly. And any increase would likely be relatively small: Labor costs only account for an average of 30 percent of restaurant operating costs, and businesses absorb higher minimum wages through reductions in costly turnover and increases in productivity. It’s also unlikely diners would compensate for higher prices by offering a smaller gratuity: data on tipping show that tipping behavior in equal treatment states is virtually indistinguishable from tipping behavior in states that have different minimum wages for tipped workers.

What’s more, this focus on D.C.’s high-end establishments misses the bigger picture. Not only is the district home to many restaurant workers who struggle to make ends meet—even after tips—but one-fifth of D.C.’s tipped workers aren’t in the restaurant industry at all. Many valets and manicurists, for example, don’t earn 20 percent on top of an expensive meal, but the Department of Labor allows their employers to pay them D.C.’s $3.33 per hour base wage as long as they “customarily and regularly” receive $30 or more per month in tips.

Initiative 77—which 70 percent of voters support—would reduce poverty and increase economic security among tipped workers in the district, as well as better protect them against discrimination, wage theft, and sexual harassment. The effects would be particularly powerful for women and people of color. Chipping in a little more for craft cocktails and small plates at happy hour seems like a small price to pay.

* Note: At the time these data were collected, the minimum wage in Washington, D.C. was $11.50 per hour.

No, this isn’t the recent West Virginia teachers strike — it’s a 1921 coal miners strike, which escalated into what would come to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. The two sides battled for five days, until more than 2,000 additional U.S. Army troops entered the fray to crush the workers rebellion. Up to 100 laborers were killed, hundreds more were injured, and more than 1,000 were arrested. While the uprising seems like an episode relegated to the largely forgotten labor wars of past, the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) may make such conflicts part of the future for unions once again.

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The plaintiffs in Janus—backed by right-wing foundations and corporate lobbying groups—seek to deprive AFSCME of its ability to collect agency fees, which are essentially reduced union dues from non-union members. By setting a federal precedent, the case could cleave the public sector workforce across the country into two groups: those paying for collective bargaining and those not paying for it but still receiving benefits such as higher wages—often referred to as “free riders.” The fear is that, without a way to prevent free riding, collective bargaining will be overburdened and underfunded, and already embattled unions—which have fallen from representing 33 percent of workers in 1954 to just 11 percent today—will be finished. Or, as Charles Wowkanech, president of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO, put it, “[S]uch a broad-based attack on workers would leave no group unscathed.”

But this prognosis ignores that unions both existed and made great strides before they were officially recognized or even legal organizations. And it ignores what organized labor has accomplished in the roughly half of U.S. states that already prohibit mandatory agency fees—including West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky, where massive teacher demonstrations have led to statewide victories.

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Prior to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), employers had no obligation to recognize unions, and they even included anti-union clauses in employment contracts. This prevented millions of workers from joining unions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yet it was during this time that unions were their most militant. Without legal recourse, workers relied on direct action—such as boycotts, pickets, and strikes—to win their demands. These tactics put workers face to face with their opposition: the bosses and their lackeys; mercenaries; local law enforcement; and, as in the 1921 West Virginia coal miners’ strike, even the U.S. military. And with so many union sympathizers barred from official memberships, labor actions often included both unionized and non-unionized workers, if not their entire communities.

The results could be explosive. Besides the Battle of Blair Mountain, which remains the largest labor rebellion in U.S. history, the Haymarket affair of 1886 involved a bombing and Chicago police opening fire on a rally in support of striking workers; the so-called “Colorado Labor Wars” led to the deaths of both strikers and strikebreakers from 1903 to 1904; and two people were killed by the police and militia during the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Despite the overwhelming violence used against them in this period, unions were still able to win significant victories, such as the eight-hour workday (albeit only in particular locations and industries). By 1934—the year before the National Labor Relations Act granted unions state recognition—the tide seemed to be turning in favor of workers: Sailors and longshoremen unionized all West Coast ports in the United States, and 400,000 textile workers from New England to the South launched what was then the largest strike in U.S. history.

According to Peter Cole, professor of history at Western Illinois University, these strikes—and the “working class radicalism” they represented—were curtailed by the NLRA. Cole says the Act was designed to contain “radical left-wing forces by forcing employers to accept modest, if still quite beneficial, reforms,” like giving workers the right to unionize and strike.

In other words, the federal government used the NLRA to enforce a peaceful compromise between labor and business, rather than risk the escalation of all-out class war. In exchange for the right to unionize, strike, and collectively bargain, workers agreed to union elections and arbitration of unfair labor practice charges through the newly created National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). That is, rather than rank-and-file union members fighting for their demands through direct action, labor struggles were decided by lawyers and bureaucrats behind the closed doors of NLRB regional offices. (Although the NLRA does not cover public sector employees, many of these same rights were later extended to them through various state and federal measures, such as President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988, with the substitution of federal and state boards for the NLRB.)

Janus threatens to dismantle this regime of compromise and deliver unions into the pre-NLRA era, shifting labor struggles from the courts back onto the streets. And we don’t have to look as far back as the 1920s for examples of how this could play out. Unions in West Virginia lost the ability to collect agency fees in 2017, yet rather than collapsing, labor’s struggle in the state has hit a new zenith. Without the backing of their union or much faith in their elected representatives, 20,000 rank-and-file West Virginia teachers organized and led their recent nine-day strike, winning raises for public sector workers statewide and inspiring successful teachers strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky—all states where unions are barred from collecting agency fees. In an homage to the past—and perhaps a harbinger of the future—some of the teachers in West Virginia chose to wear red bandanas, just like the striking coal miners of 1921.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and are not representative of the Center for American Progress’ policy positions on any issue. 

For 20 miles, under a robin’s egg sky, teachers and public education supporters lined sidewalks and curbsides, parking lots and strip malls. They formed small seas of red shirts, hats, and beach umbrellas, and waved signs proclaiming “#RedForEd” and “Arizona education deserves more.” A school social worker walked along the road, wearing a full-body sign: “Best practice is 1 social worker to 250 students. I serve 942.”

One woman held a sign that read: “Arizona exports cotton, copper, and teachers,” a reference to the fact that teachers are leaving the state in droves.

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I traveled the entire route with my sons—20 miles to the east side where cheering teachers stood backdropped by the Rincon Mountains, and then 20 miles to downtown where teachers waved signs from overpasses and chanted through bullhorns. My sons—who, at ages 3 and 6, believe that teachers are superheroes—drank milkshakes in the backseat, watching the red unfold intersection after intersection, and cheered them on.

But Wednesday’s demonstration was just the beginning. On Thursday morning, tens of thousands of teachers across Arizona walked out of their classrooms. More than 110 school districts closed, affecting up to 840,000 students.

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Resentment among Arizona educators has been simmering for years, caused by repeated budget cuts, the misuse of sales tax monies intended for public education (as confirmed by an Arizona Supreme Court ruling in 2010), and related lengthy lawsuits between the state and its public schools seeking back payments. During the Recession, the Arizona state legislature cut $1.5 million from public schools, more than any other state, leaving Arizona schools more than $1 billion short of 2008 funding.

Arizona currently ranks 49th in the country for high school teacher pay and 50th for elementary school teacher pay. When adjusted for inflation, teacher wages have declined more than 10 percent since 2001. Per-student spending in Arizona amounts to $7,205, compared with the national average of $11,392. There are currently 3,400 classrooms in Arizona without trained or certified teachers, and the state has over 2,000 teacher vacancies.

Inspired by grassroots teachers movements in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma, Arizona teachers are using their collective power to demand change. A newly mobilized coalition, Arizona Educators United, has partnered with the state’s teachers union, the Arizona Education Association, to organize and coordinate demands. Teachers have held organizing meetings and “walk-ins” over the past few weeks, gathering together before school hours in protest of low pay for teachers and support staff—many of whom rely on second or third jobs just to get by—as well as insufficient classroom materials and per-student spending well below the national average.

Teachers in Arizona are reporting leaky roofs, 25-year-old textbooks, rats in classrooms, and schools unable to afford toilet paper. That’s not right. We have to stand with them as they organize for more resources. #RedForEd

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) April 22, 2018

Last week, when the Arizona Education Association held a statewide vote, 78 percent of the 57,000 Arizona educators who voted supported walking out. The teachers’ demands include a 20 percent pay increase; a permanent salary structure with annual raises; education funding restored to 2008 levels; competitive pay for support staff; and “no new tax cuts until per-pupil funding reaches the national average.”

In response to the demands, Governor Doug Ducey (R) offered teachers a 20 percent pay raise by 2020. But teachers are wary of Ducey’s plan, saying he hasn’t released details about how it would be paid for. The plan also doesn’t include raising wages for support staff, whom teachers say play critical roles in serving students.

While 74 percent of registered Arizona voters say the state spends too little on K-12 education, not everyone supports the teacher walkout. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas threatened consequences for teachers participating in the action. “A walkout is a nice term for it. It is a strike, plain and simple,” Douglas said in an interview this week, referring to a 1971 opinion from the Arizona attorney general, which said that public employees could not legally strike. Douglas suggested that teachers could be investigated, referred to the Board of Education, or even stripped of their teaching certificate.

State Rep. Kelly Townsend (R) made headlines after she responded to an email from a constituent who asked that she and other legislators find a way to fund education and avoid a walkout. Townsend, who serves as Majority Whip, responded:

I’m sure we can take it from the correctional officers pay who make minimum wage in some cases, release some of the prison population, take it from the developmentally disabled and close adult homes from the disabled, freeze Alzheimer’s research, take it from Veteran’s services, dental services for the underserved, desperately needed road funds, the university funding, and put another freeze on Kids Care health insurance.

She has since become increasingly verbal in opposition to the walkout, even threatening a class action lawsuit.

But amid the backlash, many community groups have mobilized to support the teachers, including nonprofit organizations, youth centers, and churches offering free or low-cost camps and daycares for working parents in need of childcare during the walkout. And on Thursday, more than 50,000 teachers and supporters converged at the state capital in Phoenix.

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Yesterday morning in Tucson, I found hundreds of teachers, parents, and students demonstrating peacefully and passionately in front of the courthouse. Parents lifted toddlers onto their shoulders to wave at passing cars. A family spread out a picnic on a blanket in the shade. When a semi-truck drove by, honking in support, the crowd erupted into cheers. Some demonstrators planned to later join the masses in Phoenix; I overheard a lighthearted joke about the streams of teachers in their station wagons, obeying the speed limit all the way to the rally.

High school teacher Jeff Mann brought his two children to the Tucson rally. “It’s a chance for our kids to see what civic engagement is and how you fight for what matters—have your feet match your mouth,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that these are the steps we have to take, but we haven’t been given many choices. My hope is that I’m back teaching tomorrow, that the legislature comes to their senses, and that education is funded.”

A group of students from Tucson’s IDEA School stood together on a corner with their teacher, chanting and waving homemade signs. One 10-year-old in the group told me, “We’re not a public school, but we’re helping support all the public schools, because we want all the teachers to have more money and the kids to have more materials.”

On the same corner, seventh-grader Salome Arrieta and her mother Victoria stood together, holding #RedForEd signs. Salome said that despite her middle school receiving the prestigious A+ School of Excellence Award from the Arizona Education Foundation, there’s still a glaring lack of resources. “Whenever I go to my school and try to use the bathroom, there’s no toilet paper, there’s no soap, and our textbooks are like 15 years old,” she said.

Salome’s mother, Victoria, an elementary school special education teacher, said she walked out to support the kids. “Everyone needs a raise. Not just the teachers. When you’re a special education teacher, the support staff is an integral part of your job, and they need to be paid more, too.”

Across the street, second-grade teacher Sonya Rosales told me, “My kids are sitting on carpet from like 1976. Any activities that we do, whether it’s for Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, it comes out of our own pockets. We get 10 reams of paper per quarter, and once it’s out, that’s it.” She said learning materials are so outdated that she’s forced to make her own worksheets. “I make everything myself on my computer. I go to the Common Core standards, and every worksheet I make myself. I work two extra hours a day, unpaid.”

A teacher named Roberta who preferred not to give her last name said she’s been teaching for 35 years and spent more than $1,000 of her own money on materials for her classroom last year. “I do the very best that I can,” she said, “If it means me spending money out of my pocket, I do that because I’m a teacher and I care about my students, and I care about seeing my students walk across that stage.”

As she spoke, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m doing this for my students. I’m a Republican, but it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat. It’s about our students.”

To the leaders, skeptics, and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn: Welcome to the revolution. It is a powerful and peaceful one because it is of, by, and for the young people of this country. Since this movement began some people have asked me, do you think any change is going to come from this? Look around, we are the change. Our voices are powerful, and our votes matter. We hereby promise to fix the broken system we’ve been forced into and to create a better world for the generations to come. Don’t worry, we’ve got this.

Kasky’s statement was, of course, about guns. Seventeen of his classmates and teachers had been taken from him, and from their families, friends, and their own futures, five weeks earlier by a gunman who used an automatic weapon to kill 17 people in 6 minutes and 20 seconds. But they were also taken by a system—a political system wherein a vast majority of Americans, and particularly young Americans, support policies to clamp down on gun deaths but politicians, bought off by the NRA, do not listen.

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Young people are at a tipping point. They are frustrated by a system whose cracks were etched into place by preceding generations, but have only fully metastasized for theirs. They experience suffocating levels of student debt alongside declining wages and income equality while watching companies monopolize entire industries, and sometimes even nationwide elections. Representation—actual representation—feels more like theory than reality.

People are, finally, beginning to take notice of young people’s activism to fix that system. However, many are mistaking the new wave of media coverage dedicated to young people’s political activism for young people’s newfound political activism. It’s not that young people were ever politically dormant; it’s just that their activism has existed in places where older generations aren’t used to looking: on college campuses, like the Know Your IX movement and tuition equity campaigns for undocumented students, and inside activist movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #ByeAnita and #Occupy.

And now, increasingly, unions.

For the first time in decades, union membership is on the rise among young people. Historically, younger people have not been unionized, and their rates of union membership trail older adults by wide margins. But, just like the gun laws that are already being amended, that too is beginning to change.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in 2017, there were 262,000 new union members in the United States. Seventy-five percent of this increase came from young people (which EPI considers those aged 34 and under, but for the purposes of this article, broadly refers to the older subset of Generation Z and most Millennials, ages 16 to 35). Young people also hold the most favorable attitudes towards labor of any generation, and their support for political parties skews heavily towards those that support pro-worker policies (like standing against “right-to-work” laws), including the Democrats and, increasingly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

But for some reason, unlike previous generations, young people’s workplace organizing isn’t seen as an integral part of their organizing, writ large. While plenty of people are documenting the rise of young people’s union membership and plenty more describing young people’s leadership in activist spaces, what’s missing is the idea that these two phenomena are actually one: Young people are turning to outside outlets that allow them to exercise their politics in the wake of a political system that, by and large, does not.

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In a piece for Jacobin Magazine, Micah Uetricht sketches out the ebbing relationship between democracy inside and outside the workplace, and, relatedly, the relationship between economic and political democracy. To Uetricht—a sociology graduate student who focuses on labor, member of the DSA, and associate editor at Jacobin—activism is activism, whether it takes place at the workplace or outside of it. “It’s a relatively recent development that we think of what happens at work as some kind of separate sphere of our lives in general,” he says. He adds: “Young people understand that and don’t like living in a dictatorship in the place where they spend 8 or 10 hours of their day.”

Uetricht experienced something similar at his first job out of college, when he worked as a cashier at an airport making minimum wage. He says he and his co-workers were treated as less than human on a daily basis, and they eventually decided to unionize, granting him a newfound sense of agency: “I had never felt as powerless as I did when I was a cashier making minimum wage. Conversely, I had never felt as powerful as I did when I joined with my co-workers, confronted my boss, and won.”

That fact—that unionization campaigns often center around not simply better wages or benefits, but a sense that your voice will be heard—often goes misunderstood by those who are not connected to the labor movement. But for Uetricht, who went on to become a union organizer, the idea of worker voice, even if it’s to voice complaints about stagnant pay or subpar health benefits, is not simply one benefit of unions; it is the benefit. “The thing that you learn immediately as an organizer,” he tells me, “is that even in low-wage workplaces, the number one issue people have with their workplaces is not their low wages but a lack of respect.”

A lack of respect is also primarily driving young people’s frustration with the political system. When Kasky, the 17-year-old Parkland survivor, spoke at the March for Our Lives, he said “our voices are powerful, and our votes matter.” He said that in contrast to the status quo, in which young people’s voices are not seen as powerful, nor their votes. And, looking at recent history, it’s not hard to understand why that might be Kasky’s understanding of the status quo. Young people’s votes were spurned by an electoral college that favors rural, sparse areas, disproportionately discounting the large numbers of young people who lived in cities in 2016. Their ideas of stronger restrictions on guns, reigning in big banks, and support for the rights of LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, and people of varying religious views have been continually overpowered by older generations and special interests.

Seen through that lens, it’s no wonder young people have found working inside the U.S. political system ineffective, and, quite frankly, not worth their time. Instead, young people have redirected their activism toward different kinds of outlets, where their efforts may actually bring about tangible results. Outlets like unions.

What does this mean for the labor movement? A workplace is, at the most fundamental level, a microcosm of the political system. There are those who hold power, the bosses, and those who don’t, the workers. Over time, the balance of power ebbs and flows; when unions are strong, the balance shifts more heavily to the workers, and when unions are weak, the balance favors the bosses. When unions are powerful, workers have something akin to a voice in the direction of their workplace. And when unions are at their most powerful, workers have something akin to a voice in the direction of their country, a counterbalance to special interest groups like ALEC or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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Julia Ackerly is working to build unions up to that level. Now 27, she’s worked on Democratic campaigns for most of her adult life: She worked as a field organizer and regional field director for the Bernie Sanders campaign in the 2016 primary elections, and then for Larry Krasner’s bid to be Philadelphia’s District Attorney (DA), a race that drew national attention for how Krasner sought to use the DA position to enact a progressive vision for the criminal justice system. Ackerly has always worked on campaigns that worked closely with organized labor. But she had never been in a union herself.

That changed when the Campaign Workers’ Guild (CWG) formed. The idea behind the CWG is pretty simple: It hopes to unionize campaign staffers, who experience harsh working conditions where poor pay and benefits and long hours run rampant, justified by managers as sacrifices for an important cause. CWG is currently organizing campaigns one-by-one: Its first successful organizing campaign was that of Randy Bryce, the candidate hoping to win House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Congressional seat, and it’s organized 10 more campaigns since, for a total of 11 as of March 2018. But it ultimately hopes to organize entire parties’ campaign staffs at once in the future.

Ackerly, who helps organize campaign staffs and is now a dues-paying member of CWG herself, says that having a collective ability to be heard and respected in the workplace is a “very motivating factor towards unionization campaigns.” She singles out creating protocol and reporting structures for sexual harassment and discrimination as one of the biggest motivations staff members have for organizing. Which, tellingly, is also the one of the biggest activist movements dominating living room and water cooler conversations across the country as the #MeToo movement continues.

Young people dominate the junior staffs on campaigns and have also made up a significant portion of the driving force behind recently organized campaign staffs, according to Ackerly. Jake Johnston, the Vice President of Organizing for the Non-Profit Professional Employees Union (NPEU) (which includes some members of the TalkPoverty staff), has similarly seen young people take the lead at the organizations that have recently organized under NPEU, and at NPEU itself.

For Johnston, collective action has implicit ties to activism, writ large. “The reality is that our political system really has cut out a significant part of this country. I think there’s clearly a rejection of the status quo, and yet there are so few avenues to try and change that,” he says. “Whether it’s joining the DSA, joining a union, joining an advocacy campaign, or joining an electoral campaign, people are trying to change that. Everyone needs an outlet for activism.”

That’s true for young people in particular. For far too long, they’ve been on the receiving end of an economic and political system that does not work for them, while being denied the opportunity to change that system.

Whether it’s students like Cameron Kasky shouting about the NRA into a microphone that reverberates from the Capitol to the White House, young people like Julia Ackerly organizing an industry that has never been unionized before, or activists like Micah Uetricht organizing his own workplace, young people are refusing to take part in a political system that has consistently and methodically drowned out their voice. Instead, they’ve taken their voices elsewhere, to outlets like unions and activist movements where—finally—their voices are being heard.

Every teacher has at least one class that they need to watch at all times, and mine was fifth period English in 2011. They were the class that made substitutes cry, and that once knocked down the temporary wall separating my room from the one next door. One day, after I passed out pencils, I tried to put the extras down on the desk behind me without turning around. I missed and hit the edge of the desk, driving the freshly-sharpened tips straight into my own palm.

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I laughed when it happened. There was a hunk of graphite driven a quarter inch into my hand and a jagged flap of skin that I would later cut off with eyebrow scissors, and there was absolutely nothing I could do for the next sixty minutes. I stared straight into the bloody mess and let loose a cackle while the look on my students’ faces shifted from shock to horror. Then I put my thumb over the wound to stop the bleeding, and kept teaching.

In between that class period and the next one, I had four minutes to run to the bathroom. I stared at the sign above the sink warning me not to drink the water, and wondered if getting toxic water in an open cut was dangerous. That’s when I began to wonder what, exactly, I was doing with my life.

I hadn’t planned to be a teacher. But when I went home for Thanksgiving my senior year of college and told my grandmother my master plan—to write freelance for a local arts website while I volunteered with advocacy groups—it knocked the wind out of her. Then, for the first and only time in my life, she gave me clear instructions on what she expected me to do next. I needed to go to graduate school, she said. I needed to get a masters’ degree, and a stable job doing something that could actually support me.

Teaching was the most stable career I could think of. I got that masters’ degree, and a job outside of Washington, D.C. My professors had warned me that the first year would be hard, but what they hadn’t told me was that my brand new career was essentially a pressure cooker.

During my first faculty meeting, I found out that my new colleagues had not received a raise in three years. The administration gave the union a choice when the recession hit: either lay off teachers, or give up their raises for the foreseeable future. The union voted for the latter, not knowing that their wages would be frozen for the better part of a decade. Our school—one of the only low-income schools in an otherwise affluent district—was failing, and if we didn’t raise test scores people were going to start losing their jobs anyway. But the new principal had some big ideas, she told us, and we were going to do this together.

Her first idea was ending all out-of-class discipline. Research shows that students of color and students with disabilities are punished too often and too harshly, so we were going to stop as much punishment as we could. Any behavioral issues were to be addressed in the classroom, no matter how severe.

The next was to use lunch periods as extra tutoring time. Administrators called names in the cafeteria of any student with outstanding work or low test scores, and sent them back up to their teachers. Our lunches were at the same time, so we ate with students while they worked through assignments.

Then the school implemented a universal breakfast program. Most of our students already depended on school lunches, so offering breakfast doubled their chances to get something to eat. We didn’t have enough cafeteria staff to cover that, so breakfast happened in our classrooms too—our first-period students came in a half-hour earlier and ate in the rooms.

The new initiatives kept piling on: We added after-school tutoring, academic mentoring, and open office hours. Every single one of these ideas was good—every time we offered a new support, a few kids did a little bit better. But every single one of these ideas was also the sole responsibility of the teachers. By the end of the year I had students in my classroom for 12 hours a day, with no time to plan the next day’s lessons or grade papers until the last kid went home.

In theory, that type of schedule is exactly what a union is supposed to prevent. Our contract mandated breaks, planning periods, and additional staff in the classrooms to support students with disabilities. But our union was doing its best to keep its members employed in the face of a budget crunch—dealing with contract violations was a luxury. So our list of responsibilities kept growing until teachers buckled under the pressure.

The teacher across the hall from me didn’t even last through October. He quit in the middle of the week, and the rest of us took turns covering his schedule for two months while the district tried to find a replacement. That spring, the state was granted a waiver that exempted us from the punishments that we could have faced if the school didn’t make enough progress. Even so, a third of us didn’t come back the following year. Some, like me, switched careers. Others transferred schools, and some retired. The school administrators had the summer to scramble and fill all those open jobs—still for the same pay, because the salary freeze was entering its fourth year.

Seven years later, many teachers still haven’t gotten relief. Districts across the country are still struggling to recover from the housing crisis that wiped out their tax base. On top of this, federal spending for K-12 education has been cut by almost 20 percent since 2011, and states have struggled to make up the difference. Seven states—Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—poured gas on the fire by enacting income tax cuts post-recession rather than restoring education funding. With the exception of Michigan, teacher salaries in these states are among the lowest in the nation.

Now, for the first time in a generation, schools are being closed with a series of wildcat strikes. Because of course they are. Teaching has always been difficult, but years of funding cuts are making it impossible. After pleading with lawmakers for support, striking is the only thing left that makes sense. That’s why West Virginia closed down every school in the state for 12 days, and it’s why Oklahoma might follow suit.

Given how normalized mass protests have become under the Trump administration, it’s worth remembering that this is genuinely radical: striking by public employees is forbidden by statute in 26 states. During the West Virginia strike, the state’s Attorney General made it clear that he believed the work stoppage was “unlawful,” though it seems superintendents have chosen not to punish participants.

That’s because superintendents know something lawmakers still haven’t grasped: Teachers make their living by getting people to pay attention. So when they say they can’t do their jobs anymore without more money and more support, and state legislators respond by jamming their fingers in their ears and passing yet another tax cut, teachers will do what it takes to be heard.

I discussed what happened and what this policy is all about with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama.

Rebecca Vallas: Heidi, what is this policy that the Trump administration is advancing and what are they hiding?

Heidi Shierholz: In December, the Trump administration released a proposed rule to try to make it legal for employers to take workers’ tips. There were regulations on the books from 2011—it was a long-standing practice at DOL that tips cannot be taken by employers. But the Trump administration is trying to rescind those regulations, and it’s really bad for workers.

But now the Department of Labor is bending over backwards to try to make it seem like it’s not terrible for workers. For instance, they talk about how theoretically employers who take tips could share some of those tips with the back of the house workers or other untipped workers. But there is nothing in this rule that says they are required to do so. So, what’s going to happen is employers will end up just pocketing a lot of those tips themselves.

The controversy that broke is that the DOL claimed that they could not do a quantitative analysis of how much in wages and tips would be transferred from workers to employers as a result of this rule. But what was revealed today is that that was all untrue. They actually did the analysis, and it showed billions of dollars being transferred from workers to employers. They actually took it to the Secretary of Labor who said something to the effect of, “Okay, we can’t publish something that shows this because this will make us look terrible. Take this back to the drawing board and see if you can bring me back smaller numbers.” They did that, but they never got it down as small as was comfortable for Secretary Acosta, so they just got approval from the White House to remove the analysis entirely. So this proposal was released without any quantitative economic analysis about the impact the proposed rule would have on workers, even though they are legally required to quantify the economic impact to the extent possible.

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RV: So not only did they try to figure out a methodology to get a number they were comfortable with—in terms of how much employers were going to end up pocketing in the way of workers’ tips and wages—but they decided because they couldn’t get the number down they were just going to pretend they’d never done it at all? Is that what we’ve learned?

HS: Yes, that’s what we’ve learned. They said in their proposal that they were—quote—“unable to quantify how customers would respond to the proposed regulatory change” and that the department “currently lacks the data to quantify possible reallocation of tips.” So they just said in a bunch of different ways, “We can’t do this.” But we know they did do it. The numbers looked bad for them, so they buried it. This is real malpractice. The public deserves to have those numbers. They make the department look like it is not living up to its mission of actually protecting workers—in fact, it’s just going to transfer a whole bunch of money from workers to employers and they wanted to hide that fact.

RV: When they went to crunch the numbers on this policy it looks like they found something similar to what you guys at the Economic Policy Institute had already been telling people for a while. You did some analysis finding that if this rule goes into effect, workers will lose billions in lost tips and wages.

HS: So we don’t know exactly what the DOL estimate was. We know it’s in the billions but no one knows the actual number. I worked at the Department of Labor. I worked on many, many analyses like this. I have full confidence that the analysis that we did at EPI likely used the same data that DOL used for their analysis. And when we did it we came up with an estimate that $5.8 billion would be shifted from workers to employers as a result of the rule and that nearly 80% of that, or $4.6 billion, would be taken from the pockets for women who work for tips, and that’s primarily because women are much more likely to work in tipped jobs.

RV: It’s not just tipped workers who are actually at risk of being hurt here, correct?

HS: One of the interesting things that’s the backdrop to this is that the DOL has been trying to sell this rule as something that will make restaurants more egalitarian, because now we’ll have this sharing between better-paid tipped workers and lower-paid back of the house workers like dishwashers and cooks. But it is very unlikely that they will do that. The rule does not require them to do it. They would be no more likely to share tips with back of the house workers than they would be to make any other choice about what to do with that shiny new revenue stream, which is what being able to confiscate tips would mean to them. They could increase executive pay. They could make capital improvements to their establishment. They could just line their own pockets. Under basic economic logic, those back of the house workers are not going to get more pay.

RV: This is hardly the first time that the Trump administration has been caught either lying or hiding evidence about the policies they’re looking to advance or the Obama-era policies they’re looking to roll back. You mentioned that because there are very specific rules governing how rule-making is supposed to happen in this country—rules that it appears that the Trump administration has clearly broken here by withholding and lying about evidence in their possession about this rule during a [public] comment period—can you explain a little bit about how that works?

HS: In this particular case, they are simply required as part of the rule-making process to quantify to the extent possible the economic impact so that the public has that information in hand in order to comment on the purposed rule.

The rule-making process in general is really basic in some sense: The agency puts out a proposed rule, anyone can comment on it. The public, advocates, business groups, anyone has the right to tell that agency what they think about their rule. The agency is actually required to read [the comments] and to take them into account as they’re crafting their final rule. So it’s absolutely crucial the public is given all the information so it can understand the impact of the rule and comment on it.

DOL claimed it wasn’t possible for them to do this quantification. But we produced an estimate in less than two weeks. It wasn’t rocket science. And now we know that they did do an analysis, buried it, and then claimed that they couldn’t do it.

Given all that has happened, they need to withdraw this rule, re-do the economic analysis, and let the public comment with all the information at hand.

This interview was conducted for Off-Kilter and aired as part of a complete episode on February 2. It was edited for length and clarity.

When he was a candidate, Trump pledged to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party.” He claimed that each of his policy decisions would hinge on whether it creates “more jobs and better wages for Americans” and promised to side with workers instead of “special interests” and the “financial elite.” But throughout his first year, he sided with corporations and the wealthy instead.

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In 2017, Trump used his executive authority to pare down worker safety protections, make it harder for workers to receive the pay they earned, and hamstring their ability to collectively bargain for decent wages and benefits. His administration took action to weaken mine inspection rules, undermine the quality and pay of apprenticeship programs, and delay and roll back rules that will prevent construction and agricultural workers from being exposed to toxic chemicals.

Under Trump’s watch, the Department of Labor has signaled that it will use its regulatory power to roll back overtime coverage and protections for millions of workers and allow companies to legally confiscate employees’ tips. It withdrew guidance that held corporations accountable for wage theft. And the National Labor Relations Board is trying to slow the process for workers to request a union election.

Already, Trump’s agency appointees overturned a 2015 precedent that protected workers’ rights to bargain with companies that influence their workplaces. These so-called “joint-employer” protections are increasingly important since large corporations are more often relying on temporary staffing agencies, labor subcontractors, and franchises to supply their labor force. Now corporate interests are pushing even more extreme legislation: A bill to roll back protections for minimum wage, overtime, and child labor violations by joint employers has already passed the House. A president who cares about the rights of workers would fight hard against such a proposal.

Trump’s war on workers extends to the public sector as well. The Trump administration has backed union opponents that want to eliminate fair-share fees in the public sector, attempting to overturn a 40-year-old Supreme Court precedent and weaken public sector unions. And last night, he promised to make it easier for political appointees to fire federal public sector employees.

Just like last year’s joint address to Congress, the president promised last night to create jobs with a new infrastructure program. However, his fiscal year 2018 budget shows that this “new plan” is a shell game, since it would be paid for in part by cutting $138 billion from the Highway Trust Fund, which currently funds highway and public transportation projects across the United States, and eliminating existing job-creating infrastructure programs like TIGER and New Starts grants.

And while Trump touted his infrastructure plan, he didn’t guarantee that the jobs created will actually support a family. While the federal government has upheld Davis-Bacon prevailing wage standards for nearly 90 years to ensure that construction jobs funded through federal spending provide decent wages, many on the right are pressuring the administration to leave out these protections. Trump failed to mention them last night. If the president really wants to help workers, he should guarantee that all jobs created by the infrastructure package include the prevailing wage protections and pay at least $15 per hour, and expand contracting job quality protections broadly to ensure that all government spending creates well-paying jobs for workers.

The president also boasted about the performance of the U.S. stock market and the benefits of his tax cut bill. Yet neither today’s market performance nor the tax bill will make substantial, long-term improvements in the lives of everyday Americans. The run-up in stock market value predominantly benefits the rich, as 80 percent of U.S. stock value is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Meanwhile, despite Trump’s false claim that “we are finally seeing rising wages,” the average wage of production and non-supervisory workers rose by only four cents in 2017 when adjusted for inflation—a growth rate of just 0.17 percent, below the last four years of wage growth.  And the tax bill—which Trump previously justified by saying working- and middle-class taxpayers would “receive the biggest benefit – it won’t even be close”—in fact gives the most to the richest taxpayers. This year, taxpayers making over $1 million will bring home a tax cut 100 times larger than the average tax cut for families in the bottom 80 percent by income. And in 2027, once individual tax cuts expire, nearly 92 million families making less than $200,000 annually will be paying more in taxes.

Viewers also heard Trump boast about one-time bonuses from companies seeking favor with the administration. However, the fact that some of these companies laid off thousands of workers as they were announcing the bonuses failed to make it to the presidential teleprompter.

Trump’s claims during last night’s speech can’t hide the truth: Month after month, the Trump administration took action to benefit wealthy donors instead of working people. From denying overtime protections for millions of Americans, to raising health insurance premiums, to weakening safety protections for workers, he has continually failed to stand up for those he claims to support. His pledge to lead a new “worker’s party” was a bait-and-switch, and he should be held accountable for this failure.

In a series of tweets, Seema Verma, the Trump official who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, argued that work requirements will “improve health outcomes” and cause improvement in “mental and general health, and well-being.” The administration’s guidance allowing states to deny people Medicaid makes similar claims.

#Claimants who move off benefits and (re)-enter work generally experience improvements in income, socio-economic status, mental and general health, and well-being.” #TransformingMedicaid https://t.co/TgmgCk6Bb2

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 11, 2018

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The administration points to two research reviews it says support its case for allowing state officials to deny Medicaid to low-income people not meeting state work requirements. In fact, neither of the studies say that imposing work requirements as a condition of receiving health care will improve health. Moreover, both of the studies rely heavily on research from countries with universal health coverage—that is, countries that provide health care and coverage to all of their people regardless of employment status and without imposing work requirements. In these countries, people are empowered to make work and education choices without being threatened with the loss of health insurance if the state doesn’t like their choices.

In short, the reviews don’t tell us anything about the impact of Medicaid work requirements on health. What they actually do tell us is the that relationship between health and employment is much more complicated than the administration suggests.

The most rigorous and recent of the two reviews found insufficient or inconsistent evidence that employment was beneficial for general health, except for depression. The authors also cautioned that selection effects—the fact that more healthy people are more likely to work—may have caused an “overestimation” of their findings that work was beneficial for depression. In theory, one could conduct a demonstration study that denied employment to some people while providing it to others in order to isolate the causal effects of employment on health. But, as the authors note, this would be unethical.

The older and less rigorous of the two reviews, a 2006 evidence review commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Department of Work and Pensions, concludes that “the balance of the evidence” shows that work is “generally good for health and well-being, for most people.” But it goes on to detail what it calls “major provisos.” These include that “health effects depend on the nature and quality of work” and its “social context,” and that “jobs should be safe and accommodating.” The more rigorous review makes a similar point and notes research concluding that “low-quality jobs can lead to reduced health, while high-quality jobs can lead to improved health.”

These findings about how low-quality jobs can negatively impact health are particularly relevant for Medicaid beneficiaries. As researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation have documented, most non-elderly Medicaid enrollees (who do not also receive SSI disability benefits) are employed, but typically in poorly compensated jobs that do not offer health insurance. Among non-elderly Medicaid enrollees who are not employed, physical and mental health impairments are common.

If we truly care about able bodied, working age adults on Medicaid, then we have a responsibility to help them rise out of poverty. https://t.co/0cXxSyAmQF

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) January 17, 2018

If the state officials and the administration want to improve health and well-being, they should offer real help with finding well-paying, safe, and accommodating work to all Medicaid enrollees, but on a voluntary basis. This help should include child care assistance and other work supports. But allowing state officials to coerce people to take any job—or work even more—under threat of losing their health insurance takes away people’s agency and will cause far more harm than good.

Finally, if the administration is serious about improving the health of working-class people, then it should stop rolling back important labor standards and worker protections. And it should get serious about improving job quality, including by raising the minimum wage as President Trump made a campaign promise to do.

Bottom line: All the happy Orwellian Twitter talk from Trump officials won’t change the fact that their policy will hurt millions more than it will help.

Agriculture is a notoriously dangerous industry for women: 80 percent of women farmworkers report having experienced some form of sexual violence on the job. The CIW is addressing this crisis through its Fair Food Program (FFP), which puts market pressure on tomato growers to enforce a strict code of conduct in their fields. The code, which was developed by workers themselves, sets various human rights standards, one of which is zero tolerance for sexual assault. (It mandates immediate firing for unwanted “physical touching.”) If violations of the code go unaddressed, the result is severe economic consequences for the grower.

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To enforce the code, which covers more than 90 percent of Florida’s $600 million tomato industry, the CIW has established legally-binding agreements with 14 of the world’s largest retail food corporations that purchase tomatoes—including WalMart, Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and all major fast-food companies with the exception of Wendy’s. These corporations promise to cut off purchases from farms that are out of compliance with the code. Now, tomato growers know if they don’t crack down on abuses in their fields, they can’t sell their produce to these major buyers. These agreements didn’t come easily: CIW educated consumers about the plight of farmworkers via hunger strikes, marches, and direct action. It took intense public pressure to get most of the corporate retailers to sign on.

Nely Rodriguez, a CIW staff member originally from Mexico, says it’s the economic consequences that make all the difference. “We’ve shown how the power of the market can be used to improve the conditions in the field,” she says. Under the FFP, workers are able to monitor their own workplaces for violations of the code, and can lodge complaints via a trilingual 24-hour hotline operated by an independent monitoring organization, which does annual announced and unannounced audits on participating farms and investigates all complaints. (During those audits, they speak to at least 50 percent of the workforce, including workers, crew leaders, and supervisors.) In contrast to other workplace hotlines that might be contracted out, or answered by a machine or a corporate HR representative, CIW’s always has an expert on call who understands the power dynamics of the tomato industry. Headed by a retired New York State Supreme Court Justice, the monitoring organization also audits the payroll, looking for minimum wage violations and enforcing the penny-per-pound of tomato surcharge that buyers pay to administer the program.

Since the Fair Food Program started, “Everything about working in the fields as a woman has changed,” Rodriguez says. Every new hire immediately receives a tri-lingual pamphlet and watches a CIW-produced video about the code, and then participates in worker-to-worker education sessions in the fields. “You literally can see people speaking up about issues—even in front of the bosses—during these sessions,” she says. “You see the lack of fear—it’s a completely different culture,” Rodriguez says. Prior to the FFP, it was “commonplace” to either suffer sexual violence or to know a victim, “and there was never any consequence if it came to light, or the consequence was the woman losing work.”

In recent years, 23 supervisors have been disciplined and nine fired as a result of complaints. When a violation requires corrective action, growers don’t hesitate because they know the hit they will take to their bottom line if they fail to comply. Rodriguez says the number of allegations has slowed, and the nature of the allegations has also changed, as employees and supervisors come to understand that zero tolerance truly means zero tolerance. “Instead of a boss who watches women when they are sleeping, now it might be some vulgar language on the bus,” she says.

CIW’s model is now being replicated in other states, and reaching workers in other industries—most recently dairy workers in Vermont. The MacArthur Foundation recently wrote that it offers the “potential to transform workplace environments across the global supply chain.” And the New York Times called it “the best workplace-monitoring system” in the United States. The CIW has exported its model to farms in seven states and three crops along the East Coast, and it will soon be piloted on citrus and watermelon farms in Texas. It is also informed historic reforms in the Bangladesh garment industry, and is being studied by janitorial and construction workers in Minnesota.

Could this approach work in the television and film industry? The key question is, what parts of the supply chain are equivalent to the tomato buyers? If a CIW-like movement led by the women of Hollywood inked legally binding agreements with 150 major corporations, declaring that they would not buy advertising on network shows that were in violation of a code offering recourse to victims of harassment or assault—that could be a start. What about agreements with the platforms that stream content, like Netflix, mandating that they will only carry films or shows produced by companies that are in compliance with that same code? One could even look at potential agreements with cable providers and national movie theatre chains. All of these agreements would together send a signal that sexual misconduct will not be tolerated in the television and video supply chain, and that companies that do not comply with the agreed-upon code will experience severe economic consequences.

“All Hollywood has to do is ask who has the power, and then bring public pressure to get those agreements signed,” says Rodriguez. “If a solution came from the most unexpected place to eliminate sexual violence in the workplace, they can do it too. And then they could help make sure the model reaches more workers in industries across the country who don’t have the platform and resources that they have.”

This article was produced in partnership with The Nation.

Inmates are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that workers are paid at least the federal minimum wage. That makes it completely legal for states to exploit inmates for free or cheap labor. More than half of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated, and the vast majority only make a few cents per hour.

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Most inmates work in their own prison facilities, in jobs such as maintenance or food service. These jobs pay an average of just 86 cents an hour, and are primarily designed to keep the prison running at a low cost. Others may be employed in so-called “correctional industries,” where inmates work for the Department of Corrections to produce goods that are sold to government entities and nonprofit organizations. The highest median wages for these jobs top out at less than $2 an hour, and they’ve dropped over time—an incarcerated worker is paid less today than they were in 2001. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, most inmates working in prison facilities aren’t paid at all.

It is impossible to discuss prison labor without acknowledging the deep ties the criminal justice system has to the legacy of slavery in the United States. Targeted mass incarceration policies, racial bias, and other structural disadvantages have led to an overrepresentation of people of color—particularly African Americans—in prisons and jails. As activist and author Shaka Senghor notes in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th, “The 13^th amendment says, ‘no involuntary servitude except for those who have been duly convicted of a crime.’ So once you’ve been convicted of a crime, you are in essence a slave of the state.”

Though we run the risk of stating the obvious, there is a clear solution available: treating prisoners like people rather than chattel. That means paying prisoners a minimum wage for their work, and making sure the employment options in prison are designed to help people transition into their communities once they are released.

Apprenticeship programs, which provide paid training that combines on-the-job learning with classroom instruction, may be the perfect solution. These programs can equip inmates with a marketable skill, a wage, and a credential that holds value in the labor market and can help them get a job upon release. A recent Center for American Progress report suggests using paid apprenticeships during incarceration to help inmates and their families support themselves after incarceration and reduce recidivism.

However, these programs frequently suffer the same pitfall as other prison work programs—they pay breathtakingly low wages. Since 2008, the median starting wage has been 7 cents an hour and the median exit wage 35 cents an hour—hardly enough to put inmates on the road to financial stability.

If these programs paid decent wages, they could increase economic stability of inmates, effectively easing the path to re-entry. They would allow inmates to pay off debts from their interactions with the justice system and reduce recidivism. They’re not a panacea, but well-paid apprenticeships can help put returning citizens on the road toward a good job and a secure future.

The criminal justice system has historically relied on a system of punishment and exploitation instead of rehabilitation, but we can change this going forward. Treating incarcerated people like human beings by paying them for their work is a good place to start.

Last year, when the union tried to sponsor the city’s Cooper River Bridge Run, its check was returned.

“We got a letter saying that what we do as a union doesn’t fit with their other sponsors”—which included Boeing, says Evans.

The union then tried to sponsor the Knights of Columbus 5K race on Thanksgiving.

“They sent the check back after consulting with their board,” says Evans. “They didn’t want to give us any ability to brand ourselves as being part of the community.”

Organizers of both events declined to comment on why the union’s sponsorship was rejected.

This Wednesday, the workers at the plant will vote on whether to unionize.

***

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner plant in North Charleston is the crown jewel of South Carolina’s economic rebirth. Union opponents point to a state economy that is currently growing at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. However, that growth hasn’t meant equal opportunity for all.

South Carolina has the 11th highest poverty rate in the U.S., with 16.7 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. Despite the opening of new manufacturing plants, the state’s poverty rate is actually higher than when the recession began in 2008.

One contributing factor is a lack of unions throughout the state, which depresses wages. In fact,  research shows that unions increase workers’ wages and benefits, reduce inequality and poverty, and boost economic mobility across generations.

At the North Charleston plant, for example, Evans says that workers in some job classifications are paid half as much as their unionized counterparts in Washington State, and that they often have second or third jobs to help make ends meet.  As a result, the IAM has been trying to organize since the plant first opened in 2011.

“Every community event, you see them everywhere sponsoring stuff,” says Ken Riley, President of the South Carolina AFL-CIO. “They have been sponsoring Little League ballgames. If there is a picnic in the city, they are there.”

Boeing has countered with billboards and TV ads painting the IAM as an out-of-state organization that previously tried to prevent the plant from opening in order to keep jobs in Washington State. To support its case, Boeing has focused heavily on an NLRB complaint that the union filed in 2011 and later withdrew.  In it, the IAM alleged that the company shifted work to South Carolina in order to retaliate against Washington State-based union workers who went on strike in 2009.

“Boeing has always believed in South Carolina, but the IAM hasn’t” reads WeAreBoeingSC.com, an anti-union website built by the corporation.  “Now they want our teammates and our community to forget about how they tried to shut us down”.

Boeing workers have been forced to attend anti-union seminars. Management even set up two tables at the plant—one with diapers and children’s clothing, another with groceries—each representing the $800 dollars in union dues that workers would pay annually.

This isn’t the first time Boeing has taken on an IAM organizing effort at the plant. In 2015, the company organized town halls with workers and promised to address their complaints. Many workers believed Boeing’s assurances, and support for the union waned. Fearing a loss, the IAM called off the election.

But the union says this time around is different—some of the goodwill workers felt towards the company has worn off.

“We are getting much more support than last time because of [Boeing’s] broken promises,” says Evans.

Workers say that the plant has reneged on promises to be more responsive to feedback, hold regular meetings with workers to hear criticism, increase wages, and make scheduling more consistent.

“I have honestly never worked anywhere, union or not, that flip-flops so much as Boeing has lately,” says Sean Cribb, a production worker at the plant. “They can’t decide overtime rules, [or] work schedules.  They are moving management around so much that none of them can learn the work package so they can better assist their team.”

Although Boeing declined to comment on any of these specific allegations—and it’s worth noting that U.S. labor protections are so weak that none of this anti-union activity is illegal—spokesperson Elizabeth Merida said in a statement, “[Boeing] believe[s] our team is best served by having a direct relationship with the company and working as one team as we continue to build on the great successes that have already been achieved here.”

***

Union officials say a win on February 15 could be a watershed moment, opening the door for organizing in the south, beginning with the BMW plant in Spartanburg or the soon-to-open Volvo plant in Berkeley County.

“This would be the breakthrough of the century if they would win,” says Riley.

That’s because corporations and their political allies routinely argue—with great success—that unions in the north are the main reason why so many corporations are heading south. South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate of any state in the nation, with only 2.1 percent of its workers organized.  Former Governor Nikki Haley was explicit about her desire to keep unions out.

“You’ve heard me say many times I wear heels. It’s not for a fashion statement. It’s because we’re kicking them every day, and we’ll continue to kick them,” she said.

But Evans and other organizers say a win in North Charleston would be a huge step towards ending that anti-union legacy, finally giving workers in South Carolina a voice in addressing wages and increasing inequality.

“This is such a tough environment. There is really a lack of any structure that tells people that they can do this,” says Evans.  “When they see workers at Boeing get a first contract and its decent, I think a lot more people in the south will want to reach out.”

Nearly a decade later, fast food workers and the Fight for $15 are a central focus of the mainstream labor movement. And, given IWW’s ability to unionize workers who once seemed out of reach, many labor organizers now look to them as an incubator of new organizing strategies.

Now IWW faces one of the biggest challenges in its history: convincing the broader labor movement to embrace the approximately 400,000 Americans employed as prison labor across the U.S.

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This spring, the IWW and allied community groups organized prison labor strikes of thousands of incarcerated workers in Alabama, Wisconsin, Texas, Mississippi, and Ohio—all demanding the right to form a union. The IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee has called for a nationwide prison strike on September 9th to mark the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising and claims it has the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the U.S.

“It could really shake things up,” IWW organizer Jimi Del Duca told me. “A lot of working class people are afraid to organize because they have a few crumbs to lose. [Many] prisoners have nothing to lose and that gives them courage. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

However, the barriers to organizing prisoners are high. Communication between prisons is difficult, as most prisoners are not allowed access to email. Even within prisons, inmates are limited in their ability to meet face-to-face.  While they are allowed to assemble routinely for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or religious activities, the 1977 Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Labor Prisoners’ Union denied them their first amendment right to assemble if a warden feels a gathering is a threat to prison security. As a result, wardens block most prisoners’ union meetings.

However, Elon University Labor Law Professor Eric Fink says that prisoners may have another option. The right of prisoners to form a union has never been challenged in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union certification case, and Fink believes that prisoners could use the NLRB process to push for the right to meet regularly and form collective bargaining units. He argues that prison workers—employed by private contractors in 37 states—should have the same right to form a union as other workers employed by those contractors. According to Fink, if the IWW were to bring a case before the NLRB, then the Board could declare that prisoners are employees who are eligible to join a union.

“I think the Board is capable of saying there are issues that [incarcerated people] have the right to bargain for—such as hours and wages—as any other worker would have the right to do,” said Fink.

As for prison workers who are employed directly by the state, Fink feels they could organize more easily. Under federal labor law, each individual state has a Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) which governs how labor law is applied in the jurisdiction. Often, the leadership of the PERB is heavily influenced by local labor leadership. So, if a public sector union such as AFSCME were to endorse the right of prisoners to form unions, state-level PERBs might be inclined to extend that right.

However, there is a catch: many public sector unions also represent guards, who may be lukewarm to the idea of prisoners forming unions.

“The problem is that insofar as a number of public sector unions have prison guards as members—and sometimes in large numbers—it has an impact on the ability to have that discussion,” said Bill Fletcher, the former education director of the AFL-CIO.

Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of History in the African American Studies at the University of Michigan, believes that guards should see prisoners’ unions as a win for them, too.

“These are workplaces that are deeply unsafe and barbaric,” said Thompson. She believes that giving workers a collective voice may reduce gang violence, because it will give prisoners a structure through which they can advocate for themselves. Unions would also provide guards and prisoners with the means to push together for a safer prison environment.

Thompson also argues that it is in organized labor’s best interest to help prison workers. Some Republican governors—such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—have used prison labor to replace unionized public employees.

“Prisoners have no power to resist being employed as scab labor,” said Thompson. “Rather than resent the prisoners, the idea would be to support prison labor workers’ right to resist work.”

It remains unclear if the mainstream labor movement will support the prison labor strike movement. Both AFSCME and the AFL-CIO declined to be interviewed, but they have indicated that they view mass incarceration as an employment issue. In April, while touring an apprenticeship program at a prison in Washington State, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, “Mass incarceration has become a big business whose product is low wages and blighted lives, and the time has come for us to do something about it.”

IWW organizer Del Deluca is hopeful that the broader labor movement will support this effort. With more than two million people in prison, he sees potential in this new path of organizing.

“We could change the direction of history,” he said. “We could change the way our world works.”

But their experience will be different this time. Not only is it unlikely that jobs will return quickly, but draconian changes in the state’s UI program have meant that workers can no longer rely on the program to help keep them afloat until their next job. One man shared that his UI benefits represent less than one-fifth of what he used to earn—only about half of what he would have received from the social insurance program during previous periods of unemployment.

He is not alone. A young woman who was laid off from her job at a non-profit in North Carolina’s capitol Raleigh—a city recognized for its relatively strong labor market—is still struggling to find work in her field and has taken part-time jobs since her unemployment insurance ran out. Despite her graduate degree and solid work experience, opportunities to continue in her career or pursue a new one have been stymied by the immediate need to pay for rent and food.

Meanwhile, prospects for workers are only getting worse, as solidly middle-class jobs in North Carolina’s remaining manufacturing counties continue to be lost. And, given how unlikely it is that these lost positions will be replaced by good jobs, these layoffs could spur a ripple effect in the local economy, harming every community business from the suppliers who sell parts to manufacturing plants, to local grocery stores and restaurants that serve the workers these companies once employed. In the past, UI benefits could have given cash-strapped unemployed workers money to spend, stimulating consumer demand that would keep these businesses operating—but North Carolina’s policymakers have crippled the program.

It’s clear that North Carolina’s workers—and its economy—need UI more than ever. However, extreme policy choices have left the state’s UI system unprepared to address the fallout of these layoffs, let alone the next economic downturn.

As a result of years’ worth of tax cuts for businesses, North Carolina’s Unemployment Trust Fund was quickly overwhelmed when unemployment rose during the Great Recession, and the state went into debt to pay the UI benefits it owed. In 2013, rather than restoring the program to solvency, leaders in the General Assembly instead pushed through cuts to North Carolina’s UI program that reduced the number of weeks workers could collect benefits, slashed UI’s weekly benefit amount, and limited job training and workforce development opportunities.

These changes have been devastating to North Carolina’s working families. As a result, North Carolina’s UI system went from being fairly average compared to other states to downright stingy. Today, just 1 in 10 jobless workers in North Carolina receives UI—the lowest level in the nation. And, although nearly a third of jobless workers are out of work for 26 weeks or longer, the state offers just 13 weeks of UI for them to fall back on. This is coupled with steep benefit cuts: The average weekly benefit has dropped to a meager $233—just one-third of what is required to meet the basic needs of a family with one adult and one child in North Carolina.

In the name of helping businesses, North Carolina’s leaders took an extreme approach that will actually hurt its economy: When the next economic downturn arrives, UI payments will be insufficient to ensure that workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own can maintain their spending and thus generate the demand for goods and services produced by local businesses. Even more troubling is the fact that cuts to unemployment insurance—a program designed to sustain the American middle class—come at a time when North Carolina is experiencing the fourth-largest decline in the nation in the share of adults with middle incomes. Cuts to the UI program have likely exacerbated this trend: Many workers are now forced to take jobs for lower pay because they cannot afford to search for higher-quality employment. By tearing down UI—a program intended to ensure that job loss doesn’t push working families off the economic ladder—lawmakers have actually acted to expand the ranks of workers earning low wages.

It would be bad enough if North Carolina had stopped there. But unemployment insurance cuts have been made worse by state policymakers’ eagerness to pursue every punitive measure available to them across other critical programs.

For example, state leaders have implemented a time limit on access to food assistance in counties whose labor markets were deemed too weak to provide jobs to all those who want to work. In addition, they’ve refused to invest state dollars in specific skills training or career pathways that would allow jobless workers to prepare for future jobs and new careers. And they have made too little commitment to helping rural communities—and those struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs—rebuild their economies.

Our state leaders must commit to pushing forward better policies that support jobless workers in North Carolina. However, the UI system is ultimately a state-federal partnership. So key federal reforms are important to ensure all those who are jobless and seeking work in our state have a better chance of staying connected to the labor market.

A first step for the federal reform is to set minimum standards for state systems—including North Carolina’s—that are based on what works to support the economy and connect unemployed workers to jobs. Such minimum standards must include the provision of at least 26 weeks of UI benefits for laid-off workers, and benefit amounts that are sufficient to support jobless workers while they seek a new job. Beyond that, federal investments should place a greater emphasis on re-employment services so that jobless workers can connect with local employers and access skills training they need to advance their careers.

North Carolina’s unemployment insurance cuts surpass nearly all other states’ in their harshness, and have been a disaster for jobless workers and their communities. What state policymakers are likely to discover when the next recession arrives—if not before—is that these cuts will come at enormous cost to our economy as well.

In the past, unemployment was criminalized under the rubric of vagrancy prosecutions and related forms of racially-targeted labor control. Today, such practices have returned in new forms. In several contexts people face jail time if they do not work to the government’s satisfaction. How this happens is explored in “Get To Work or Go To Jail,” a report I recently coauthored with colleagues at the UCLA Labor Center and A New Way of Life Reentry Project. In many ways, these work requirements parallel the more familiar ones in public benefits programs, where people risk losing income support if they do not work enough.

The most straightforward examples come from probation, parole, and other forms of criminal justice supervision that operate outside the confines of prison. As Yale Law School professor Fiona Doherty has been documenting, work requirements are a pervasive feature of these systems. Failure to work can violate the terms of supervision—and create a path back to jail. On any given day, some 9,000 Americans are behind bars for violating probation or parole requirements to have a job.

As with work (or work search) requirements in aid programs such as Unemployment Insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), an essential question is always whether lack of work is voluntary or involuntary. In practice, this is a question of labor standards: Which jobs should someone be allowed to reject? Those that pay below the prevailing wage? Have erratic schedules incompatible with childcare? Subject workers to retaliation for organizing?

The function of enforceable work requirements is to get people to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t, and to set up a system of surveillance to ensure that they do. And this is exactly what happens. For example, a recent study of Texas’s much-touted Noncustodial Parent Choices program found that work requirements enforced by the threat of jail caused employment to increase but wages to decrease. A study of Wisconsin welfare reform found similar downward pressure on earnings.

An even stronger analogy to work requirements in aid programs comes from court-ordered debts, such as child support obligations and criminal justice fines and fees. At the center of the modern debtors’ prison conversation, these debts are deeply linked to labor. The connection arises from the same simple question at the heart of income support programs: Why don’t you have more money? For means-tested benefits, lacking income is why the government gives you money as assistance. For court-ordered debt, lacking income is why you don’t have to give money to the government: the Constitution forbids imprisoning those who simply are unable to pay their debts.  But in both contexts, the suspicion arises that lack of income is “voluntary” if additional earnings could be generated by working more. Notably, that suspicion is thoroughly shaped by racial stereotyping.

Take child support enforcement, for example. State agencies’ collection efforts begin by scrutinizing non-custodial parents’ inability to pay and end by scrutinizing their inability to work.  Most states construe child support obligations as a duty to earn enough to pay.  As a result, a penniless parent can end up behind bars if, as the Supreme Court of California explained, that parent “fails or refuses to seek and accept available employment for which the parent is suited by virtue of education, experience, and physical ability.”  The courts consistently have upheld incarceration for nonwork in the child support context, despite the striking similarities to Jim Crow-era debt peonage practices that the Supreme Court long ago struck down as unconstitutional involuntary servitude. These similarities include shocking disparities of race and class, with African-American fathers ten times more likely than other fathers to be jailed for child support.

Detecting voluntary unemployment is notoriously difficult. The more you distrust those who say they cannot find jobs, the more tempting it is to surveil them. That is one legacy of persistent racial stereotypes concerning labor discipline. This sort of surveillance is a crucial function of employment programs, even when they are bundled with services, which often have dubious value. When participation in employment programs is mandatory, they generally are designed to push people to accept jobs they can already find, or to blame them for not finding any—not to improve their employment prospects in a meaningful way. That framework is explicit in the Obama Administration’s recently proposed child-support regulations, which promote “rapid labor force attachment” and reject “services to promote access to better jobs and careers.” While better than simply locking up noncustodial parents who can’t afford to pay, this “work first” model returns us to the questions of labor standards and diminished bargaining power.

When no jobs are available, the next step is to create a degraded tier of second-class work. Unpaid “workfare” or “work experience” programs have served that function in the years since 1990s welfare reform. Today, we see something similar happening with criminal justice debt. Mandatory “community service” may seem enlightened compared to throwing unemployed people in jail. Similarly, “offering” workfare is arguably better than simply terminating benefits for lack of work, as occurs under SNAP’s harsh “able-bodied adults without dependents” work rules that can cut off assistance even when no work is available.

Thus, a widely touted progressive reform when it comes to court-ordered debts is to offer unpaid community service as an alternative to debtors’ prison. This policy already is in place in Los Angeles, where every year an estimated 100,000 people are ordered to work for free or go to jail. By labeling it “community service,” the authorities attempt to shield this unpaid work from labor and employment protections such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation for job-related injury. A federal judge upheld a similar policy in a recent New York case.

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As with workfare, these forced labor programs are triply unfair. First, they extract valuable work from citizens while stripping them of fair treatment and respect. Second, they perpetuate an unjust definition of voluntary unemployment. The proper test for willingness to work is willingness to work at a minimally decent job, not willingness to work for free without labor protections. Third, by creating a class of unprotected, coerced labor, they undermine the labor market for everyone. Employers have every incentive to substitute this new labor force for ordinary employees, or to extract concessions from workers by threatening to replace them.  New York City did both under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who cut unionized public sector jobs while turning to a massive workfare program to maintain services.

Welfare reform taught antipoverty advocates to take low-wage work and unemployment seriously. Today, we must take that line of thinking one step further to include racialized mass incarceration, not just as a barrier to good jobs but as an enforcer of bad ones.

The widespread usage of the 79 cents figure corresponds to a public dialogue around equal pay that focuses on women who earn salaries much higher than the minimum wage—women who work in offices but are excluded from C-suites. But, while it is true that the gender wage gap is larger among women with more education, women who have an advanced degree will also earn much more over a lifetime than those with less than a high school diploma. And the white, middle- and upper-class women who comprise the bulk of female office workers have radically different work experiences than low-income women.

The latter group of workers, often women of color and recent immigrants, earn very low pay with few opportunities for upward mobility. These disparate experiences among women raise the question of how to create an inclusive equal pay movement that both acknowledges the very real discrimination that professional women experience in the workplace while also ensuring their own advancement isn’t achieved on the backs of other women.

Unfortunately, the common focus on getting women access to high-paid and male-dominated fields—through encouraging women to “lean in”—obscures the fact that, for the many women who earn poverty wages and work without essential labor protections, equal pay won’t come any time soon.

Many of these women workers are people of color employed in care work. Women are over-represented in all sorts of care work, from professional jobs in teaching and nursing, to low-wage positions as nannies and home health aides. Care work—defined as any paid or unpaid role in which a worker cares for another person—can include cooking and cleaning as well as emotional labor like nurturance. A unique feature of this work is that it has historically been performed by family members, but is increasingly part of the labor market as more parents work outside of the home. But its growth in the labor market has been polarized, with large increases in low-wage and high-wage positions, but very little growth in the middle.

This trend has led sociologist Rachel Dwyer to hypothesize that job polarization in the labor market as a whole, characterized by a paucity of good middle-class jobs and growing income inequality, is a result of disparities in care work. This distribution is driven by the entry of more women into the formal workforce—often in care sectors themselves—who increasingly require the care work of others to balance career and family. Unsurprisingly, most of the high-wage job gains in care work have gone to white women, while most of the low-wage gains have accrued to non-white women, especially African-American women and Latinas. This phenomenon has reinforced racial divisions in the labor market and increased inequality among women, as seen in the discrepancies in the gender pay gap by race.

To move closer to gender equality, we must find mechanisms for empowerment of women in the formal workplace. Efforts towards workplace justice for all are already ongoing for many organizations, including those catering largely to moderate- and high-income women, like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). Still, centering issues that affect women of color, undocumented women, and those in low-wage care work jobs—and especially those who fall into all three categories—poses an ongoing challenge. Unlike pay equity for middle-class and high-income women, feminist advocacy that intersects with poverty and immigration policy is more complex, more prone to controversy, and sometimes just less sexy. Positive progress, like the recognition by NOW that immigration justice is a feminist issue in partnership with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, show that mobilizing mainstream women’s groups on a more diverse set of issues is possible.

And yet, a feminist revolution that lifts up all women—especially those who are most disenfranchised—will not trickle down from highly visible professional women alone. Policy actions to fairly value and compensate women’s work outside the office, especially in the domestic sphere, is ongoing in many states and beginning to draw greater attention from policy researchers. Still, while labor organizations are turning a critical lens to care work, popular feminist discourse dominated by educated white women too often obscures the issue.

Acting to increase representation of low-income women and women of color in mainstream feminist circles is also a responsibility shared by all of us. This can take many forms, whether it be avoiding selecting candidates for internships or jobs who are recommended by people in your network, or making a concerted effort to hire underrepresented women to write for your publication or speak at an event.  Even further, all feminist advocates can support common-sense policy reforms to alleviate pay discrimination, like the EEOC proposal to amend employer reporting and the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Collective action is a tall order for a group as large and diverse as working women, so we recommend another simple individual step: when you receive a promotion, a pay raise, or a bonus, share that added wealth with the women who work minding your children at daycare, making your coffee in the morning, and cleaning your home. Generous tips can go a long way towards alleviating the material hardship of low-income women, and a wage increase, even further. For women employed in care work jobs, employer generosity may be the only way to get a raise, even if your state or municipality enacts a higher wage floor. While organizations like the American Association of University Women may have excellent resources on how to negotiate salary for a college-educated woman, similar strategies for low-income women are substantially less feasible, if available at all.

So, when you’re leaning in at work—this Equal Pay Day and every day—don’t forget to also pay it forward.

“Whenever you feel like it’s probably fine to not tip your server, that’s one more bill stacking up because they’re short on money. This is food for the week that our families will go without because you didn’t think it was necessary, even after asking for everything under the sun and receiving it free of charge, mind you. This is one less basic necessity my daughter needs because even TWO more dollars is too much for you.”

These words from a young, Colorado waitress named Taylar Cordova—accompanied by an image of a zero-tip check for a meal totaling $182—set the internet ablaze this week, receiving thousands of likes, shares, and comments on Facebook and sparking impassioned think pieces about the plight of our nation’s 11 million restaurant workers.

And it couldn’t have been timelier. Thanks to the efforts of industry groups like the National Restaurant Association—or “the other NRA,” as I like to call them—which has stymied efforts to raise wages for restaurant workers, today marks the 25th year the federal tipped minimum wage has been frozen at an abysmal $2.13 per hour. And when you’re paid $2.13 per hour by your employer, or even $5.29 as it is in Colorado, you are completely reliant on tips to pay your bills.

Happy anniversary, everybody!

Twenty-five years is a long time to go without paying a significant portion of your workers—servers, bussers, hosts, bartenders—at least the minimum wage, let alone a wage that enables a family to make ends meet. And as a result, servers are twice as likely to need food stamps than the rest of the U.S. workforce, and three times as likely to live in poverty. The restaurant industry now includes 7 of the 10 lowest paying jobs in the country.

And the fact that it’s been 25 years isn’t even the half of it. In fact, it’s only about a quarter of it. Since the creation of the minimum wage almost a century ago, federal law has mandated that tipped workers be paid less than everyone else, a practice rooted in American slavery, when employers didn’t want to pay newly freed slaves a wage. Why? Because of the undue and enduring influence of our friends at the NRA.

The NRA claims to represent small independent businesses, but APRIL FOOLS! It’s actually a front group for multinational corporations like Darden (Olive Garden), DineEquity (Applebee’s/IHOP), and Bloomin’ Brands (Outback Steakhouse). Despite the corporate welfare that these companies manage to secure for themselves, as many as 50 percent of their employees are near the poverty level and must access an array of public assistance programs—at a cost of over $9 million to taxpayers.

And thus, although heart-wrenching and unacceptable, Taylar Cordova’s story is not unique. In my travels and after talking with hundreds of restaurant workers, I’ve met countless women like Taylar—mothers working long hours to put food on the tables of others, all the while uncertain whether they’ll be able to afford food for their own tables later that night.

All Work and No Pay from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

All of these stories contradict the prevailing myth that tipped workers are largely white men working at fine-dining establishments, earning nearly six figures for their efforts. In reality, nearly 70 percent of tipped restaurant workers are women, 30 percent of whom are mothers, working in casual dining establishments like Denny’s, the Olive Garden, or, in Taylar’s case, PF Chang’s. These workers—42 percent of whom are people of color—also experience disproportionate rates of poverty, financial insecurity, and discrimination.

And then there’s the sexual harassment. The restaurant industry is the single largest source of sexual harassment claims in the country. What’s more, workers in states that pay the lowest possible tipped wage of $2.13 per hour experience harassment at twice the rate of their counterparts. Conversely, tipped women workers in states that have eliminated the subminimum wage are less likely to experience sexual harassment. The tipped minimum wage, combined with the practice of tipping, forces women servers to tolerate inappropriate behavior from customers, coworkers and managers in order to survive.

Altogether, this isn’t just about the huge restaurant corporations lining their own pockets. With the lives of over 11 million restaurant workers hanging in the balance, their impact is seismic. Their obstructionist efforts have deep consequences and keep the restaurant industry and our nation at large from moving in a direction that promotes equality across racial, gender, and economic lines.

But after years of hard work, and tireless efforts by workers and their allies, stories like Taylar’s are resonating because a national movement for One Fair Wage is gaining incredible momentum. The seven states that have already eliminated the two-tiered minimum wage system (including California and most of the West Coast) account for over one million tipped workers, and their restaurant industries are flourishing. In fact, California is taking a step further; state legislators announced this week they are moving forward with a plan to increase the minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour. Many other states, including New York, Maine, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, plus Washington D.C., are considering wage increases. I urge them not to leave out women and people of color; tipped workers deserve a raise, too.

From Danny Meyer to Amy Schumer, the plight of employees who earn tips is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. It’s time for our legislators to catch up with the rest of America and establish one fair wage for all workers. We hope that on this special 25th anniversary, we’ll finally give the restaurant industry a gift it deserves: a fair wage that ensures dignity and justice for the tens of thousands of hardworking employees who make the restaurant industry what it is.

SNAP reduces hunger and hardship for millions of Americans. The vast majority of those who receive SNAP are seniors, children, people with disabilities, or are working. For millions of others, many of whom may have lost a job through no fault of their own, SNAP provides an important stepping stone to help them look for work and get back on their feet.

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Despite this, 23 states around the country are beginning to implement a harsh time limit on SNAP that will cut off assistance for over half a million of some of the poorest Americans. Federal law limits these individuals, ages 18 to 49, who are out of work and deemed able-bodied and not caring for children, to just three months of SNAP out of every three years—unless they are working or in a work training program for at least 20 hours per week.

While some claim that this harsh time limit is a “work requirement,” the policy applies regardless of how hard someone is looking for work or whether employment or job training is even available. And the reality is that states have no obligation to help those who are struggling find work or provide a work training slot. Unsurprisingly, most don’t.

The individuals who will be impacted by these cuts are a diverse group that includes not just unemployed workers seeking a job or job training, but also part-time workers who may not be able to find enough work to meet the 20-hour threshold. It also includes people facing significant barriers to work: A study conducted by the Ohio Association of Food Banks found that one-third of those subject to the time limit have disabilities or serious health conditions, 40 percent lack access to reliable private or public transportation, and 13 percent report being caregivers for a parent, relative, or loved one. Many of these individuals also do have children they are trying to support, the children just aren’t living in their homes. Many are also military veterans. Most of those who will be cut off don’t qualify for any other form of assistance, and struggle to get by on an average income of just $2,000 a year.

States that have already implemented such time limits have seen dramatic reductions in the number of people receiving SNAP. But cutting hundreds of thousands of struggling Americans off of nutrition assistance—which averages just $1.41 per person, per meal—won’t make it any easier for them to find work; instead, it will only mean more strain on charitable institutions that are already having difficulty keeping up with rising need. While food banks, soup kitchens, and churches play an enormous role in helping to reduce hunger, they simply cannot do it alone.

Policymakers must take action to preserve access to nutrition assistance.

While it is unlikely that Congress will act in time to stop these individuals from losing SNAP, states can take steps to limit the impact of these cuts. First and foremost, any area of a state with sufficiently high unemployment or a lack of jobs can have the time limit waived. Next, states must carefully screen individuals to ensure that the time limit is not incorrectly applied to exempt individuals, such as chronically homeless people. And finally, states can provide job training services that not only allow individuals to maintain eligibility for SNAP, but can also—if well designed—serve as a pathway to a well-paying job. Even with these steps, there are still a great many vulnerable individuals who will be impacted by these cuts. It’s ultimately up to Congress to get rid of this draconian rule.

The facts are simple: limiting how long people can get help putting food on the table will not mean that they will be able to find more jobs or get more hours. It simply means that they will be hungry.

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Javier’s experience isn’t uncommon. Our civil legal aid attorneys have also represented a crew of cleaners who were locked in a restaurant overnight while they cleaned (and not paid overtime for the additional hours) and construction workers strung along for years with partial weekly payments, among others. We have even had to sue the same employers multiple times on behalf of different workers. And the practice is widespread. A report from Temple University’s Sheller Center found that in any given work week in the Philadelphia area, almost 130,000 workers will be paid less than minimum wage, over 100,000 will experience an overtime violation, and over 80,000 will be forced to work off-the-clock without pay.

Although wage theft is illegal under federal law and under statutes in most states, enforcement is underfunded—sometimes nonexistent. This disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, who are more likely to work in low-regulation and non-union jobs where employers cut corners at their expense. But these workers—who need those wages the most—don’t know where to turn for help when they do not receive a paycheck, fear losing their job if they complain, or simply cannot afford to miss work for the several days that it takes to file a complaint and attend a court hearing. And for immigrant workers like Javier, they are often threatened based on their immigration status when they complain to their boss.

And between the small number of workers willing to complain and low financial penalties, deterrents to wage theft are inadequate to curb the practice. In Pennsylvania, for example, the Wage Payment and Collection Law only mandates a penalty of 25 percent of wages due on top of repaying the wages. Thus, if an employer doesn’t pay six workers and only four come forward with formal complaints in court, the employer comes out ahead—he pays less in fines than he would have had he paid his six workers correctly.

Unfortunately, bills that would help address these issues have languished in the legislature for more than a year despite the support of the vast majority of voters. In the absence of legislative action, we have found that local ordinances are a powerful locus of action, even though they impact fewer workers.

As the workshops of democracy, cities and municipalities also allow us to test new models on a limited scale and to identify what should be replicated on a wider scale. This was a tried and true strategy in the context of paid sick days: after an organized and effective campaign over the last few years, activists managed to pass a paid sick leave ordinance in Philadelphia last year. Similar ordinances have come out of San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Los Angeles, among other cities.

We therefore partnered with labor and community activists to pass a local anti-wage theft ordinance that fit well within the powers of a municipal government. The legislation included three main facets, each of which was integral to the legislation.

First, an administrative enforcement mechanism allows workers to bring complaints against their employers without having to miss work and therefore pay. Making the complaint process easy and the hearing free  is a critical way to expand remedies by making them practically available to more people. Although the federal Department of Labor already offers this kind of service, it does not do so for workers who work at businesses that have less than $500,000 in annual revenue. Some states offer a similar complaint process, but their efficacy varies.

Second, the legislation requires that penalties be raised. The current penalties in Pennsylvania are shamefully low, making wage theft an economically good decision for the unscrupulous employer. By raising penalties, the ordinance should increase compliance by making wage theft a bad economic decision.

Third, the legislation allows the city to go after business licenses, further demonstrating to employers that wage theft is a poor business decision. By allowing the city to revoke or suspend a business license, we can root out the worst actors and prevent them from causing further harm (or cajole them into compliance).

With these principles in mind, we partnered with Councilman Bill Greenlee, who had led and won the seven year fight for paid sick leave, and introduced a strong bill in City Council. Boosted by press coverage of the widespread local wage theft problem, we built a broader network of community leaders and advocates, created supporting materials, wrote legal memos, met with editorial boards, and lined up workers to tell their stories. The bill passed City Council in October and was signed by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter in December. The ordinance will go into effect in July 2016 and will be implemented by our new Mayor, Jim Kenney.

Despite all appearances, legislative change that benefits working families is possible, even when state politics makes it seem impossible. In order to achieve pro-working family change, activists need to alter their frame by working at the local level, rather than deal with the gridlock and lack of action at the federal level and state levels.

After all, as former U.S. Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.”

*Name has been changed.

Minnesota, ranked as the largest slaughterer of turkeys in the nation, has long been an epicenter of the American meatpacking industry. The state is home to 33 major meatpacking plants, and, with just over 12,000 workers in the sector, boasts the highest concentration of jobs in the industry nationwide. But over the past few decades, as plants began to crop up in rural areas and small cities far removed from the influence of urban unions, these jobs have grown less secure. Today, a mere nine plants in the state are organized.

It is clear that the rest stand to benefit from collective bargaining. The industry ranks as one of the most dangerous in the country, recording almost 39,800 nonfatal injuries nationwide—or 7.5 cases per every 100 full-time workers in 2008. Workers can also be exposed to toxic levels of pathogens and chemicals, like ammonia.

Minnesota factories are no exception to these safety hazards. At a plant operated by turkey giant Jennie-O in Melrose—a small city 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis—injuries are not uncommon. In 2006, for example, an employee was crushed to death while cleaning out a machine. Other workers report being harmed by excessive speeds on production lines, says Ahmed Ali, who advocates for employees at the Melrose plant as a Lead Staff Organizer at the Greater Minnesota Worker Center. According to Ali, lines often run at speeds that are double the industry averages, which can lead to repetitive motion injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome. Through a spokesperson, Hormel—Jennie-O’s parent company—says that line speeds at the Melrose plant comply with government standards.

But Omer Hassan, a former worker at the Melrose plant, claims that excessive line speeds led him to develop a musculoskeletal injury that rendered his right hand inoperative. According to Hassan, he still suffers “severe pain” on his right side. Following the injury, he took time off to see a doctor and says he was denied pay for missing work. He was subsequently fired in August 2015, which has jeopardized his ability to provide for himself and his mother. As he told TalkPoverty, “It has been difficult for me and for my mom. I have always had a job and brought home a paycheck. That’s all gone for now.” Hormel did not comment on this specific case, but said that in the event of an injury, employees are given “suitable alternative duties” while they recuperate.

These poor labor conditions extend beyond Melrose. Barbara, whose name has been changed to protect anonymity, is an employee of the Gold’N Plump chicken plant in St. Cloud. She says the production line there is like a “flowing, raging river.” Workers who cannot keep up are asked to sign a warning letter or are even terminated on the spot. According to Barbara, those who request to use the restroom more than three times a month are also asked to sign a warning letter—a practice that would run contrary to state law, which requires an option for a bathroom break every four consecutive hours of work. Through a spokesperson, Gold’N Plump said that the company provides regularly scheduled breaks for workers and recognizes that “each person is unique, which may mean accommodating additional restroom breaks” for some. However, the company did not deny that it issues warning letters for additional bathroom use.

On top of these alleged abuses in the industry, wages are low. According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, in Kandiyohi, Meeker, Renville, and McLeod counties, annual median wages for slaughterers and meatpackers amount to $27,909, which is just above the federal poverty line for a family of four. By contrast, Hormel CEO Jeffrey Ettinger reportedly took home more than $13 million in total compensation in 2014.

Given these conditions, the need for stronger protections for workers is clear. In Watonwan County, workers at the Butterfield Foods chicken slaughter plant are represented by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1161. According to Darin Rehnelt, a representative for the union, UCFW Local 1161 has successfully negotiated grievance procedures to protect workers against unlawful termination, as well as nine paid holidays a year, time-and-a-half after eight hours, and double-time on Sundays. Rehnelt says that collective bargaining has also allowed workers to set up internal structures to increase safety. Union stewards monitor line speeds and labor conditions, and workers can share concerns with a health and safety committee. If laborers are injured, they have recourse to a union-provided attorney who specializes in workers’ compensation law.

The striking contrast between the plants demonstrates some of the immediate benefits of unionization, such as increased wages and benefits. But on a broader level, unions are also key to ensuring economic and social mobility. According to the Center for American Progress, low-income children are more upwardly mobile in areas with higher rates of union membership. And unions also play a central role in combating income inequality; lower rates of unionization are associated with an increased share of income going to the wealthiest Americans.

Our poultry need not be consumed at the cost of workers’ dignity. By building a strong labor movement at the company, state, and federal level, progressives can change a status quo predicated on giving workers a raw deal.

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The U.S. economy continues to improve and the unemployment rate is decreasing, reaching a seven-year low of 5.2 percent in New York City in September, according to the New York State Department of Labor. But many people are still looking for a job or seeking a better one, which can be a stressful and time-consuming process. Lured by advertisements and the promise of work, some turn to an employment agency for help.

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), which I serve as Commissioner, licenses and regulates employment agencies. While we are very vigilant in our protection of job seekers, with such a high demand for services and many people desperately in need of work, there are inevitably those who try to take advantage of vulnerable individuals. This has led to a proliferation of predatory employment agencies that exploit the unemployed or underemployed who are trying their best to provide for their families.

One of these individuals was Rosa. After paying $125 to an employment agency, the agency sent her to a laundromat that they claimed was looking for workers. However, when Rosa went to inquire about the job, the owner of the laundromat said they were not hiring and had never asked for workers. Rosa returned to the employment agency asking for a refund, but was refused one. Their only response to her was that she was “too old” and so the laundromat just didn’t want to hire her.

And Marlon, a man from Queens, New York, paid a $125 advance fee to an employment agency plus a $774 fee for a construction training class. The agency guaranteed Marlon a job. Not only did it fail to come through on that promise, it never even referred him to a potential employer. When Marlon returned to the agency to demand a refund, the office had been abandoned.

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We at DCA have seen too many job seekers respond to ads for employment only to have agencies charge them illegal fees as high as $1,400—for processing their application, background checks, or “required” trainings like Marlon’s. Many of these agencies operate without a license, send people to jobs that don’t exist, or place them in jobs that don’t pay minimum wage.

This is a growing problem among our immigrant and low-income communities, as they are often the main target of these scams. Over the past year, DCA received more than 600 complaints about employment agencies, and as a result initiated more than 225 investigations into both unlicensed and licensed offices. In the past year, DCA has issued more than 400 violations and secured more than $77,000 in restitution for 269 consumers who were charged illegal and predatory fees.

DCA has also increased its education and advocacy work in this industry. Together with New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), DCA recently created a Job Hunter’s Bill of Rights, which is available in eight languages. It outlines what employment agencies can and cannot do. Advocacy groups have been distributing it to employers and job seekers throughout New York City. Some of the rights and responsibilities noted include: an individual’s right to a full refund of any advance fee if an agency doesn’t find that worker a job or if a job offer isn’t accepted; the job seeker’s right to file a complaint regardless of immigration status; and the requirement that employment agencies refer workers only to employers that are hiring.

“Every day, predatory employment agencies take advantage of unemployed low-wage and immigrant workers,” says Manuel Castro, Executive Director of NICE. “That’s why [we have] worked with DCA on this Bill of Rights. With DCA cracking down on bad actors, and a campaign pushing for legislative reform, low-wage job seekers will be better protected when looking for quality jobs.”

We urge New Yorkers to know their rights, including the right to submit a complaint to DCA about employment agencies in New York. For job hunters who choose to use an employment agency, it’s important to check the local laws and know your rights. Here in New York City, get our tips and read the Job Hunter’s Bill of Rights. There are laws and rules that can protect the unemployed and underemployed from these predatory practices. Knowing those rights is the first step.

Author’s note: Read the results from DCA’s investigations of employment agencies.

Sure, the fact that Urban Outfitters and other retailers such as The Gap, J. Crew, Bath & Body Works and Victoria’s Secret are nixing an abusive practice is laudable. In addition to heading off potential legal trouble, their decisions over the past several months demonstrate that companies are listening to the needs of their employees and the questions being raised by customers.

But let’s not let these headlines fool us into thinking that all is well in the retail industry. Despite Urban Outfitters abandoning the practice, many large profitable restaurant and retail chains continue to intentionally deny employees more hours and use scheduling systems that wreak havoc on their ability to take care of their families.

For example, it’s common for employees to find out whether or not they need to work a shift mere hours before they are scheduled to start. In fact, almost half of the service industry employees surveyed in Washington, D.C. reported that they first learned of their work schedules less than one week in advance. Nearly one-third received less than 24 hours’ notice of schedule changes.

And the problem goes beyond not knowing when you’ll work. It’s also about not knowing how much you’ll work. Plenty of companies force their employees to keep their schedules open with the possibility of being scheduled full-time, but then only assign and compensate workers for part-time hours. And being sent home before the end of a scheduled shift is then passed off as a natural part of the job.

These practices add a whole new level of volatility to people’s lives. Not knowing when you’ll work from week to week can make it difficult or men and women to arrange child care, pursue education or training, or hold down a second job to make ends meet. It’s also next to impossible to budget when you don’t know if you’ll be scheduled for 10 hours or 40, or if you’ll be sent home an hour early each day.

Luckily, we’re making strides so that the lives of the people who ring up our purchases and serve our food are less turbulent.

In San Francisco, community leaders, labor advocates and retail employees came together and enacted the first set of comprehensive and meaningful standards that would address this issue. Now, when an employer cancels an on-call shift with less than 24 hours’ notice, they must pay the employee two to four hours. The new rules also mandate that schedules are posted two weeks ahead of time and that the nation’s biggest and most profitable retailers must provide part-time employees with more access to hours before hiring additional part-time workers. Acknowledging that scheduling and hours are just part of the picture, the organizers of this initiative also worked to successfully raise San Francisco’s minimum wage to $15.

This victory has inspired similar efforts in Washington, D.C. and Massachusetts. On the national level, the Schedules That Work Act would ensure that everyone has the right to request a predictable schedule.

And so, as this momentum grows, business owners would be wise to look to their colleagues to see the benefits of consistent scheduling for both their employees’ livelihoods and their business’s productivity.

Take Costco: in addition to offering better rates of pay and benefits than competitors, it guarantees many part-time employees a minimum of 24 hours and provides two weeks of advance notice for scheduling. As a result of these policies, the company boasts one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry.

Small business owners have also adopted stable scheduling. Tony Lucca, the owner of two D.C. restaurants, gives his employees their schedule a month in advance and uses an online scheduling system that gives employees a say in when they work. And Gina Schaefer, the owner of a number of Ace Hardware stores in the District, makes sure shifts are made available to part-time employees first before hiring anyone new.

We know that it is possible for businesses to be productive while allowing their employees to lead stable, meaningful lives. So yes, let’s cheer on the companies who are ending on-call scheduling. But as Black Friday approaches, let’s not forget that the real change will come when all families in our community achieve the strong wages, reliable hours, and sane schedules that they need in order to build a good life.

Many of us, including the pope, might very well disagree on just what makes a family, but we can all agree that the common good of our society is best served when caregivers don’t need to risk their livelihoods in order to provide care for young people. However, policies like paid sick leave—which allows workers to take time off to care for themselves or their families if someone becomes ill or incapacitated—remain out of reach for too many people.

President Obama recently made headlines after signing an executive order requiring federal contractors to grant workers up to seven days of paid sick leave each year. But the fact remains that out of the 22 wealthiest nations in the world, the United States is the only one without any form of guaranteed paid sick leave for workers. As a result, only about 43 percent of workers have reported the ability to take paid leave to care for a sick family member. Nearly a quarter of American workers report losing a job or being threatened with job loss for taking time off to care for a sick child or relative.

While paid family and medical leave impacts all families, it especially impacts women. Six in every 10 mothers are the primary, sole, or co-breadwinner for their family. This includes both single mothers and mothers with an unemployed spouse or partner at home. And about a third of all children in the United States live in a single-parent household; nearly half of them are already living below the poverty line. Forty percent of their parents are working in low-wage jobs—the types of jobs least likely to offer paid sick leave.

Many working families simply cannot afford to take the time they need to care for their children when they get sick. For a family headed by a sole breadwinner who earns the average wage for workers without paid sick leave, it would take just three days of missed work to be driven below the federal poverty line. With over one in five churchgoers estimated to be living in households that earn less than $25,000 a year, people of faith must come to realize that this kind of instability—and injustice—is a reality for many of the people in their congregations.

This desire to care for our children is a human instinct, a family value, and a faith practice. The scriptures appeal repeatedly to God as a nurturing parent who always comes to the aid of their children. Most of us are familiar with the imagery of “God the Father,” and scripture pushes us further. God the Mother speaks through the prophet Isaiah to promise: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” In the Christian New Testament, Jesus remarks at how often he has “desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”

Faith advocates have endorsed more just, family-friendly workplace policies for years. It’s now time for people of faith—whether in the pulpits, in the pews, or in politics—to stand up, speak out, and actively promote paid sick leave as a real family value and faith practice that impacts every working family. In a real “culture of care,” when parents inevitably get that call from the school nurse, they can leave their desk, or register, or assembly line and offer the care their children need. State and federal elected officials and business leaders—especially those claiming to be pro-family and pro-faith—should take the steps necessary to make access to paid leave a reality for all working families.

I am a devout Catholic so I will want to talk about religion. And there are other issues near and dear to me such as immigration and worker’s rights. But since my time with the Pope will be brief, I will focus on one issue—poverty.  Pope Francis is a champion of the poor, and this is a subject I know well. I am among the one million people in New Jersey living in poverty.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a cabin cleaner at Newark Liberty International Airport. I can barely afford to pay the rent for a modest apartment I share with a roommate in Newark, much less buy a ticket to fly on any of the airplanes I clean every day. Meanwhile, airline profits and CEO pay are soaring.

As a Catholic, I believe that “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” I know that we need to fight for just wages. So even after working a night shift of labor-intensive work, with aches and pains in my body, I’ve participated in marches and rallies with my union brothers and sisters. I also testify regularly at public meetings to call on NY/NJ Port Authority officials to follow through on their promise to raise the wage. We are still waiting. In the meantime, airport workers must work two or even three jobs to pay the bills because the $10.10 per hour we earn still leaves us below the federal poverty level for a family of four. And it’s not just airport workers—it’s fast-food workers, retail workers, and home care workers. That’s why the Fight for $15 movement has inspired so many of us to stand and fight together. Because “those who mourn, will be comforted.”

On the train, I am wearing a beautiful traditional dress from Peru, my native country. This dress reminds of me of that bittersweet moment when, tearfully, I said goodbye to my family and friends so that I could come to America and give my five children a better life. I will tell the Pope about this arduous journey and how my faith has carried me through difficult times—times when I went without food so my children could eat. I will tell him that despite hunger pains, faith has nourished my heart and soul. My faith in God gives me the strength to carry on and fight not just for myself, but for all low-wage workers who clock-in and out of work every day but still don’t earn enough to make ends meet. As the Pope said, “the poor shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of money.”

“Poverty in the world is a scandal,” Pope Francis said. “In a world where there is so much wealth, so many resources to feed everyone, it is unfathomable that there are so many hungry children, that there are so many children without an education, so many poor persons. Poverty today is a cry.”

Does the Port Authority hear our cries? Does America?

We encourage you to ask questions of the candidates and join the conversation using #talkpoverty and #familiesvote.

The upcoming Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, California offers prospective leaders of the largest economy in the world a chance to speak to the concerns of the 106 million Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. The looming question facing the working and middle class is this: how do we build a system that works for all of us?

The first Republican debates ran three and a half hours with 17 participants. The moderators failed to ask the kinds of questions that force candidates to say exactly how they will create opportunities for Americans being left behind. Even worse was the reinforcement of false and offensive stereotypes. When Fox News anchor and debate host Martha MacCallum asked—“How do you get Americans who are able to work to take the job instead of a handout?”—she effectively called millions of struggling Americans freeloaders.

We need a debate with powerful solutions, not tired stereotypes.

Yet the next debate will be held at the library dedicated to the President who created or propagated many of the stereotypes that are still used to demonize people who are struggling in our economy. Ronald Reagan is seen by many as a hero—a Dirty Harry who told it like it is and stood up to friend and foe alike. But to many low-income families, he is a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge, who—like the famous miser—exerted his power in a way that has made it harder for people to lift themselves up.

Reaganomics was rooted in the idea that if we build an economy that puts the interests of the wealthy first, then the benefits will trickle down to the rest of society. His formula was one part tax cuts for the well-off, and three parts dismantling labor unions, cutting spending on social programs, and neutering government oversight.

The rigged rules of today’s economy are the logical conclusion of Reagan’s approach to public policy.

“In so many domains, the course was set in the 1980s,” says Luke Shaefer, a University of Michigan professor and co-author of $2.00 A Day, Living on Almost Nothing in America.  “Reagan set the course and the [politicians] who have come afterwards have taken it even further beyond.”

In our continuing series on the presidential debates and poverty, we asked Americans how Reagan’s economic legacy affects them and what they want to hear from the presidential candidates.

‘The King of Rhetoric’ pushes the stereotype of the ‘Welfare Queen’

One of Reagan’s enduring legacies was his deft use of rhetoric to push his ideas. None was more harmful than the label “welfare queen,” a pejorative term he coined that has become synonymous with black single mothers who receive public assistance.

For Gloria Walton, it is a deeply personal slur. She grew up poor in Mississippi with a single black mother who worked all of her life in minimum wage jobs to make ends meet.

“My mom was working and needed public assistance to help make ends meet,” she says. “But Reagan demonized black women with this idea of the welfare queen. It’s offensive.”

Today, Walton is the president and CEO of Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) in Los Angeles, training low-income adults in careers that will help them sustain their families. She says SCOPE combats the effects of Reagan-era policies like deregulation and cuts in federal programs, as well as wage stagnation, which have all devastated low-income communities.

Walton wants to ask all of the presidential candidates: “Economic inequality has widened. In my city, per capita income is $13,243 in South LA and $128,000 in Bel Air. What can you say to the hard-working men and women of South L.A. to justify this historically unprecedented income gap?”

The wealthy few get richer

Since Reagan, the gap between the wealthy few and the rest of us has reached historic proportions. After-tax incomes of the top 1 percent grew almost twice as quickly as they did for middle-class families between 1988 and 2011, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

Reagan’s efforts to weaken unions in order to strengthen corporations helped increase the gap because it reduced bargaining power and the number of well-paying jobs. When he fired striking air traffic controllers during his first term, it was considered an opening salvo on labor and a signal to corporations that they came first. Today, 11 percent of workers belong to unions, compared to 20 percent in 1983. One result has been a rise in temporary workers with few or no benefits. There are almost 3 million temporary workers in the U.S. today, more than double the approximately 1.2 million temporary workers in 1990.

Sonya Spann, 50, is one of those workers. She earns $11 an hour as a billing contractor for an insurance company in Birmingham, Alabama. Spann has no health or retirement benefits, or paid sick or family leave. But this was the best job she could find after the hospital where she worked shut down. Her husband lost his full-time job during the recession and now picks up hours working at a retail store for minimum wage.

“Every time we try to get off our knees and attempt to stand up, we get the rug pulled out from under us,” Sonya says. “What would you do in my situation and what are you going to do to create family-sustaining jobs?”

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Cuts in federal programs

Current efforts by legislators to cut SNAP, require drug testing of recipients of nutrition assistance, or implement other punitive measures that reduce the number of people eligible for government aid, all grow out of the Reagan tradition.

Reagan also eliminated or cut programs that significantly funded city budgets, cementing a pattern of disinvestment in low-income urban communities that continues to limit opportunities today. He also cut funding for public service jobs and job training, gutted federally funded legal services for the poor, and reduced funds for public transit.

Pat Jones, 63, sees the effects of this deprivation on her south LA community. It is a neighborhood wracked by poverty and a lack of jobs, where families struggling to make ends meet on the minimum wage must choose which utility is the most important to pay that month, she says.

“We look at the job market here and a lot of us can’t qualify for jobs or there are no training programs,” she says. “Corporations run everything. Reagan did that.”

Jones asks all presidential candidates: “Everybody has to pay their fair share of taxes, but corporations and the wealthy have a string of exemptions and loopholes. Why can’t they pay their fair share and what are you going to do to increase investment and opportunity in low-income communities?”

Here’s hoping that presidential candidates in both parties start answering the questions that people who are struggling want answers to.

This Labor Day, nearly a quarter of Americans who work in the private sector couldn’t spend time with their families because they don’t have access to paid holiday time. This is just one symptom of an economic system that is out of whack—so much so that people working full-time, or two or even three jobs, can’t make ends meet. While well-connected, handsomely paid CEOs have the flexibility they need to spend time with their families and provide their children with resources well beyond the basics—too many of us are barely getting by (if that) and living to work, rather than working to live full lives.

For nearly 40 years, Americans have been working harder and more productively but aren’t seeing any change in how much they take home at the end of the week. A study from the Economic Policy Institute released this week found that many parents’ paychecks aren’t enough to cover their family’s most basic needs, and that working full-time at the federal minimum wage isn’t enough for a parent with one child to get by anywhere in the country.

Even as the economy has turned around, most Americans have failed to see improvements in their pay, according to a recent study by the National Employment Law Project. This is especially true for those who work in the retail, food service, and home-care industries, which already are among the lowest paying sectors and have seen the greatest declines in take-home pay. All the while, more and more corporations are leaving the people who cook our food and stock our shelves without the right to stand together to demand better wages and working conditions. And, profitable corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart are keeping their employees from working enough hours to pay the bills and making their lives impossible to plan.

Despite our unbalanced economy and the reality of poverty – as well as all of the forces working against the stability families so desperately need – the past few months have demonstrated the enormous potential for change that has arrived.

Take the minimum wage wins in Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, St. Louis and Birmingham; and the wage increases for home-care providers in Massachusetts and fast-food employees in New York. Or look at cities like San Francisco that have enacted measures to ensure that massive retailers provide more hours to the clerks and cooks who work for them so that they can better pay the bills. President Obama has moved to make sure nearly 5 million men and women will soon have access to stronger overtime pay, and federal contractors will have to provide paid sick leave. And recent legal decisions have made it possible for two million home-care providers to receive a minimum wage and overtime pay after relentless organizing by the women who care for our families and want to better care for their own families, too. Finally, the National Labor Relations Board has just ruled that contractors and franchise employees can organize and hold their employers accountable for unfair treatment.

The forces that keep working people living on the brink are beginning to fall apart, and it’s not a mystery as to why: People have been standing together and pressing for change. Still, there is so much work that remains. Coming off of Labor Day, let’s celebrate the progress we’ve made together – and dig in with resolve and determination for the fight ahead.

Despite dramatic gains in educational attainment, wages have failed to grow for those at the bottom (and middle) over the last four decades. At the same time, low income household incomes have become increasingly dependent on wages. The figure below shows the major sources of income for non-elderly households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution from 1979 to 2011, using the CBO’s measure of comprehensive income. It shows that incomes of the bottom fifth are increasingly dependent on ties to the workforce. Wages, employer-provided benefits, and tax credits that are dependent on work (such as the EITC) made up 68.3 percent of non-elderly bottom-fifth incomes in 2011, compared with only 58.2 percent in 1979. While government in-kind benefits from sources such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps) and Medicaid increased from 13.2 percent of these bottom-fifth incomes in 1979, to 19.5 percent in 2011, cash transfers such as welfare payments have declined 9.2 percentage points (from 18.6 percent to 9.4 percent).

For better or worse, the safety-net system has become increasingly tied to work through programs such as the EITC and the child tax credit, which only benefit households with labor earnings. While other transfers and tax credits are clearly important to families in the bottom fifth and should be strengthened, it is crucial to recognize that this group depends on pay from the labor market for the majority of their income.

In addition, despite what some policymakers and pundits might have us believe, a significant share of poor people work. The figure below shows the population of those in poverty segmented into various labor status categories. The top bar shows that 35.2 percent of the poor between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2013 were considered not currently eligible to work because they are retired, going to school, or disabled. The other 64.8 percent of working-age poor are currently eligible to work. The second bar shows us that among these currently-eligible workers, 62.6 percent are working and 44.3 percent are working full-time. Of the working-age poor eligible for employment, 37.4 percent are not working—a share that includes the 3.3 million unemployed poor people seeking a job.

On Labor Day this year, it’s important to recognize the integral role of wage growth in poverty reduction. Although hourly wage growth has stagnated for the vast majority since 1979, this didn’t have to happen—there was room in the economy for all people to see wage growth, as economy-wide productivity continuously reached new heights. In fact, if all wages had grown at the same rate as productivity since 1979 (in other words, had economic gains been more widely shared with low- and moderate-wage workers), 7.1 million fewer people would be poor and the market-based non-elderly poverty rate would be 2.6 percentage points lower today, or 13.5 percent. If we had also targeted full employment through Federal Reserve policy, for instance, the non-elderly market-based poverty rate would be 4.2 percentage points less and 11.2 million fewer people would be poor.

Policies that boost employment and wages are vital and underappreciated tools for reducing poverty. To gain momentum in the fight against poverty, fiscal transfers that help low-income families almost surely need to be accompanied by policies that foster widely shared wage growth. Without wage gains, the tax-and-transfer system needs to work harder every year simply to keep poverty rates from increasing. This Labor Day, let’s focus on the things we can do that will both help workers and reduce poverty, such as strengthening workers’ bargaining rights, raising the minimum wage, eliminating the tipped minimum wage, making sure the new overtime threshold quickly gets into place, enforcing wage theft rules, fighting for wider access to paid sick and family leave, and urging the Fed to target full employment.

People in poverty are working, now we need to make the economy work for them.

Millions of American families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet but are still living paycheck to paycheck.

Millions more who are undocumented can’t plan for their futures because they fear la migra (the immigration police) will haul them and their loved ones away at any time.

And still others, who have served often excessive sentences for past transgressions struggle to find work when they are released from prison.

In total, about 106 million people live on the brink, fighting to overcome the barriers to success that keep them living in marginalized communities or in such chaos that financial stability is out of reach.

Yet what are the chances that their struggles will be addressed in any meaningful way during the first Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News on Thursday?

What are the chances the Fox News moderators will ask candidates about their agenda to address the needs of neighborhoods facing high unemployment and low wages?

What is the likelihood that the candidates will be asked to outline plans to improve the lives of the working families who live in forgotten communities where there is little investment in infrastructure and jobs?

If the most recent presidential elections are any indication, the chances that these issues will be raised are slim to none. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the dwindling middle class, the last presidential election was noticeably devoid of any references to Americans living in poverty. In fact, The Nation reported that from 2008 to 2012, at least five consecutive presidential or vice presidential debates went without a single question about poverty.

This first debate of the 2016 election is an opportunity for the leading Republican candidates to go on the record about the issues that matter most to working families.

So in an effort to help the candidates and the Fox team find their way, here’s a roadmap. We asked four Americans struggling to make ends meet about what they want to hear on Thursday:

Rachael Collyer, 22, Cleveland Heights, Ohio:

Rachael graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Spanish and English. She works as a bartender with a fluctuating income that on a good day nets up to $14 an hour and on soft days earns her the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

She also has almost $26,000 in student loan debt.

Rachael can’t afford her own apartment, so after she graduated, she moved back home with her parents in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She’s a volunteer organizer now for the Ohio Student Association because mounting debt is holding too many students and their families back. The state has decreased its college grants to students, she says, even though more than half of all jobs in Ohio will require a college education by 2020. It is no wonder then that about 68% of Ohio’s college graduates have an average of $29,000 in debt.

“We are like frogs in boiling water,” she says. “College debt has been going up and going up and suddenly we’ve reached this point where we yell, ‘How did this happen?’ “

Rachael wants the Fox News moderators to ask the candidates: Given the cost of attending college, most students work while they are in school. And, in Ohio, if a student works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, they won’t earn enough to cover the average cost of attending Ohio State. How do you propose addressing the wage needs of recent college graduates and current students so that paying for their college education is not a barrier to success?

Duane Edwards, 34, Fredericksburg, VA:

Duane’s life changed drastically when he was 14 years old. His father, an Army veteran, was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a wife and three children. At that moment, Duane told himself he had to find a way to earn money so he wouldn’t be a burden on his mother. So he secretly began selling marijuana.

He was eventually caught on a drug charge and sentenced to community-based probation. His mother tried hard to keep him straight, but she had to work to maintain the family and he took advantage of her absence. He says there were few mentors or teachers who looked at him and saw any potential. Without a job and no prospects, Duane eventually landed in prison and served a three-year sentence.

“Being incarcerated made me grow up,” he says. While behind bars, he earned an associate’s degree in childhood education, and he tutored other inmates who were trying to get their GEDs. He wanted to make good on his life when he got out.

So when he was released in December 2006, he had high hopes that he would turn around the troubled life he once lived. But it was dependent on him finding work. In the first six months alone, he applied to more than 40 jobs. None would hire him because of his record. Since he’s been out, Duane has applied to more than 120 jobs and has received call backs for just 15 of them, with most offering low-wage work washing or loading trucks.

Today, the married father of two girls, who are three and four years old, has a bachelor’s degree in theology and is a pastor at a local church. It’s taken him almost nine years since he got out, but he finally has a full-time job driving a truck, making $14.50 an hour. He says he’s grateful for the job, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet.

“I would like an opportunity at a good job so I can take care of my family,” he says.

He wants to ask the candidates: Given that the school to prison pipeline starts early, particularly for young black men, and there is a decided lack of opportunity for young African Americans, what is your plan to invest in schools in marginalized communities made up primarily of people of color so that the outcomes of the students in those schools are the same as in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods?

Patrice Mack, 45, Euclid, Ohio:

Patrice is the single mother of a 24-year-old daughter and three boys, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old twins. She owns her own home and has a college degree in business administration. Earlier this year, she left a job that paid her so little that her sons were eligible for government health insurance because she couldn’t afford the company’s insurance.

“You can have a degree and still struggle to survive,” she says. “I’m a paycheck away from poverty.”

Patrice is tapping into her retirement savings in order to get by until she finds a job. She is looking for work, but opportunities for good jobs have dwindled. And due to unpredictable, constantly shifting schedules, and a lack of paid leave and paid sick days, many jobs make it impossible to balance work and caregiving responsibilities.

She wants to ask the candidates: The minimum wage is at a level where working families can’t survive unless they work multiple jobs. So how do you propose we do a better job of parenting our children and being there for them, while at the same time earning enough income to provide for our families? And how do you think employers can incorporate paid leave or paid sick days?

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Astrid Silva, 27, Las Vegas, NV:

Astrid grew up most of her life under the tinsel and lights of Las Vegas. As a young person, she was a standout student and graduated at the top of her class in her magnet high school. She’s earned associate degrees in arts and political science and is working on a bachelor’s degree. Astrid could be a poster child for today’s diverse and civic-minded millennial generation.

She’s also an undocumented immigrant.

At the age of four, Astrid rode a tire raft with her mother and crossed the Rio Grande. She wore black patent leather shoes and the “biggest poofiest white dress with purple flowers and a purple sash.” Her mother had wanted her to look pretty when they met her father in the States.

“As a young person, you understand,” she says. “I understood there was something different about us.”

She says their status affected her family in big and small ways. Neither she nor her mother were able to drive because they couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They wouldn’t go to certain areas, or leave Nevada, because they were worried they would get picked up by immigration authorities. And unlike other people in their neighborhood, they couldn’t leave the country and visit Mexico. She remembers the pain and sadness that overwhelmed her family when her grandmother died in 2009. Her father couldn’t leave and see his mother one last time because they feared he wouldn’t be able to return.

Their biggest fear came true in 2011. Her father was arrested and given deportation orders. He’s since been granted a stay, which he has to apply for every year, and Astrid says she doesn’t know how long it will last.

Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for immigration reform. President Obama even mentioned her in a speech where he deplored our “broken” immigration system.

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country, Astrid has a stay until 2017.

But she says that too may end after Obama’s term ends.

“I’m trying to figure out how to keep my family together here,” she says. “This is not a political strategy. For us, it’s real.”

Her question for the candidates is: Given that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what kind of concrete plan do you have for immigration reform? Not one that dismantles what the President has done or that focuses only on border security, but that offers real solutions for issues such as family reunification; the ban on re-entry to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants that spans three to ten years; or the rights of asylum for undocumented immigrants?

This week the TalkPoverty Radio team headed out to Phoenix, Arizona to attend Netroots Nation, a gathering to exchange ideas on how to use media and technology to influence the public debate.

We open this week’s episode with the Weekly Worst, a round up of the week’s worst poverty news, with Alan Pyke, Deputy Economic Policy Editor for Think Progress.  We then join Rebecca on the ground in Phoenix as she talks with Katie Klabusich, writer and reproductive justice activist, who discusses the need to include economic justice in all social justice movements. Rebecca then talks to Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA) about the push to raise the income threshold for overtime pay. We then hear from Analilia Mejia, Executive Director of New Jersey Working Families, about her work advocating for paid sick days for working families amid opposition from Governor Chris Christie (R) and the state legislature. And we close with the voices of the Black Lives Matter protestors who shifted the conversation of the Netroots Presidential Town Hall.

 Here are 7 of our favorite moments from this week’s episode:

1. “So it wasn’t the maggots. It wasn’t the unrefrigerated meatballs…it was something else!”

2. “I can’t imagine how often my folks would have gotten arrested when I was a kid…”

3.“Is there a term for the opposite of mansplaining?”

     4.“If you’re not including economic justice in your movement, you’re doing it wrong.”

5. “This is one of the tools that we have to raise American workers’ wages, and it can be done with the stroke of a pen.”

6. “The devil has enough advocates.”

7. “Welcome to Arizona, where the Martin Luther King holiday was repealed.”

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Questions? Comments? Email us at info@talkpoverty.org!

This week we talk to Joan Walsh, Editor at large for Salon.com, MSNBC political analyst, and author of “What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.” We discuss 2016, the stigma around poverty, and race in the U.S.

But first, we’re joined by Craig Harrington, Economic Policy Program Director at Media Matters for America, to discuss why comparing the U.S. economy to the Greek debt crisis makes no sense, and why conservatives are doing this anyway. We also talk to Liz Ben-Ishai, Senior Policy Analyst at Center for Law and Social Policy, on how we can protect workers and help business at the same time by simply making work schedules predictable, and how new legislation can help.

Here are 6 moments you can look forward to hearing on this week’s episode:

1) “Charlie, it was meant to mock you. You’re an idiot!”

If you’re worried that #GreeceCrisis is a looking glass into the future of the USA, you might work for Fox News http://t.co/7AD3uvFHgM

— Craig Harrington (@Craigipedia) July 8, 2015

 

2) “Hashtag Trump your cat, for our listeners.”

Omg #trumpyourcat is beyond making my life right now…… @maddow #winning pic.twitter.com/XrkS08yUrM

— Rebecca Vallas (@rebeccavallas) July 11, 2015

3) “In defense of Donald Trump, he’s had some crowds – they were just paid actors.”

4) “One thing that makes a good ally is doing more listening than talking.”

5) “People say dumb things on Twitter – I’m not talking about Paula Deen here…Oh boy.”

6) “It seems odd to employ tactics or strategies that undermine your business.”

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Questions? Comments? Email us at info@talkpoverty.org!

But because she’s a salaried employee, she’s ineligible to earn overtime pay. The long hours, weeks spent on the road and living out of hotels has taken a toll on her emotionally and physically.

“I’m just so beat down,” McCrary, 50, said from a job site in South Florida.  “I’m 100 pounds heavier than I was when I started the job.”

So when she heard last week’s news that President Obama wants to expand the overtime rules so that more Americans are eligible, she was excited.

“Right now, too many Americans are working long days for less pay than they deserve,” Obama wrote in an op-ed for The Huffington Post. “That’s partly because we’ve failed to update overtime regulations for years.”

The overtime threshold was last raised in 1975. According to the Department of Labor, 62 percent of workers qualified for overtime back then. Now, just 8 percent do.  In fact, a family of four would have to live in poverty before a breadwinner would qualify for overtime—the poverty threshold for a family of four is $24,008, but the overtime threshold is just $23,660.

“The rules that establish which workers are exempt from overtime pay haven’t kept up with the cost of living,” reads a Department of Labor webpage.  Under the new proposal, the federal government would lift the overtime threshold from $23,660 to $50,440.

With a salary of just over $40,000, McCrary is one of the 5 million working Americans who would benefit from the new rule.  She stands to earn up to $15,000 more annually, and doesn’t hesitate when asked what she’d do with the extra income: “I would put that money in savings for old age. I have to start to put something away to fall back on, because I don’t want to have to fall back on my kids,” she said.

McCrary’s current job offers stock options and a 401K retirement plan and she’s taken advantage of those benefits for the past two years.

But before this job, she had only one employer that offered a retirement plan and it cashed out the employee retirement accounts when the business folded.

She knows what it’s like to juggle to make ends meet. A single mother of five who are all adults now, she’s worked as many as three jobs—driving a limo, working at a hotel, and doing census surveys.

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Like many parents, McCrary put her children’s future ahead of her own. That included helping them pay for college. But it sapped her efforts to save for herself.

“My daughter took out student loans that we didn’t realize were parent loans,” she said. “I’m on default on those and they grow every year.”

A $25,000 loan has ballooned into a debt of more than $40,000, she said.

“Trying to keep my kids in school and get them educated was more important than trying to put something away for myself,” McCrary said.  “I figured the worst case scenario, I could live in one of their basements.”

Nationwide, a movement has swelled that is calling attention to the struggles of fast-food and retail employees, car washers, home care professionals and others who make a minimum wage.

The Obama Administration’s proposed rule targets a specific set of employees – white-collar employees, managers and supervisors who are often full-time and salaried. Currently, if these workers put in more than 40 hours a week, it does not translate into more money in their paychecks.

“Many working families are putting in longer hours, but are not seeing their extra work reflected in their wages because they are currently not eligible to receive overtime,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change.  “Being able to receive overtime will greatly level the wage playing field that is greatly tipped in favor of the wealthy in our country.”

The proposal could take months to implement. It is subject to a 60-day public comment period. The administration can put the rule into effect through regulation. However, the conservative-led Congress can try to fight it with legislation.

Adjusting public policy to keep up with the times is long overdue, said McCrary, who has noticed that some supervisors seem reluctant to ask to be paid for all of the hours that they work.

“Some of the people have been out here for so long, they don’t even argue about it. This is the way it’s always been,” she said.  “It is time for a change.”

After the violence, the workers regrouped in a nearby park where one of the strikers said, “What they did to us today in front of the TV cameras, is the way the police treat us every day.” Another woman striker told a reporter, “I wasn’t robbing a bank or selling drugs, I’m simply asking for an increase in pay but the police beat us as if we were garbage.”

However, the police assault backfired, and the response of the campaign organizers and activists is still instructive today. Far from being beaten into submission, the strikers met the next day and voted unanimously to return to the scene of the violence on the following day.

Over the next weeks, public outrage at the police helped galvanize support for the strikers. Janitors in Century City won their union, doubling their pay and benefits. Century City also proved a tipping point for the Justice for Janitors campaign. Many in the labor movement had argued that janitors were impossible to organize—they were undocumented, part-time, subcontracted, workers of color—but the campaign demonstrated clearly that not only could these workers organize, they could win.

Emboldened by success in Century City, Janitors in Washington, D.C. blocked the 14^th Street Bridge with school buses, effectively shutting down the nation capital’s rush hour commute.

At the University of Miami, Janitors fasted for weeks as part of their lengthy and winning strike. Workers in wheel chairs, weakened by the fast, surrounded the university’s president, Donna Shalala and chanted in Spanish, “Union or death!” In Houston, 5,000 Janitors won a first-time union contract in a “right-to-work” state, despite the fact that bail was set at more than $20 million for people arrested for non-violent acts of civil disobedience in the city. Workers in cities across the nation went on strike in support of the Houston Janitors, and allies in Europe occupied buildings. Finally, pension fund trustees in charge of $1 trillion in workers’ pension fund capital adopted “responsible contractor” procedures—committing to invest only in office buildings where janitors were treated fairly.

The Justice for Janitors campaign succeeded because it relentlessly went after the building owners and financiers at the top of the real estate industry—the people who truly had power over the janitors’ livelihood—not the cleaning companies who were powerless subcontractors. The campaign also exposed an economy that was increasingly using sub-contracting and other schemes to separate and isolate workers from the corporations and companies that were actually in control of their wages, benefits and overall working conditions.

Justice for Janitors became much more than a “union organizing campaign,” it grew into a movement. Its influence and impact extended far beyond the people directly involved in the campaign’s actions. Its success was rooted in its ability to pit the needs of an entire community against the wealth of the real estate industry. The movement penetrated pop culture with Adrian Brody starring in Bread and Roses, a movie based on the Century City Strike. The game show Jeopardy asked contestants, “What is Justice for Janitors?” The campaign was also part of the back-story of the assistant in The Devil Wears Prada. The Justice for Janitors movement became a living example of what was possible—even against the greatest odds.

Hundreds of articles and dissertations have now been written about the keys to the success of the campaign. Some claim that it succeeded through militant direct action, strikes, and disruption rooted in the struggles of Central America. Others state it was through grounding organizing in immigrant communities. Still others say it was due to integrating existing union membership with non-union workers. Additionally, some view global solidarity, corporate leverage, and “top-down” tactics as the basis of the campaign’s success.

As two of the original organizers of Justice for Janitors—with 25 years of distance from the Century City Strike—the key lesson for us is that there is no silver bullet; there isn’t one thing, one strategy, one action, or one tactic that magically beats billionaires or creates the space for a movement to develop.

Yet Justice for Janitors unquestionably provides critical lessons for future organizing: As Wall Street and the finance industry increasingly take control over the global economy, we have to look up the economic food chain and target the real culprits. We have to bring as many stakeholders to the fight as possible, and creatively and aggressively organize to disrupt business as usual for those in control—that can mean strikes, civil disobedience, engaging shareholders, or directly challenging other business, social, and political interests and their exploitative practices and schemes.

Workers’ lives have been disrupted enough. It’s time to turn the tables.

Linda lives at a local shelter with two children. She works full-time in the health care industry and earns $8 per hour, resulting in a yearly income of $16,640 before taxes. Even in the unlikely event Linda were to find an apartment for less than $600 per month with cheap utilities, she would still have only $200 left for all of her other monthly bills, including food, clothing, transportation, child care, and health care. Finding an apartment she can afford also might mean living in a neighborhood where it is difficult to get to work.

Linda’s story of struggling from paycheck-to-paycheck is one that we hear far too often in Louisville and across the nation. Unfortunately, Congress and our state legislature have both failed to raise the current $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Now, low-wage workers in Louisville have placed their hope in the hands of the Louisville Metro Council and Mayor Greg Fisher.

The current proposal supported by workers and advocates would gradually increase Louisville’s minimum wage over three years to $10.10. This is only a start, since it is significantly less than the $11.48 living wage that former Mayor Jerry Abramson called for during his tenure. Moreover, the average monthly rent in Louisville is $694 and families will need to earn $13 per hour in order to afford housing and other household expenditures.  Like Linda, more than half of the adults living in Louisville homeless shelters are employed, some working full-time.

With more than 18 percent of Louisvillians now living below the poverty line of $18,552 annually for a family of three, we must do what we can locally to raise the minimum wage so it is no longer a poverty wage. An estimated 22 percent of low-wage workers in Louisville would benefit from a minimum wage increase, including 62,500 workers who make less than $10.10, and another 24,800 workers who would indirectly benefit once wage scales were adjusted upward.

And while the opposition would have us believe that undeserving teenagers working in the fast food industry will primarily benefit from an increased minimum wage, the fact is that among affected workers the average age is 35 years old; more than one-third are at least 40 years old; and most of the workers are women.  I hear the opposition clearly when they say that there may be minimal job loss, or that raising the minimum wage will not end poverty; and I understand that some businesses may have to increase their prices.

But the cost of goods and services is already increasing every year without the benefit of a minimum wage increase. And while raising the minimum wage will not end poverty, it will indeed help move some people out of poverty, and others who are on the cusp of poverty will no longer need assistance.

In order to help businesses adapt to increased wages, sponsors of the Louisville minimum wage legislation intentionally designed it to increase gradually over three years. We are committed to supporting businesses and we have proven that repeatedly by providing economic development incentives. During the last decade, we have used tax dollars to give tax breaks to the Yum Center, General Electric, Kentucky Kingdom, Colonial Gardens, and Cordish Companies, just to name a few beneficiaries. Now we are asking businesses to invest in their workers.  I know that there are areas of agreement that should be our focus: reducing income inequality, creating job stability, establishing fair wages, promoting compassion, and reducing poverty. We can get there and raising the minimum wage is a good start.

As the Labor and Economic Development Committee of the Louisville Metro Council prepares to vote on the minimum wage ordinance on December 4, I hope that we keep in mind that we simply cannot afford the price of poverty and we cannot afford to ignore working families. We can and we should raise the wage in Louisville.

Good morning, my name is Virgil Pack, I’m 45-years-old and I live in Richmond, Virginia. I’m a father of two kids—a daughter and a son. My daughter’s name is Ashleigh, she’s 21 and attending UDC in her junior year. My son’s name is Sean, he’s 13 and lives in Albany, NY.

I have worked in the restaurant industry for most of my life. I have three jobs and work about 65 hours a week but every month is a struggle to make ends meet. I’m a crew trainer for Wendy’s where I make $7.75 an hour; I’m a shift manager at Sonic’s Drive-In where I make $11.00 an hour and unfortunately they’re cutting my hours; and for my third job, I’m a crewmember at Moe’s Southwest Grill where I make $7.75 an hour.

This means that at the end of each month, I have $915 to pay for rent, utilities, and more. I pay child support for my son, Sean, which is payroll deducted from Wendy’s.  I also help my daughter Ashleigh with college.  I have absolutely no benefits at any of my jobs—no health insurance, no paid sick leave.  I have 2 years of college under my belt and I used to run my own business, but in this economy, this is the only work I can find. God forbid I get seriously ill or injured, I’d probably be homeless.

Like the federal minimum wage, Virginia’s minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, which you can see is just simply not a livable wage. And to make low and inadequate wages even worse, the lack of benefits makes it that much harder to get by: without paid sick days or paid leave, I’m forced to choose between going to work sick or losing needed income to support my family, or possibly even losing my job, and if there’s a family emergency I have to choose between the same impossible choices.

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However, I am excited to say that I have an appointment with a navigator on Thursday of this week to enroll in a health insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act. The idea that I will shortly have health insurance is such a huge weight off my shoulders and an absolute blessing for me and my family.  However, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Without higher wages and better quality jobs, I’ll still be running in place.

In Virginia, raising the wage would affect over 744,000 workers, which is more than 20 percent of the workforce.  And many people like me, work so hard, yet with wages so low and no paid leave or other benefits, we’re stuck or falling behind. Not only would raising the wage enable families like mine to put more food on the table and know that we can pay rent each month, it would make us feel appreciated and respected as workers.

I would like to take the time to say that I’m not up here for sympathy but I would like for people to see that there are Americans trying to live right and would like a fair chance at the American dream, which to me is family and prosperity….

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this opportunity.

But winning a robust minimum wage is only half of the battle.

Last month, Seattle again made history when Mayor Ed Murray announced the creation of a citywide Division of Labor Standards Enforcement to enforce its minimum wage law and other labor standards. A key feature of the new division is that it utilizes community groups as partners in outreach and to educate workers about their rights.

Because wage theft is so common in industries that employ minimum wage workers, only an effective, strategic enforcement system will ensure that workers receive the new wage they are entitled to.  Fortunately, we know how wage theft happens and we know the kinds of enforcement techniques that result in low-wage workers being paid their due.

A landmark 2009 study of nearly 4,500 low-wage workers in three of the cities currently considering a minimum wage increase—Los Angeles, Chicago and New York—found that more than two in three workers experienced at least one pay-related violation during their previous work week. Of these workers, one in four was paid less than the minimum wage, and three in four were not paid their overtime wages. Wage theft costs workers and their families in these three cities an estimated $56 million every week—that’s $56 million stolen weekly from workers’ pockets instead of helping their families and communities.

We also know the people who are the victims of wage theft. Government statistics and private studies show that they work in restaurants and hotels, retail and grocery stores. They clean office buildings and care for our children and elders. They build our homes.

Relying on government alone to right these wrongs simply doesn’t work—government has neither the resources nor the manpower. The U.S. Department of Labor has slightly more than 1,000 investigators who are responsible for protecting the rights of 135 million workers in 7.5 million businesses nationwide. Things aren’t any better at the state level, where the ratio of investigators to workers is approximately 1 to 150,000.

We also know that enforcement doesn’t work if it relies solely on workers filing complaints. A study of the largely complaint-based federal system found that for every one complaint received, there are more than 100 other labor-standards violations that go undetected, allowing unscrupulous employers to fly under the radar. One reason workers don’t complain is that nearly half of those who suffer wage theft also face retaliation for speaking up about it.

The fact is that enforcement of existing laws is so poor that the average employer has a less than 0.001 percent chance annually of being investigated by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.  That doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of scofflaws.

But just as surely as we know the challenges to effective enforcement, we also know how we can change this status quo and secure compliance—through an enforcement agency that has strong penalties at its disposal to deter and correct violations.  We also know from lessons learned in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Florida, and New York—in industries ranging from construction to hospitality to janitorial to agriculture—that community groups must play a critical role in enforcement.

Successful enforcement partnerships take advantage of the strengths of both government and community groups. City agencies have the power to file complaints, assess significant penalties, and take wage thieves to court. But even the best-trained investigator can’t possibly know the industries in every city and can’t be in all places at once. Community groups do and are.

Non-profits—based in our neighborhoods and knowledgeable about their industries, languages and cultures—can help spread the word to both employers and employees about minimum wage protections and other labor standards. Community based organizations can also support victims of wage theft who—fearing retaliation—don’t want to take a complaint directly to a city official. They can interview workers and witnesses and assemble the necessary proof in an atmosphere of trust.

Community groups also have vital information that supports strategic enforcement. It is an inefficient use of limited enforcement resources for investigators to wait for complaints to come in, or to investigate every industry equally. Existing violation data and the experiences of the US Department of Labor demonstrate that by focusing attention on high-violation industries and fractured employment relationships—like subcontracting and franchising—enforcement agencies are much more effective in discovering abuses and taking action to stop them. Community groups have contact with working people every day and can help city agencies investigate known violators. Business can play a role, too, by pointing out bad actors who gain a competitive advantage over responsible employers by breaking the law.

In short, through these partnerships, city enforcers are able to focus on correcting and deterring violations. They can assess penalties and award back wages to a degree that makes it very clear that our cities and states will no longer tolerate cheaters.

We can make the promise of a higher minimum wage a reality for millions of our neighbors and co-workers.  By establishing a Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and funding community-based outreach, Seattle is moving in the right direction.  Other cities should take note.

In Our Backyard aims to highlight efforts to dramatically reduce poverty and inequality in our city. If you are interested in writing for the project, please email us at info@talkpoverty.org.

TalkPoverty: What were the reasons and the need for the creation of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute [DCFPI]?

Ed Lazere: We were created in part because the city passed a pretty steep and regressive tax cut on the idea that we needed to cut our top income tax rate because otherwise people would flee the city which is not really supported by the research at all. There wasn’t a DCFPI to respond to that argument.

We see ourselves as using a combination of research and putting the numbers out there for the advocacy community, hopefully communicated in a strategic way, and then partnering with other organizations to try to shape the city’s budget to be more focused on the needs of low-income residents; and to do research that highlights the challenges that low-income residents face, like affordable housing or poverty, and to address working conditions, like the minimum wage or paid sick leave.

TalkPoverty: Can you describe poverty in the nation’s capital for people who know nothing about it?

Jenny Reed: The poverty rate in D.C. is a little over 18%. There were about 109,000 residents living below the poverty line in 2012. Our poverty rate has continued to be high even during strong periods of economic growth in the city. We have about 1 in 4 kids living in poverty, but in the eastern and southern parts [of the city], child poverty rates are much higher. In some neighborhoods it’s 50%.

Lazere: The poverty rate consists almost entirely of people of color… African American and Latino. Income inequality is quite dramatic in the District. If you divide the population, ranking them top to bottom, the bottom earners were even with most large U.S. cities, but at the top, the average income is the highest in the country. As a result the gap between the top and the bottom is one of the highest in the country. If you’re living in a community with substantial inequality, a lot of things may be more expensive, like housing, because it’s all one market. The high-income people are shopping in the same market as you are. They’re going out to restaurants or theater and you don’t. There’s a psychological effect of being at the bottom of a rung of a very unequal society.

Reed: We have found that a large share of people in families in poverty work. For a lot of people the problem is getting access to full time year-round work, and full time year-round work that actually pays a decent wage. D.C. recently increased its minimum wage.  It will be $11.50 by 2016. The first phase of the increase went into effect July 1 up to $9.50.  We think that will help…. We did a simulation that showed if you could get everyone into a $15 an-hour job and access to full time year-round work you could move about 80% of the people [out of] poverty in D.C.

Lazere: The minimum wage was passed the same day as something almost as equally monumental [that] got almost no attention, which was an expansion of our paid sick leave requirement. D.C. is fairly unique among jurisdictions in requiring every employer to provide some amount of paid leave for illness or domestic violence. [That] legislation passed in 2008, but you weren’t eligible until you’d been on the job for almost year. For most low-wage workers, they’re in an industry where the turnover is often 100% within a year, so it was likely that many, many people never got to the point where they started accruing [leave].

The bill that passed last fall made sure all workers were covered. They start accruing leave from the first day on the job, and there are no exclusions for tipped restaurant workers as there had been before. That was big. It’s pretty dramatic and people we know, particularly single parents who have the highest poverty rate, often face challenges if a child is sick. Do I stay home with them and risk losing my job because I don’t have paid sick leave? Now for at least some number of people they won’t have to make that difficult choice.

TalkPoverty: What is the unemployment rate in D.C.?

Lazere: For people with [just a high school degree], it’s about 20 percent. We’re talking about an unemployment rate that’s twice what the national unemployment [rate] peaked at during the great recession—in the middle of a city where construction cranes are everywhere, people are building ugly popup housing, [and] restaurants are opening left and right.

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TalkPoverty: So what do you make of that? One guy who wrote for us in Maryland lost 6 people in two years to gun violence, this young guy. He found a job in community development and he takes people to job fairs and describes the devastation of 50 people going and getting nothing. He said just what you said: we see all of these shovel-ready projects starting and none of the jobs going to low-income people who are ready to work. What do you make of that?

Reed: Workforce development is probably one of the most important things we can do, but it’s really hard to do well. There are a couple ways the city really needs to do a better job. One is the Workforce Investment Council which they’ve recently beefed up. [It’s comprised of] business leaders, developers, labor, and government officials that are all supposed to get together and say, “This is where D.C. should be investing its workforce development dollars.” They have an executive director, but they really are just getting started.

Then there’s the workforce intermediary which DCFPI and D.C. Appleseed and Employment Justice Center advocated for. It’s sort of a matchmaker. They’re supposed to be the liaison between say the developer for the convention center hotel that was recently built and the Department of Employment Services to say, “I’ve got all of these people who have these skills. You need these people with these skills. Let’s put them together.” But I don’t think that the Workforce Intermediary has really been able do anything. They’re still kind of figuring themselves out.

Lazere: You hear from a lot of D.C. residents: “I got training for a job and then there wasn’t a job at the end.” They get understandably discouraged and not very optimistic about participating in other training after that.

TalkPoverty: You hear a lot of that with TANF training programs too…

Lazere: It’s a similar thing. They used to go through the same ropes of, “Let’s get your resume ready, let’s help you get some business clothes and teach you how to do an interview.” And a lot of people didn’t show up because they were like, “I’ve done this already. What I really need is just for you to connect me to a decent paying job.”

The District made an effort to revamp its “one size fits all” TANF employment program, largely because we highlighted the problems.  The current program is not perfect but still is far more customized than the old program.  DCFPI is in the midst of assessing how well the new TANF employment program is working.

Reed: I think that there’s concern about some of the major D.C. programs like our transitional employment program or our one-stop centers [that] haven’t really shown great outcomes. They might be giving people something to do, but it’s not connecting them to a job and that’s a big problem.

Lazere: I just learned recently that while the city monitors for the federal programs whether someone got a job and how long they kept it and ways they got it, they don’t really do that for the locally funded programs. How can you have and modify and shape an effective program if you’re not looking at how well you’re doing?

TalkPoverty: How do you think the city can balance having people come into areas that were previously less developed with providing affordable housing for low-income people?

Reed:  Where I think D.C. could do a better job is being more proactive about preservation. We absolutely need to build more affordable housing, but we also need to make sure we’re holding on to what we have. We’re not helping people stay in the neighborhoods as they develop around them. We could be more proactive about tying affordable housing preservation strategies to major economic development projects. Just like you do [an] environmental analysis, or traffic analysis, you could do an affordable housing analysis and say, “What’s at risk here? Is there project-based Section 8 housing that we think owners might want to opt-out of? Are there low-income buildings with tenants that we think the owner might try to sell? Can the district purchase it? Can the tenants purchase it? What can we do to keep the neighborhood affordable?”

You won’t be able to keep every unit, but it’s actually a lot cheaper for the city to preserve units or build new affordable housing prior to development then to try and do it after development has started.

Lazere: The way that governments do their budgets it tends to be fairly incremental. We spent $100 million [on affordable housing] this year, so we’ll spend $102 million next year and then $103 million. That’s just not really going to work. With prices rising so fast, we’re losing ground every year. Once you’ve lost a neighborhood, you’ve lost this tremendous opportunity to preserve affordable housing for a long period of time.

We spend about $2 billion as a city on education, [and] we spend $500 million on our police department… So why is it that in a city where the number one challenge for residents is affordable housing, we spend three times on public safety when crime is going down than what we spend on housing? And the number of homeless families jumped 23% or 25% this year.

TalkPoverty: 25% THIS YEAR? When the economy’s supposed to be getting better…that goes to your recovery report. Recovery for who?

Reed: That was a huge issue this past winter. There was a really significant rise in the number of homeless families and the D.C. shelter system was incredibly overwhelmed. We put families in recreation centers for one night only and they had to reapply for shelter every day. If it wasn’t below 32 [degrees] it was tough luck. You had to be out. A pro-bono law firm brought a class action against the city. They’ve won two injunctions against the district.

TalkPoverty: Against that policy?

Reed: Both of the judges ruled in favor of the plaintiff, finding that the recreation centers violated the law. By law families are supposed to be placed in rooms or apartment-style shelters and what they did was set up partitions like what you see when you’re giving blood. It was really horrible the way they set them up. Families couldn’t get in until after 9 and they had to leave by 7 in the morning. They couldn’t use the showers even though the showers were there. There was no food. The lights were kept on all night, there was no privacy. The judges found not only was it a violation of the law but it was causing irreparable harm to the children.

Lazere: There’s a new national model that started largely with the Recovery Act of getting people out of shelter quickly through rapid rehousing because shelter is not a good place for anybody to live.

I think the issue with rapid rehousing in D.C. is with housing so expensive, most families who become homeless are very young and have very limited job experience. When you [try to] put them into an apartment that’s $1,000 a month even that’s hard to find right? Then to tell them a year from now you’re on your own [because rent is no longer covered after one year]—on a… job that pays $10.00 an hour.  A lot of families are very nervous about going into rapid rehousing because when they’re in shelter it may be crappy but at least they get to stay.

Lazere: Part of the solution is to get someone out of shelter quickly. You hope that rapid rehousing will give them the stability they need to get their life back together. But there still needs to be something at the end [when the rent subsidy runs out] for that significant number of people who may have a job that may be more stable, but still not enough to [pay for] their home on their own.

Reed: Maybe we should give people longer than a year to get settled and get to the point where they can afford the rent. We should make sure people aren’t paying too much of their income towards rent. Program rules allow maybe 45% [of a person’s income toward rent], which is way too high. I understand maybe 30% isn’t achievable, but 35% maybe max. More than that and we’re getting into a likelihood that they’re going to end up back in shelter.

There’s a lot on the homeless services front that we could be doing. We kind of backed away from our permanent supportive housing investments for the chronically homeless. It combines long-term affordable housing with intensive services. Chronically homeless are folks with severe mental health or chronic health issues and they really need intensive supports to maintain their housing.  It’s shown to save a ton of money because there’s less reliance on costly emergency services.

D.C. was progressing pretty well and just kind of stopped investing in the program. In the upcoming budget, we will start making fairly good investments again. For example, the mayor put in money so we’ll end chronic homelessness among veterans in 2015 which is part of a federal campaign as well. We can end chronic homelessness in D.C. There’s about 2,300 families and individuals. It’s not an unachievable number. There’s a plan. We just need to fully invest in it to get it done.

With the poverty rate at an unacceptable 14.5 percent and economic inequality stuck at historically high levels, one might assume that chronic economic insecurity and an off-kilter economy are the “new normal”—that nothing can be done to fix it.

But there is nothing “normal” or inevitable about more than 45 million Americans living in poverty. It is the direct result of policy choices. With different policy choices, we will see a more equitable economy—it’s as simple as that. 

Here are 10 steps Congress can take to cut poverty, boost economic security, and expand the middle class.

1) Create jobs.  

The best pathway out of poverty is a well-paying job. To get back to prerecession employment levels, we must create 5.6 million new jobs. To kick-start job growth now, the federal government should invest in our infrastructure by rebuilding our bridges, railways, roads, ports, schools and libraries, neighborhood parks, and abandoned housing; expanding broadband; develop renewable energy sources; and make other commonsense investments that create jobs and boost our national economy. For example, extending federal unemployment insurance would have created 200,000 new jobs in 2014. But Congress failed to act, leaving 1.3 million Americans and their families without this vital economic lifeline. We should renew federal unemployment insurance, and also build on proven models of subsidized employment to help the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged workers re-enter the labor force.

2) Raise the minimum wage.

In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty.  Not so anymore. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 is a poverty wage, and had it been indexed to inflation it would be $10.86 per hour today. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to inflation would lift more than 4 million Americans out of poverty. Nearly one in five children would see their parent get a raise. Recent action by states and cities shows that boosting the minimum wage reduces poverty and increases wages.

3) Increase the EITC for childless workers.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) lifted more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—above the poverty line in 2012. Kids who receive the EITC are also more likely to graduate from high school and have higher earnings in adulthood. Yet childless workers largely miss out on the benefit—their maximum credit is less than one-tenth that awarded to a worker with two children. Policymakers across the political spectrum have called for boosting the EITC. Importantly, this policy change should be combined with a raise in the minimum wage—one is not a substitute for the other.

4)     Support pay equity.

With female full-time workers earning just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, we must take action to ensure equal pay for equal work. Closing the gender pay gap would cut poverty in half for working women and their families and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the nation’s gross domestic product.  Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act to hold employers accountable for discriminatory salary practices would be a key first step.

5)     Provide paid leave and paid sick days.

The United States is the only developed country without paid family leave and paid sick days, making it exceedingly difficult for millions of American workers to care for their families without having to sacrifice needed income. Paid leave is an important antipoverty policy—having a child is one of the leading causes of economic hardship. Additionally, nearly 4 in 10 private sector workers—and 7 in 10 low-wage workers—do not have a single paid sick day, so they must forgo needed income in order to care for a sick child or loved one.  The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, would provide paid leave protection to workers who need to take time off due to their own illness or that of a family member, or after the birth of a child. And the Healthy Families Act would enable workers to earn up to seven job-protected sick days a year.

6)     Establish work schedules that work.

Low-wage and hourly jobs increasingly come with unpredictable and constantly shifting work schedules. These erratic schedules make accessing childcare even more difficult and leave workers uncertain about their monthly income. Further, things many of us take for granted—such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment or even a parent-teacher conference at school—become herculean tasks. The Schedules That Work Act would require that workers receive two weeks advance notice of their schedules, create and protect an employee’s right to request needed schedule changes, and provide guaranteed pay for cancelled or shortened shifts—important first steps towards making work-family balance possible for all workers.

7)     Invest in affordable, high-quality childcare and early education.

The lack of affordable, high-quality childcare serves as a major barrier to reaching the middle class. Federal child care assistance reaches only 1 in 6 eligible children. One year of childcare for an infant costs more than a year of tuition at most states’ four-year public colleges. Poor families who pay out of pocket for childcare spend an average of one-third of their incomes.  Boosting investments in Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as passing the Strong Start for America’s Children Act—which would invest in preschool, high-quality childcare for infants and toddlers, and home visiting services for pregnant women and mothers with infants—will help families obtain the childcare they need in order to work, and improve the future economic mobility of America’s children.

8)     Expand Medicaid.

Since it was signed into law in 2010, the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to high-quality, affordable health coverage for millions of Americans. However, 23 states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs to cover adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which makes the struggle for many families on the brink much harder. Expanding Medicaid means more than just access to healthcare—it frees up limited household income for other basic needs, like paying rent and putting food on the table. Having health coverage is also an important buffer against the economic consequences of illness or injury—unpaid medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. Studies link Medicaid coverage not only to improved health, improved access to healthcare services, and lower mortality rates, but also to reduced financial strain. It’s time for all states to expand Medicaid.

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9)     Reform the criminal justice system and enact policies that support successful re-entry

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Today, more than 1.5 million Americans are behind bars in state and federal prisons, a figure that has increased fivefold since 1980. The impact on communities of color is particularly staggering: One in four African American children who grew up during this time period have had a parent incarcerated.

Mass incarceration is a key driver of poverty. When a parent is incarcerated, his or her family must find a way to make ends meet without a necessary source of income. Additionally, even a minor criminal record can result in lifelong barriers to climbing out of poverty. For example, people with criminal records face substantial barriers to employment, housing, education, public assistance, and building good credit. More than 90 percent of employers now use background checks in hiring, and even an arrest without a conviction can prevent an individual from getting a job. The “one strike and you’re out” policy used by public housing authorities makes it difficult for individuals with even decades-old criminal records to obtain housing, and can obstruct family reunification. And in more than half of U.S. states, individuals with felony drug convictions are burdened with a lifetime ban on receiving certain types of public assistance.

In addition to common-sense sentencing reform to ensure that we no longer fill our nation’s prisons with non-violent, low-level offenders, policymakers should explore alternatives to incarceration, such as diversion programs for individuals with mental health and substance abuse challenges. We must also remove barriers to employment, housing, education, and public assistance. A decades-old criminal record should not consign an individual to a life of poverty.

10)  Do no harm

The across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration—which took effect in 2013—slashed funding for programs and services that provide vital support to low-income families. Sequestration also cost the American economy as many as 1.6 million jobs between mid-2013 and 2014.  As Congress considers a continuing resolution to fund the federal government past October 1 and avoid another government shutdown, it should reject further cuts to vital programs and services which would once again take us in the wrong direction. Thereafter, Congress should make permanent the improvements made to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are set to expire in 2017. And it should protect and strengthen vital programs such as Section 8 housing, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which suffered two rounds of deep cuts in 2013 and 2014.

Conclusion

It is not only possible for America to cut poverty, it is possible for us to cut poverty dramatically.  Between 1959 and 1973, a strong economy, investments in family economic security, and new civil rights protections helped cut the U.S. poverty rate in half. Investments in nutrition assistance have improved educational attainment, earnings, health and income among our nation’s children when they reach adulthood. Expansions of public health insurance have lowered infant mortality rates. And, in more recent history, states that have raised the minimum wage have shown the important role that policy plays in reversing wage stagnation.

There is nothing inevitable about poverty, and there is nothing inevitable about the lack of political will to dramatically reduce it.  Share this article with your friends, and get involved.

The workplace stress and uncertainty that Jannette faces day-to-day is also felt by low-income working families across the US. Fluctuating work hours and limited resources make the daily demands of family life and trying to get ahead in the economy a constant challenge, creating anxiety as families simply struggle to stay afloat.

Through its research, Children’s HealthWatch, a national nonpartisan network of pediatricians and public health researchers, has documented that job security isn’t just an economic and lifestyle issue – it affects our physical health as well.  In our brief published today – Steadying the Foundation: Maternal Job Stability, Safety Net Programs & Young Children’s Health – we describe how job instability (defined as maternal job loss or reduced work hours) increases the risk of poor health for mothers and their young children.

In urban hospitals across the country, we interviewed more than 14,000 low-income working mothers with children under age four.  We found that 38 percent of these women had experienced job instability in the past year. Compared to stably-employed mothers and their children, mothers with job instability were more likely to have poor mental and physical health, and their children were significantly more likely to be in poor health and have developmental delays. Our research also found that job instability is linked to higher levels of material hardships such as housing insecurity (living in overcrowded conditions or moving frequently) and family food insecurity (when families lack sufficient food for all members to lead active, healthy lives).

While financial loss due to job instability can end up harming the health and development of young children, our research suggests two of the largest federal safety net programs – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Unemployment Insurance – can blunt the impact. The rate of child food insecurity – a severe level of food insecurity where children have to skip meals or go without eating for an entire day – was significantly lower for children whose mothers experienced job instability but also received SNAP, than it was for the children who did not receive SNAP.  In other words, SNAP helped to buffer children from the worst effects of job instability.

Unemployment insurance (UI) had a similar positive effect, stabilizing the housing of children whose mothers had lost a job. Families experiencing job loss who received UI were 27 percent less likely to be housing insecure than those families that did not receive UI.

Of course, no one wants to have to rely on public assistance as they juggle the demands of raising a family and inconsistent work hours or job loss. As Tianna Gaines-Turner, a member of Witnesses to Hunger in Philadelphia, puts it, “No one wakes up in the morning saying, ‘I think I want to lose my job today and go apply for government assistance and wait weeks for my unemployment to go through.’ No one wants that. But food stamps and other government assistance programs are important to help families who, through no fault of their own, end up unemployed and need a little extra help.”  She and her husband both work to support their three children but have struggled to escape poverty.

In response to the New York Times article, Starbucks has announced it would change the way it schedules its baristas in order to improve “stability and consistency.” Shifting towards a more manageable and family-friendly work environment is a good first step. However, there are other actions that policymakers should take to promote job stability and improve the health and self-sufficiency of low-income families.

First, increase the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and index it to inflation to ensure its value does not erode in the future; also expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit to provide a critical boost to low-wage working families’ incomes. Second, ensure that the SNAP benefit is calculated based on the real cost of a healthy diet to help eligible families put more healthful food on the table.  Right now, it’s based on a plan that doesn’t match the costs of living for today’s working families. Third, permit “good cause” as a qualified reason for leaving a job under UI regulations.  Currently, many workers are ineligible for UI even if they have an unavoidable and justifiable cause for resigning, such as health problems or child care issues.  Lastly, strengthen the Family Medical Leave Act so that qualified workers receive up to 12 weeks of paid leave each year for the birth or adoption of a new child, serious illness of a family member, or a worker’s own medical condition.

This Labor Day, we should recognize the kinds of workplace practices and policies that allow families to lead healthy, productive lives with stability for their children.  The solutions are within reach – employers and policymakers can strengthen economic security for all working families.

When we talk about poverty it’s difficult to track—and give voice to—all of the different ideas around causes and solutions that need attention. Multiply those competing demands exponentially and you may get a feel for what working people in some of the fastest growing job sectors in our economy face every day.

Shift workers—especially those in the retail sector—are subject to unpredictable and erratic scheduling practices that make it nearly impossible to plan their lives and earn a stable income. An increasing number of these workers simply aren’t able to get the hours they need in order to support their families. They are essentially trapped in a cycle of poverty, with little time or resources to make any progress toward escaping it.

These are workers who aren’t living paycheck to paycheck; they’re living hour to hour.

How can people working under these conditions set a budget?  How do they schedule medical appointments or arrange care for their children?  In addition to dealing with their erratic schedules, retail workers are often required to be on call—making sure they are available without any guarantee of a shift.

So while increasing the minimum wage is indeed a critical step in the fight against poverty, it is just one piece of a much larger, broken system in the low-wage sector.

That’s why the Schedules That Work Act—introduced last month by Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), along with Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—is so critical. It would allow every worker to have a say in their schedules—whether someone is experiencing erratic shifts, or too many hours, or needs a schedule accommodation in order to meet an obligation. By giving workers the right to request a predictable or flexible schedule, this legislation would increase job quality in our country.

At the local level, city and state governments are also demanding that the largest, most profitable retail corporations do right by their workers.

Last week, Jobs With Justice San Francisco led a coalition of labor, community, advocacy and small-business groups in introducing a groundbreaking Retail Workers Bill of Rights ordinance. The measure, authored by San Francisco Board of Supervisors members Eric Mar and David Chiu, would create new protections for retail workers who are burdened with on-call scheduling and diminished hours. The ordinance would only apply to profitable, large chain retailers—banks, fast food and restaurant chains, department stores—companies that clearly have the means to improve labor standards. If adopted, the bill would require fair scheduling practices like advance notice, adequate on-call pay, and more opportunities for part-time workers to transition to full time-employment. It would also require employers to offer more hours to current part-time employees prior to hiring additional part-time staff.

Without these kinds of reforms to scheduling and hours in the low-wage sector, we will continue to have too many people working two and three jobs but stuck below the poverty line. Nationwide, nearly eight million people are involuntarily working part-time hours. That leaves them vulnerable to poverty—nearly one in four involuntarily part-time workers lives in poverty, compared to one in 20 full-time workers. These low-quality jobs also impact the broader community because employers shift costs—particularly for health care for their workers—to our already overburdened public systems.

We need 21st century policies to address the new 21st-century workplace. Efforts like the Schedules That Work Act and the Retail Workers Bill of Rights are more than just commonsense bills; they are innovative ways to address poverty and inequality in our communities.

This idea was a frequent refrain—repeated yesterday by Republicans and Democrats alike—at a hearing convened by Congressman Dave Reichert, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources.

As my colleague Rachel West put it in a column published yesterday:

“It is high time for Congress to re-examine the evidence on subsidized jobs… an effective tool for increasing economic security—and ensuring that those who have been left behind by the labor market have access to job opportunities.”

My appreciation for the power of subsidized jobs has its roots in North Philadelphia. Fresh out of law school in the Fall of 2009, I was a new attorney at Community Legal Services (CLS) and the Great Recession was in full swing. Nationally, unemployment was approaching 10 percent. In Philly, unemployment was nearly 11 percent—and fully a quarter of the city’s residents were living in poverty.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka, the stimulus package), federal funding was made available for states to establish subsidized jobs programs. In partnership with the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, we at CLS drafted a plan for what ultimately became Way to Work Pennsylvania—a statewide, subsidized jobs program that created 20,000 jobs for adults and youth around the Commonwealth.

While short-lived—the program ran from May 2010 through the funding’s expiration in September of that same year—Way to Work was by all accounts a great success. A partnership between Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry and the Department of Public Welfare, Way to Work connected low-income Pennsylvanians with private, nonprofit and public sector jobs paying up to $13 per hour. Per federal guidelines, priority populations for jobs placement included the long-term unemployed, low-income youth, welfare recipients, and people with criminal records (even people with minor records, such as a summary offense or an arrest without a conviction, can face significant barriers accessing jobs).

From the start, Way to Work was a win for both struggling Pennsylvanians and employers. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on small businesses that were able to expand by taking on Way to Work employees, alongside profiles of people like Barbie Izquierdo, a mother of two who had been been out of work for more than a year before getting a subsidized job at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.  Izquierdo then obtained a permanent position with the organization when one opened up. “This job has given me stability,” she told the Inquirer. “I’m living proof that Way to Work works.”

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In all, 39 states and Washington, D.C. launched programs, using $1.3 billion in federal funding to place some 260,000 workers into subsidized jobs—which comes to $5000 per worker.  If you think the numbers are compelling, watch the personal testimonials of workers and employers who benefited from Pennsylvania’s program.

But the clock was ticking. The federal funds were set to expire at the end of September 2010. Workers and employers banded together and lobbied Congress to extend the deadline so that the programs could continue. Governors of red and blue states alike—including then-Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour (R)—joined the chorus calling for the funding to be extended. In Pennsylvania, people felt so strongly about Way to Work, that a large group—including several employers—hopped a bus down to Washington in the July heat to tell members of Congress what Way to Work meant to them.

Despite bipartisan support, reauthorization of the federal funding failed to advance when the Senate couldn’t muster 60 votes, and the funds expired on schedule. Most states scaled down their programs as the funding dried up.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center on Law and Social Policy point out, the legacy of these programs is a blueprint for how subsidized jobs can serve as an effective tool for boosting economic security and mobility.

As West notes, subsidized jobs do not lessen the need to raise the minimum wage and pursue job creation, but:

“…when job opportunities remain elusive for whole groups of workers—even as economic conditions improve—these workers are denied the chance to protect their families from poverty and hardship, and chart a path to the middle class. As Congress evaluates the evidence on subsidized jobs programs, our lawmakers should consider subsidized jobs as an important strategy to increase economic mobility for those workers who need to get a foot in the door.”

Let’s hope Congress takes a serious look at an idea backed by something so rare it is now considered an anomaly: strong bipartisan support.

President Obama will sign an executive order that in essence demands that companies clean up their acts and comply with labor laws if they are to receive federal contracts.  Now they will have to disclose any past violations of wage and safety laws, and other worker protections such as the right to not be discriminated against because of race or gender, and companies with a track record of violating workplace laws will no longer receive the federal contracts they have come to expect.

To put this change in perspective: the United States federal government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world, spending $500 billion a year on government contracts.  More than one in five workers are employed by a company that contracts with the federal government.  Further, reforms that are initially limited to contractors – such as when President Johnson signed an executive order banning gender and racial discrimination – often later expand to the broader workplace.

In short, the executive order that will be signed today will have a significant impact on the lives of American workers.

Unfortunately, our current system for reviewing a contractor’s history of workplace safety and wage violations is inadequate and has allowed those with poor records to continue to receive government contracts.  In fact, according to a recent report by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), companies that currently receive government contracts comprise one-third of the top offenders of workplace safety and wage laws.  From 2007 to 2012, wage theft by federal contractors amounted to $82 million in back wages for workers – hardly insignificant, especially for low-wage workers whose families are living on the brink.  During the same five-year period, 42 workers employed by companies with government contracts died due to workplace safety violations. Responsible contracting reforms will put millions of dollars into workers pockets, reduce workplace discrimination, and increase safety.

This executive order will be good for America’s taxpayers.  Contracting with companies that have egregious records of workplace violations – companies that are bad actors – frequently wastes taxpayer dollars and results in low-quality services to the government. According to a report by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, between 2005 and 2009, one-fourth of all government contractors that had the worst workplace safety records also had performance issues ranging from cost overruns to development delays to outright fraud.

This executive order will move the nation towards rewarding businesses that want to do right by their workers and taxpayers. Law-abiding businesses will celebrate this change.  They will no longer be placed at a competitive disadvantage with companies that reduce costs by paying lower wages than those required by law and by cutting corners on workplace safety.

All too often, the federal government has contracted with companies based on their ability to provide low-cost services – no matter what they are doing in the workplace.  President Obama’s action today will be a game changer – it will help ensure that companies follow the law, and that good companies are rewarded while bad actors are held accountable.

Perhaps most importantly, today’s action will improve the workplace as well as the pay for millions of workers who are struggling to get by – workers whose needs and rights have too often been on the periphery when it comes to awarding lucrative federal contracts.

With this executive order, those days are over, and that’s something worth celebrating.

 Low-wage federal contract workers strike at Union Station for a Good Executive Jobs order. They were joined by Interfaith Worker Justice, SEIU, NETWORK, Members of Congress, and other organizations.

People I have talked with about this have said “The workers have won, they got a raise.  Why should the President take more action to address their concerns?”

I urge them, and anyone else who believes that a $10.10 minimum wage is enough to support a family to walk a mile in the shoes of Karla Quezada.  Karla has worked for more than a decade prepping food, making sandwiches and working the cashier serving customers at the Ronald Reagan federal building in Washington DC.  A single mother, she has worked day-in and day-out, sometimes more than 70 hours per week, trying to support her family.

In a complaint with Department of Labor (DOL), Karla alleges that she is a victim of wage theft.  She says that Subway never paid her the overtime premium that she was due when she would work more than 40 hours in a week. According to the complaint, Karla went on strike to highlight the abuse of federal contract workers, and her employer cut her hours, hoping to force her to quit and find another job.  But Karla has other ideas and greater resolve.

She has continued to raise her voice, highlighting the fact that wage theft and other abuses are taking place in federal buildings.  Karla and her coworkers joined with other federal contract workers to file that complaint with the DOL about their stolen wages.  It’s been over a year since the first complaint was filed, and the workers have not yet gotten a response.

I’m reminded of this Bible passage in Romans 4:4 – “Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.” Raising wages is a great first step, but it’s not enough.  We need to guarantee that workers like Karla are paid every single penny of the money they have earned. It’s the moral thing to do, the right thing to do.  I believe the American people agree. Our tax dollars should not go to companies that are violating not only moral imperatives, but also actual laws.

In fact, our contributions as taxpayers should help guarantee that the jobs our tax dollars create are good jobs that can support a family, not keep hard working people living in poverty.

President Obama can do more to help federal contract workers.  A recent report by the public policy organization Demos found that if the president where to take action on a Good Jobs Executive Order he could put 20 million Americans on a path towards the middle class.  Eight million workers and their families employed in jobs created by taxpayer dollars could stop relying on public assistance in order to make ends meet.

A Good Jobs Executive Order could give preference to those companies that pay a living wage and provide good benefits, follow the law, allow workers to collectively bargain and don’t overspend on CEO pay.

Why should taxpayers reward companies that exploit their workers who are our neighbors and friends?

Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faith leaders agree and are supporting these workers in their struggle for fairness and a real opportunity to achieve the American dream.  Our faith compels us to stand with them, because their struggle is just and it is our struggle as well. Karla and her coworkers are not doing this out of selfishness. Millions of workers that Karla has never met can benefit from the risks she and her coworkers are taking.  Although they don’t all know each other, they do share one thing:  Taxpayer dollars are being used to keep them in poverty.

The President can change that with the stroke of his pen.

That’s why in my last piece I echoed a call to combine a guaranteed $4,800 credit for every child with a guaranteed $15,000/year job for every family. That combination would drop child poverty to below one percent. The economic case for the child credit is simple and powerful: child poverty is really expensive, and addressing it early saves a lot of money in the long run.

Can the same economic case be made for a guaranteed job? To do so, you’d have to find jobs that cost the public more by not paying people to do them than the proposed $15,000 annual salary. You’d also have to find jobs that you reasonably believe the market would not provide alone. Finally, you’d want to find enough jobs that you could actually move the needle on poverty and employment.

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I can think of three areas of public job provision that should meet all three criteria.

Infrastructure jobs. Congress has once again artlessly avoided fixing our highway trust fund in a sustainable way. Spending on infrastructure has fallen steadily for fifty years, and our country has dangerously crumbling roads, bridges, levees, public transit, and airports.

A Brookings Institution brief estimates that the annual economic cost of poor infrastructure is more than $170 billion. Funding a national corps of infrastructure workers would meet criterion one: it’s costly not to. It also clearly meets criterion two: inadequate infrastructure spending is not exactly a new problem. If the market alone were going to create these needed jobs, it would have by now.

Does it meet the third criterion? The proposal calls for jobs that pay $15,000 a year. For several years—at least as we upgrade our infrastructure—$170 billion in economic savings would pay for 11 million new jobs at that salary.

Community health workers. As the US population ages, healthcare spending will consume an ever-greater share of national resources. A principal economic goal, then, should be to reduce the cost of per-person healthcare spending.

The Urban Institute recently published a case for Community Health Workers, which would do just that:

Community health workers help people improve their health, manage their illnesses, and obtain services in timely and appropriate ways. Community health workers are lay people with close ties to the communities they serve who readily win clients’ trust. Trained to have health knowledge and selected for “people skills,” they promote wellness and connect clients with medical and other services, especially disadvantaged clients.

These types of services represent one of the more promising ways to keep costs down by improving health and the value of care, according to the Urban Institute. In fact, there is growing evidence that Community Health Workers do just that, but they lack adequate funding: Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay for them and so far private insurers have not done so either.

Community health workers therefore meet all three criteria: they provide cost savings, the field is not growing organically, and in the coming decades there will be great demand for their services.

An army of “sous-teachers”. This op/ed by a public school teacher argues poignantly that, for teachers, “there is never enough”—never enough time, energy, resources:

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual’s instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

A good teacher knows these things, the writer argues, but with 30 hours a week of planning and grading and mandatory lunch and recess duty and overcrowded classrooms and not enough money for school supplies…no teacher can actually reach that standard.

So, let’s pair every public school teacher with a sous-teacher. Sous-teachers will complete a training program that equips them to grade simple assignments and quizzes, make copies, manage the classroom, and supervise playtime, all while leaving teachers time and space to realize the goal of that “perfect” classroom.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen as clear an evidence base on the cost-effectiveness of this third idea. But we know that investing in children’s early development leads to health benefits and increased productivity. Improving the richness and quality of our children’s classroom seems a promising route – and in the meantime we could create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

If we, the public, adopt a long-term mindset of investing in our own economy, children, and workers, then we will find a long list of ideas that meet the criteria outlined here. It’s a matter of moving away from our “fiscal cliff” version of emergency governing to a long-term vision—one that empowers workers and families and builds a sustainable economy.

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Raising the wage of federal employees and contract workers is a great step towards setting a wage floor for the entire nation. Governments are the largest employer in America, so when the feds pay their workers better, other sectors have to do the same in order to compete.

But there is much more that can be done to achieve a living wage, particularly at the local level.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are 19,492 municipal governments, 3,033 county governments, and 14,561 school districts in the United States.  Each one of them provides services to their constituents through the labor of millions of workers.  The public agencies that employ these workers represent an enormous amount of purchasing power.  Cities, counties and school district can follow the lead of President Obama and reform their procurement processes in order to raise wages for their workers.

Employees in positions that are traditionally public service jobs are particularly vulnerable to wage reductions when their positions are outsourced. For example, in New Jersey, K-12 school food service workers had their wages cut an average of $4 to 6 per hour—and many of their health insurance benefits wiped out—when their jobs were outsourced to companies like Aramark, Sodexo and Compass. At the time of the study, food service companies had among the highest levels of employees and their children enrolled in the New Jersey FamilyCare program, driving up poverty and likely costing taxpayers far more than any savings realized through privatization.

Similarly, Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) outsources 47% of its fixed-route bus service to Veolia and First Transit. The general manager of the RTD admits that the cost savings from the outsourced service are largely due to cuts in employee compensation. The starting pay for bus drivers employed by RTD is $15.49 per hour, compared to $12.25 for drivers with private contractors.

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And In December 2009, Milwaukee County outsourced nearly 90 janitors responsible for cleaning public buildings. Working for the county, these employees earned between $13.95 and $15.75 per hour plus benefits. When the service was outsourced, the contractor paid $8.00 per hour with no benefits. With families to support, many of the workers—who had more than 10 years of experience with Milwaukee County—couldn’t afford to take the degraded jobs.

Cities can enact legislation that requires contractors to pay their employees a living wage and provide reasonable benefits. Many cities have already passed “living wage ordinances” and more should follow their lead. And while these laws are a good first step, it should also be noted that the mandated wage levels too often fall short of what would truly be a family-sustaining wage.

Some public agencies are beginning to set new standards. For example, this month the Los Angeles Unified School District raised the minimum wage to $15 per hour for its service workers who keep the schools clean, safe and operating. Service Employees International Union Local 99 advocated for the new contract—which received unanimous support from the school board and was strongly supported by the district’s Superintendent. The contract is an example of how management, public service employees and elected leaders can come together to find a solution that pays a living wage and benefits everyone.

Raising the wage floor for everyone who works for the federal, state, or local government—or for an employer that benefits from government contracts—would increase the minimum wage for the majority of American workers. Other employers would also have to raise wages to compete for talent in the labor market.

In an era of rising income and wealth inequality, these are concrete steps our elected leaders can take to make communities more equitable and our families more financially secure.

In my book, Part of the Family: Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers, and the Battle for Domestic Workers’ Rights, I discuss how domestic workers have successfully persuaded state and federal policymakers to include domestic workers within basic labor protections such as overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), enacted in 1938, deliberately excluded domestic workers. This type of gendered exclusion results in higher levels of poverty for women. Domestic workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the United States.  Since our nation’s earliest days they have been excluded from basic labor protections, in large part because the work of the domestic sphere — dominated by women — has long been considered not “real” work.

In recent years, amid the economic turmoil so many Americans are experiencing, the message that domestic work is real work has begun to resonate with some policymakers. In 2010, the New York state legislature enacted the nation’s first domestic workers’ bill of rights, ensuring overtime, rest breaks and disability benefits for the state’s domestic workers. California followed suit in 2013 (though the legislative path wasn’t easy, with bills vetoed in 2006 and 2012). Hawaii also enacted legislation in 2013 that expands overtime protections for domestic workers. Massachusetts just enacted legislation that ensures a day of rest per week and protection from harassment on the job. Critically, President Obama and former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis finally reversed the exclusion of domestic workers from the FLSA. These regulations would ensure that domestic workers are protected under wage and hour laws, and, barring delays, will be effective in 2015.

During these legislative battles, advocates saw clear shifts in how legislators understood the issue of domestic workers’ rights. New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver originally refused to bring the state bill of rights to the assembly floor. But over time he was persuaded to support the legislation, and upon enactment, he noted, “This bill rights a wrong that began when domestic workers were excluded from the labor protections created by the New Deal and brings us one step closer to our goal of dignity and fairness for all workers across this state.”

Clearly, the end goal is not just the new regulations. These campaigns for domestic workers’ rights help change the way that all of us — including our legislators — think about the value of workers. The movement is part of a larger movement demanding that all workers be paid a living wage; receive paid sick days that are good for workers and public health; and have the right to paid family leave that is critical for workers and those who need their care.

There may continue to be setbacks — such as the Supreme Court’s ruling in Harris v. Quinn on June 30, which weakened the collective bargaining power of many domestic workers. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t reason for optimism. The heightened awareness among policymakers alone is a signal of progress, though it has to be sustained. My book advocates for more funding for community organizers who work hard to ensure that workers are aware of their rights and that new laws are enforced. Shining a light on emerging activism and its successes is also crucial.

The narrative of the economic collapse can indeed evolve into a better story – one in which the Great Recession eventually led to improved economic conditions for women and for all workers.

Over the years, these protections have been what safeguards the right to a minimum wage, overtime pay, health and safety protections, and the right to form a union. Without them, low-wage workers—the very people on whom we rely on a daily basis—are disempowered and often trapped in poverty.

These excluded sectors have banded together to create worker centers—non-profit, community organizations representing specific occupational sectors—mostly made up of “immigrant workers and African-Americans who labor in jobs that do not pay a livable wage.” The first crop of worker centers emerged over two decades ago in response to the waning power of traditional labor organizing and the unique needs of laborers of color.  They provided a critical community touch point in advocating and organizing for just workplace practices. Since then, they have grown to create national bodies representing all major sectors, and include: the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Guestworker Alliance, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, among others. By one estimate, there are now over 200 worker centers across the United States fighting for fair wages, paid leave, and other workplace protections.

Today, low-wage industries employ 1.85 million more workers than at the beginning of the 2008 recession and represent some of the fastest growing sectors in the economy. These industries include restaurant work, retail, and caregiving, all of which have high volumes of immigrants, people of color, and women in the workforce. When we see that these same people also make up a disproportionate amount of working Americans living in poverty—earning a fraction of the wages of their white, male counterparts—we should look to their employers for answers.

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The $600 billion restaurant industry, specifically, is the largest employer of people of color in the United States. Thirty-nine percent of all workers making the minimum wage or below work in this industry, making it the largest low-wage employer. Simply raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase the combined incomes of people of color by $16.1 billion—nearly 300,000 of those affected would be workers of color in the restaurant industry. Additionally, 2 in 3 tipped workers are women, and the tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991. All of this points to the fact that at the frontlines of the gender and racial wage gap, workers making poverty wages are bravely taking on giant, moneyed interests like the restaurant industry. This is truly the David and Goliath story of our time.

In some cases, workers are winning. Last year, ROC United was instrumental in securing paid sick days for tipped workers in Washington, D.C. The National Domestic Workers Alliance also successfully fought to provide minimum wage and overtime protections for homecare workers.

In many ways, worker centers are a contemporary economic necessity. Since people of color are the rising majority, it is imperative that we improve job quality in sectors that currently employ these workers at high rates. Worker centers become even more needed as traditional labor organizations and workers’ rights are threatened in Congress, in individual states, and in the Supreme Court with the recent Harris v Quinn decision.

Nearly 51 years ago, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, activists called for not only desegregation, but also dignified jobs and decent wages.  And tomorrow at 10:00am ET, the Center for American Progress marks the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act—which included historic protections at the workplace—with an event: “Passing the Baton: The Next 50 Years of Civil Rights and Economic Justice”.  Watch live as an intergenerational group of civil rights activists offers ideas about how to renew and invigorate a movement focused on civil rights and economic security.

Many low-wage workers are already leading the way.  This is an opportunity to find new ways to get involved.

There was once a strong statistical link between economic growth and poverty reduction, but rising inequality has severed it, and the results are deeply dispiriting. If the statistical link between economic growth and falling poverty that held before the mid-1970s had not been broken by rising inequality, then poverty, as the government measures it, would be virtually eradicated today. Furthermore, the impact of rising inequality is nearly five times more important in explaining poverty trends than family structure.

As the Economic Policy Institute has documented in our paper launching the Raise America’s Pay project, this rise in inequality is simply the flip side of nearly stagnant hourly wage growth for the vast majority of the American workforce in the three decades before the Great Recession. So how to reverse this wage-stagnation, especially for low-wage workers? Below is a list of proposals, all linked in their attempt to rebuild institutions that provide bargaining power to workers who have had it taken from them in recent decades.

The minimum wage is currently more than 25% below its real value in the late 1960s. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that the Harkin-Miller bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 would cumulatively boost incomes of people below the federal poverty line by $5 billion. And this is probably too conservative; other academic research finds that the same bill would lift more than 4 million people out of poverty. Among those who would see a raise from the Harkin-Miller bill, 55% are women and 25% are women of color. Nearly one-in-five kids would see at least one parent get a raise.

Another key policy priority should be efforts to level the playing field for workers to organize and form unions. The decline in unionization over the last several decades has led to increases in wage inequality and a loss of bargaining power for workers. And this bargaining power loss is not confined to union members themselves—unions often set wage-standards for entire sectors. Importantly, the decline in unionization is not a natural, inevitable phenomenon or a result of workers no longer wanting unions. It is the result of a policy decision to allow growing employer aggressiveness to tilt the playing field against organizing drives.

This policy choice is clear when one looks at the evidence. First, unionization has held up much better in the public sector where employers have less ability to fight organizing drives. Second, in 2007, the share of non-union workers who said they wanted to be represented by a union or similar organization reached an all-time high at over 50%.   There is a growing wedge between the desire to organize and bargain collectively and workers’ ability to do so. And, third, even the most obvious form of employer aggressiveness—the firing of workers who are trying to organize—has risen sharply in recent decades, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

The fact is that the decline of unions can explain approximately one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men and approximately one-fifth among women since the 1970s. This rising wage inequality is the key driver behind stagnant wages for workers at the bottom. When low-wage workers have been able to organize, unionization is  associated with higher wages and benefits for many, including: food preparation workers, cashiers, cafeteria workers, child-care workers, cooks, housekeepers, and home-care aides.

Reducing wage theft is also particularly important to low-wage workers. Wage theft occurs when employers withhold wages that are owed to a worker, for example by requiring workers to work off the clock or refusing to pay overtime. There is widespread evidence of these practices and more—from tipped workers not being paid their wages to Apple store employees being forced to stand in line after their shift while their bags are checked for merchandise. In nearly 9,000 investigations of the restaurant industry, the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor found that 83.8% of the shops investigated had wage and hour violations —underscoring the enforcement problems.

Millions of low- and moderate-wage workers have also seen slow wage growth because they are working overtime and not getting paid for it. This is because the real value of the salary threshold under which all salaried workers, regardless of their work duties, are covered by overtime provisions has been allowed to erode dramatically. Simply adjusting the threshold for inflation since 1975 would raise it to $984 per week (or $51,000 on an annual basis), from its current level of $455 ($24,000 annually). This simple adjustment would guarantee millions of additional workers time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

Other labor market policies and practices, which, if changed, would increase the wages of low- and moderate-wage workers, include: the misclassification of employees, such as construction workers who are deemed independent contractors so that the employer doesn’t have to pay for workers’ compensation. Just-in-time scheduling occurs when employers schedule workers erratically and sporadically, and denies workers any regularity in their schedule or pay. Think about how difficult that is for working parents who need to support their families and also find child care, or for workers who need a second job to make ends meet. Finally, paid sick time, paid family medical leave, and flexible work hours, all would support workers and their families.

The social safety net remains crucial for low-income working families in this country and also needs reforms. Everything from shoring up SNAP to extending EITC to childless adults to expanding Medicaid to people in those states which refuse federal dollars. We also should have universal pre-K and affordable and high quality child care—we need to use every tool in our toolbox to give kids a chance of success, reducing inequality at the starting gate of kindergarten.

But, if we really care about children in our country, then we also need to raise the wages of parents working hard every day to lift their families out of poverty.  We need to enforce the labor standards we have, update the ones that need it, and put power back in the hands of workers to bargain for better working conditions for themselves and their families.

Around the turn of the century, fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons spent their waking hours in the dark of the coal mines, sacrificing their health, and sometimes their lives, so the rest of America could have coal. They were subjected to suppression and labor exploitation, and families were being destroyed. Finally, the mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters, of the miners unified, and in 1921, came to be known as the Amazon Army. Holding American flags high, two to six thousand women marched through the coalfields in protest of the unfair and unjust working conditions and labor laws that oppressed the people of the region.  Armed only with red pepper, these women stood toe-to-toe with rifle and shotgun-bearing militia, catapulting the plight of Southeast Kansas coal miners into national newspapers, and forever changing the history of the region. But when the coal ran dry, this place was forgotten. Abandoned by the national eye, it became just another corner of a “flyover state.”

However, people are still here, and we are not flyover people. Southeast Kansans toil in manufacturing, farming, service industries, and education. We have successful business entrepreneurs, quality community colleges, and a Regents University.  However, there is an economic divide that continues to grow. The overall poverty rate reaches up to 23% in one county; the child poverty rate is nearly 29%–as high as 38.8% in one county.  In most school systems, 50 to 75% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Low wages in the region make it difficult to find safe and affordable housing, and 55% of the housing stock is over 54 years old. Our elders are slipping into poverty after retirement, with nearly 10% currently living below the federal poverty line. And our average annual income from wages continues a ten-year declining trend. We are working so hard to make ends meet, that we have had little energy left to question why our economy isn’t growing, why our wages aren’t increasing, and why our civic voice isn’t being heard.

Without the leveraging power of coal, Southeast Kansans have found it difficult to stand up to the continuous attack on our future. The attack comes by way of monetary manipulation within our state legislature, which has passed one of largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever enacted by any state while leaving our schools underfunded, and our most vulnerable without medical access.  They claimed these cuts would boost our economy, but according to the Kansas Department of Revenue, tax revenue in April dropped 45 percent from the prior year—$92 million short of forecasts.

We have also faced the single largest cut to Kansas public education in state history, with more than $104 million sliced from Kansas classrooms; these cuts left school funding levels so low that the Kansas Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.  Another highly controversial school funding bill literally passed in the middle of the night, stripping teachers of due process rights and handing out corporate tax breaks by cutting funding for at-risk kids.  And most recently, legislators passed a last-minute budget deal to transfer $5 million from early childhood program funds to an agency that invests in bioscience companies.

At the same time that tax cuts for the wealthy are shrinking needed revenues, Kansas has also rejected federal Medicaid expansion, leaving one in six Kansas adults under 65 without health insurance; nearly 100,000 Kansans in more than 150 industries without access to affordable healthcare.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change. Today, we hear gunshots ring out as we harvest deer for the year’s meat.  We hear water lapping at the banks of the pits and rivers, as we search for fish to fill our freezers. And people are starting to organize. We are forming organizations and coalitions to take control of our future, grow our own businesses, promote equitable economic development, and solutions to poor health outcomes. Economic development initiatives like Project 17, spanning 17 counties—and the Joplin Regional Prosperity Initiative, spanning 7 counties—are focused on workforce development and living wage job creation. Pittsburg’s Downtown Group and Get Independence are determined to revitalize the central business districts, promoting music, art, and culture. Local farmers and ranchers are being supported through groups like Eat Well Crawford County and the Food Policy Council forming in Iola. And county health rankings are improving, along with our overall quality of life, thanks to groups like Thrive Allen County and Live Well Crawford County.

A movement is beginning to swell—a movement that will create our own version of the Amazon Army and stand toe-to-toe with the income inequality and injustice that is ruining our region, our state, and our country.

Yet, poverty is nowhere. The men, women and children who are part of the 106 million striving and struggling Americans are invisible and voiceless. They are invisible because the debate about poverty is swirling around them but does not actually include them. They are invisible because they are not recognized as people but rather as a condition or a problem. They are blamed rather than empowered. They are voiceless because they are locked out of the corridors of power where conversations about poverty are happening. At best, their stories serve as useful anecdotes that add color to the harrowing statistics.

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It’s past time for people who are poor to tell their own stories so that we can then have a real conversation about what actually contributes to economic success or failure in America.

Pina Orsillo Belgrano has one of these low wage jobs that keeps her struggling. Pina, 58, is a single mother in Seattle who worked as a restaurateur, travel agent and a real estate agent in 2008 until the economy tanked and she lost those jobs. The only job Pina could find was a $12 an hour job in the hotel industry. Pina does not earn enough money to protect her home from being foreclosed.

Pina is unfortunately among the millions of people living in a society where the economy no longer allows them to afford the basics. We have the answers to solve these problems but there is a deep misalignment of power in our society that is preventing us from seeing it and getting there. That must be our north star; building power among people who don’t have it.

And that’s why the Center for Community Change Action (CCCA) is rooting our economic justice campaign in conversations with people who are living on the brink so we can hear how they define their situation and how we can make our economy fairer for everyone.

There are positive signs.  The WASH New York campaign clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of building a movement. After more than a decade of grassroots organizing, the New York carwash campaign helped carwash workers, who are paid less than minimum wage with no additional pay for overtime, fight their way out of poverty. These workers, with the strong support of community organizations, joined together to demand better pay and working conditions.

No one thought they had a chance. The owners are too big, too spread out, and there are too many of them, the workers were told.

These “carwasheros” didn’t let the naysayers stand in their way. Because of their efforts, they now have higher wages, increased job security, posted job schedules and paid leave. They built a movement and they won.

Luis Rosales, who worked at one of the big car washes in Queens for more than five years said, “This is going to be a great change for our car wash. More importantly, we were able to show other workers that it makes sense to fight and win what seemed impossible.”

And now that the city of Seattle has a compromise deal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest minimum wage in the nation, people like Pina will earn more. With the extra money, Pina will be able to meet the income requirements to receive a loan modification so she can stay in her home.

CCCA is working with local partner organizations to raise the quality of jobs (including wages, benefits, and working conditions); ensure that low-income workers and job seekers have a fair shot at those jobs; and reduce barriers to employment that currently deny opportunities for people who have been incarcerated.

Sounds too lofty? Look at what people in America have accomplished when they banded together: equal rights for women, civil rights, child labor laws, voting rights.

In Youngstown, Ohio—a city that was hard hit by the recession and has been battling to come back ever since—I heard one of the best summaries of why we need this movement for good jobs right now. An African American man, Willis, said, “That’s poverty to me…where you ain’t got no wiggle room to enjoy life.”

The rich shouldn’t be the only ones with wiggle room. That’s why we’re building a movement with Willis, with Luis, with Pina. This is the only way we will create an economy that is just and fair for all Americans—especially for those who are paid less than what it takes to get by. And it’s the only way poverty will truly be nowhere.

But raising the minimum is not enough, and absent a serious challenge to how wealth and power is mal-distributed in this country, may prove a fleeting and potentially short-term victory. Communities of color lost 60% of their wealth in the 2008 economic collapse. Just this year, Wall Street gave themselves bonuses greater than the total wages of a million minimum wage workers. Since the 2008 economic crash, 95% of the economic gains have gone to the top 1%.  If we don’t have a grander, bigger, bolder vision of what is possible and needed, a newly raised minimum wage could also become the maximum wage for increasing numbers of workers whose pay and standard of living is being driven ever downward.

We know parts of the story only too well. Over the last forty years the economy and politics of the country have been remade. Wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the top one tenth of one percent. The miserably low minimum wage, impact of tax cuts for the rich, and defunding of the government—they are all just part of a much bigger story. The economy is increasingly “financialized”—financial institutions are increasing their size and influence at every level of the government and the economy.  Wall Street—continuously coming up with ingenious ways to extract wealth from every part of the economy—has driven the growing wealth divide in our country.

One way to think about what has happened is that a massive redistribution machine was created and set loose on our country (and internationally). With each passing day it is increasingly sophisticated in finding new tricks, skims and scams to concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

How does the wealth redistribution machine work?

First, outsourcing and subcontracting: In the 1970’s, corporations were faced with rising wages for unionized workers and the growing success of the civil rights and women’s movements in challenging poverty wages, job segregation, and discrimination. The redistribution machine started experimenting with the most vulnerable workers by subcontracting and outsourcing jobs. By hiring another company to pay and supervise janitors, cafeteria and other low-wage workers, corporations found they could avoid the pressure to promote workers of color and raise wages.  Instead, they cut pay and eliminated benefits, while dodging any legal liability or moral responsibility for their actions. By subcontracting and outsourcing they were technically no longer the employer and could drive wages lower, all while still maintaining functional control of the work.

Second, de-unionizing and disaggregating work:  As a result of mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buy-outs, there is greater corporate control, concentration and monopolization at the top. At the same time, work has become increasingly disaggregated—meaning workers are rarely directly hired or paid by the entity that ultimately controls their jobs and wages. Unionization rates have plummeted.   Practices that were once used to cut the pay of the poorest workers are now the norm, spreading to increasing numbers of workers throughout the economy. Workers who organize unions find the entity that signs their check is often—ready for this?—a marginal subcontractor or franchisee of an outsourced subsidiary of a massive private equity firm, hedge fund, or other corporate entity, that is insulated legally from being picketed by workers. Corporations got the best of both worlds—control and no responsibility.

Third, profiting by driving people into debt:  The brilliance of the redistribution machine is that in sucking wealth out of workers’ pockets, it created a new market through which it could transfer more wealth to the already rich. Short of money to pay bills, tens of millions took out usurious payday loans; communities of color were targeted for predatory home equity loans and mortgages; and credit cards with exploding interest rates and bank overdraft fees drained hundreds of billions from people’s pockets. Forty million people now have $1.2 trillion in student loan debt—115,000 retirees have their social security checks garnished to repay student loans every month.  The redistribution machine’s answer to declining wages is to loan you money.

Fourth, feeding on tax dollars and gorging on government:   The City of Los Angeles pays more than $200 million a year in fees to Wall Street, $50 million more than it spends on street repairs. Nowhere has the redistribution machine’s creativity been clearer than in how it uses political power to defund government largely through corporate loopholes and bad tax policy; and then it turns a profit through complex schemes to finance, privatize, and lend to the very government it helped to defund. There is $6 trillion in government spending every year and Wall Street has used privatization schemes, outrageous fees, interest rate manipulations, price fixing, and predatory public loans products—like the interest rate swaps that helped bankrupt Detroit—to capture and transfer to the super-rich as much of the public’s money as possible.

So what to do if raising the minimum wage is essential but not enough?

We need to consciously and systematically use the momentum, energy and excitement generated by campaigns to raise the minimum wage—as the base and launching pad—to expose and slow the redistribution machine. Minimum wage campaigns can and should be the entry point for a bigger call to not only raise the bottom but challenge the very idea that the elite rich should dominate the political and economic life of the country.

We then need to look at opportunities to go on offense to reverse the massive redistribution in wealth that plagues our country.  For example:

• Using eminent domain: Cities of all sizes can modify mortgages for homeowners who are underwater, and begin to rebuild wealth in communities of color and working class communities.
• Refinancing federal loans and eliminating the Wall Street profit from higher education: Wall Street rakes in billions through publicly financed Pell grants at for-profit colleges; interest and fees on private loans; servicing, fees and debt collection of federal loans; and lending to higher education institutions that borrow money in the face of defunding. Refinancing existing loans and getting Wall Street out of higher education could save students and tax payers billions of dollars.
• Renegotiating with Wall Street: Cities can band together and demand that Wall Street cut what some have estimated as $50 billion in fees that are draining much needed public revenue. Cities pay Wall Street 2 % management fees for managing pension funds (even if Wall Street loses money), they pay for “letters of credit”, “remarketing fees”, the list goes on and on.  Cities could use their combined economic clout to negotiate lower fees and less Wall Street profiting off of tax dollars.
• Transforming major contract negotiations for the public good: Public sector unions and community groups can join together and use major contract negotiations to demand that cities, school boards and states stop wasting taxpayer money on complex interest rate swaps—and risky pension fund investments in hedge funds and private equity firms—that allow Wall Street to pay themselves outsized fees and deliver minimal returns to tax payers.
• Holding corporations legally accountable: Cities and states can pass laws that hold corporations accountable for the working conditions throughout their supply chain, including for subcontracted workers, and create conditions that increase the ability of workers to organize unions.
• Reinventing and reestablishing the strike:  This is the critical weapon workers need to confront, disrupt and force negotiations with the corporations at the top of the supply chain.

There has never been a better moment to challenge inequality.  Let’s learn a lesson from the super-rich: they’ve created innumerable innovations to siphon off wealth; now it’s our turn—to create innumerable innovations to slow, stop and reverse the redistribution machine.

I have lived in Oliver for the entire 31 years of my life.  In the last two years, I have buried more than nine friends and family members—six of them because of gun violence. You can’t tell a grown man not to sell drugs if you don’t have anything else to offer him. I got into trouble early in my life, and I was locked up for drugs. When I got out and got my second chance, I chose a different path. But my friends lived a certain lifestyle—a street life. Where we live, without a job, in order to eat you have to live a street life. This is the reality and you can’t escape it.

After my best friend, Yarndragus, was shot in the middle of the street in broad daylight, I knew I had to make a change.

If those six friends could’ve found good jobs, they would still be alive today. That is why I believe we have to get Baltimore and Maryland working.  I have been working with TRF and BUILD for the last two years, and I am grateful.  I have seen firsthand how change starts—with meaningful work for the residents of the neighborhoods.

Now, I work with young people who want to work. I take them to job fairs and to apply wherever I see companies hiring—from the new hotels being built down downtown to restaurants to construction sites throughout the city. It’s easy to get 50 young men and women to come with me to apply, but you can see the frustration in their faces when no one in the group gets hired. Our young people want to work, but there’s nowhere for them to go to find a job.

The jobs that TRF and BUILD have created have rebuilt my mixed-income community. The neighborhood I live, work and volunteer in—once drug-stricken—is now vibrant with life, joy and excitement. This past year, I and three co-workers enrolled in school paid for by TRF and BUILD. I passed a real estate class and my co-workers passed an electrician class.  I am now an assistant property manager.  I also bought my first car this year. I am excited for this job, but I could have also been depressed.

If I didn’t get this job, I would have had to go to a job hub day after day to fill out application after application. I would have had to choose whether or not to go back to school and rack up loan debt with no guarantee of a job on the other end. If I didn’t have a job, I might be out on the streets or in jail or forced to sell drugs. So, I’m standing up for myself and for the young people in my community who want to work. I’m standing with TRF and BUILD who are putting people to work, and I hope our elected officials will stand with us too.

So as the song says: “Ain’t no stopping us now: we’re on the move!”

To succeed, this is what we need: Any shovels going into the ground in Maryland over the next 10 years need to be held by Baltimoreans and Marylanders.  Baltimore approved $1 billion in school construction funding, and hundreds of millions of dollars are going into infrastructure improvements in the area. We are asking our elected leaders to invest in residents who want to work, and we are working to get voters to the polls to make sure our leaders know they are accountable to residents.

The first house I remember living in was a big farmhouse.  It probably wasn’t really all that big but things always look larger when you’re a kid.  When I was maybe 4 or 5 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night, my sister was carrying me out of the house.  It was on fire.

My Dad was working at the steel mill on the midnight shift.  The rest of us—there were nine of us kids, I had four brothers and four sisters—we stood on the other side of the road with Mom and watched our house burn to the ground.  When Dad got home there was nothing.  We weren’t able to get our clothes out, or anything else.  And there was no insurance.

So what to do?

We had a chicken house up on the side of the hill.  My older brothers and my Dad took cardboard and used it as plaster board.  And so we lived there in the chicken house for a while—that’s where I had whooping cough.  Down over the side of the hill we had what we called a smokehouse—which was basically a cellar with a little structure on top of it.  We used that as our kitchen.  Eventually, my Dad and older brothers took our barn and made a house out of it, and that’s where I grew up.

It was definitely tough times.  My Dad probably had a 5th grade education, my Mom—I’m not sure how far she went in school.  I had a tenth sibling who didn’t survive childhood.

Dad drank a lot, and wasn’t always kind.  But my mother was just the opposite—she was like the sponge that absorbed all of the incoming fire, so to speak.  She was the protector.  And I always felt secure, sure that my Mom and Dad would be there for us.

I know there were times my parents went without what they desperately needed in order to make it possible for us kids to have what we needed.  We all cared for each other.  I remember times trying not to eat too much food.  We ate a lot of mush—oatmeal, basically.  But we always had pigs, and chickens, and cows.  We had a lot of vegetables—my Mom canned a lot. We grew a lot of potatoes and tomatoes and beans.  We always had horses, I remember plowing behind a team of horses with what we called a turning plow that would dig deep into the earth.

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Things got a little better as some of my older siblings left the house and got jobs.  Three of my brothers became construction workers—cement finishers.  We got indoor plumbing in our barn house when I was in high school.

I had no thought whatsoever of going to college—never knew anyone who went to college.  But I enjoyed school.  I stuttered badly at times during that period, but I had teachers who saw potential in me.  Mabel Keller taught me during 1^st through 4^th grades in a one-room school. I remember standing outside with her one day and she said to me, “Teddy, I wish you were my little boy.”  I remember the pride I felt.  When I was a senior in high school, another teacher, Frankie Edwards, took me to visit a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, Asbury College.  On the way home she told me if I wanted to go to college I could, there were people who would help me afford it.

So I went on to further my education and got two Masters and a PhD.  Other than myself, only one of my siblings finished high school.  And some of them were truly much more capable than I—and I mean that.  The only difference between my brothers finishing concrete—and it’s an honorable thing to do—and my ability to become a psychologist and a Congressman and a Governor, was opportunity and education.  Because I came a long later in the birth order it was possible for me to have opportunities they just didn’t have.

My family was strongly Democratic, primarily because of what my folks experienced during the Depression.  So I grew up hearing about FDR and the importance of social security and other programs that helped people in need.  We were also a strong labor family—my Dad worked at the steel mill, my brothers were members of the Cement Mason’s Union, and I belonged to the Laborers’ Union during my graduate school days when I worked in construction.  This, and my family’s experience when I was growing up, as well as the teachings of my faith—have always caused me to feel a responsibility to look out for those who have fewer opportunities in life.  And I’ve always tried to stay close to the people I want to represent—primarily because of my own need to stay in touch with where I came from.  I’ve always felt that if you’re not careful when you’re in public life you can start thinking of yourself as being other than the people whom you represent.  I’ve always tried to consciously make sure that that didn’t happen to me—I’ve seen it happen to too many other people.

So when I was in Congress and in the Governor’s office I never accepted any subsidized healthcare coverage, because there were a lot of people I represented who had no access to health care.  In terms of combatting poverty, I’m very proud of the work I did in Congress on the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which provides health insurance for millions of children nationwide who can’t afford private health insurance.  A small group of us in the House regularly met over a long period of time to formulate what became the CHIP legislation.

But I look back over my tenure as Governor, and I talked a lot more about the middle class than I did about people in poverty, or near poverty. And, yes, it was a difficult time during the Great Recession— just trying to keep things together, keep things from totally falling apart.  But we don’t hear as much concern expressed about low-income people as we did 20 or 30 years ago, and I believe that we’re regressing as a nation in that regard.

I think there is a tendency on the part of people who are not struggling to survive every day to assume that the safety net programs are there and helping the people who need help.  But then you talk to people who operate food banks, for example, you find out that there are a lot of hungry people and the food banks can’t meet the need.  And more and more, you find people who used to donate to the food banks are now turning to them every month in need.

The excuse we hear too often from political leaders who don’t talk about poverty is that budgets are too tight and you can only do so much.  But there is a reason budgets are tight—we have cut taxes!  If we had a progressive tax system that was anywhere near the levels it was before Ronald Reagan became President, we would have the resources we need.

This is one area where I think we can do a much better job—talking about the link between tax policy, decreasing revenues, and cuts in programs that people need to have a fair shot at the American Dream.

We also have to do a better job talking about work and shared prosperity.  It’s un-American, frankly, that you can work and work and work and not get out of poverty.  And I think something that is sometimes missing from progressive consciousness—and something that certainly benefited my family—is an awareness of the importance of organized labor.  We became as egalitarian as we did as a nation because working people gained power and influence by banding together and bargaining for better wages and benefits and safety conditions.  And as economic disparities have increased over these last few decades, the influence of organized labor has decreased.

So whether it’s the same paradigm or not, we’ve got to find some way for people to act collectively in their self-interest.  And that’s a challenge that I think is facing organized labor but also all of us who care about giving everyone a fair shot and a fair chance.

We simply can’t get where we need to go as a nation through individual efforts.  It’s got to be through collective action.