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More than half a century since the Civil Rights Act became law, U.S. workers continue to experience different levels of success depending on their race. Analysis using microdata on earnings shows that black men and women earn persistently lower wages compared with their white counterparts and that these gaps cannot be fully explained by differences in age, education, job type, or location. Especially troubling is the growing unexplained portion of the divergence in earnings for blacks relative to whites.

The minimum wage in St. Louis falls by $2.30 an hour Monday, making it a rare city to buck the national trend of municipal pay floors rising above federal and state levels.

Many low-wage workers in the Gateway City will lose raises they received in May, when the minimum wage increased to $10 an hour. A state law taking effect Monday mandates that Missouri municipalities follow the state minimum of $7.70 an hour, nullifying the higher wage St. Louis officials had sought since 2015.

Average hourly wages are growing at a slightly slower pace over the past 12 months compared with the prior year, according to the Labor Department. Median weekly earnings are growing at a better rate, but gains have been subdued since the recession ended more than eight years ago.

Typically modest wage growth would point to remaining slack in the labor market. But that’s not the case, according to updated research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

“While higher-wage baby boomers have been retiring, lower-wage workers sidelined during the recession have been taking new full-time jobs,” paper authors Mary C. Daly, Bart Hobijn, and Benjamin Pyle wrote. “Together these two changes have held down measures of wage growth.”

It’s apparent that the 11.2 percent return, as welcome as it may be, did not result from any CalPERS investment acumen. As a recent Wall Street Journal article points out, it reflected what was happening across the spectrum of pension funds, thanks to a booming stock market, and, in fact, fell short of the 12.4 percent median return for such funds calculated by Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.

It would take years of double-digit returns to narrow CalPERS’ pension debt, now more than a quarter-trillion dollars, and reach the 80 percent funded level deemed to be minimally sufficient.

The more likely scenario is that the gap between what it needs and what it has will continue to languish, and even grow, even though CalPERS continues to ramp up mandatory “contributions” from state and local governments – or more accurately their taxpayers. Those inflows have more than doubled in recent years, hitting cities especially hard because they devote so much of their budgets to highly paid police and fire staffs that have the most lavish, and therefore most expensive, pension promises.

Although the decline in the manufacturing economy eliminated many good jobs for high school graduates, there are still 30 million good jobs in the U.S. that pay well without a BA. These good jobs have median earnings of $55,000 and are changing from traditional blue-collar industries to skilled-services industries.

U.S. worker productivity picked up modestly in the second quarter but showed little sign of breaking out of the sluggish trend that has prevailed for more than a decade, holding back economic growth and living standards. The lethargic pace of productivity growth seen in recent years could have a critical effect on the future trajectory of wages, prices, overall economic output and government budget balances. . . . “If labor productivity grows an average of 2% per year, average living standards for our children’s generation will be twice what we experienced,” Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said in a July speech. “If labor productivity grows an average of 1% per year, the difference is dramatic: Living standards will take two generations to double.”

A run-up in stocks helped deliver a banner year for America’s public pensions. But the gains won’t be nearly enough to ensure all state and local retirees receive their promised future benefits. Large U.S. systems that oversee retirement funds for police, firefighters, teachers and other public workers earned median returns of 12.4% in the fiscal year ended June 30, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service. That is their best annual result since 2014. Yet many of these public pensions remain severely underfunded despite the recent gains, meaning they don’t have enough assets on hand to fulfill all promises made to their workers. Estimates of their collective shortfall vary from $1.6 trillion to $4 trillion.

The acceleration in wages on a monthly basis may show that managers are finally starting to boost pay some more in a bid to keep or attract workers. Even so, the 2.5 percent pace of annual wage growth is little changed over the past two years, owing to factors including weak productivity, as well as people returning to the labor force and accepting lower-skilled work.

The L.A. metro area’s median base pay grew 0.5 percent in a one-year period through July 17 to $59,064, below the national average of 1.2 percent, according to a report from jobs website Glassdoor released Tuesday. The figures mark the slowest pace of wage growth in three years, indicating a continued slowdown in pay increases nationally, despite low unemployment and healthy jobs numbers, according to the report that is based on millions of anonymous salary reports shared on Glassdoor.

You probably haven’t heard much about the looming pension crisis because elected officials don’t like talking about it and it’s easy for them to kick the can down the road: they can make promises to public employees now that won’t come due until they’re out of office.

But the slow creep of pension costs is crowding out investments in other areas, including education, environmental stewardship, social services, and public transportation. In essence, the state is being forced to default on its social obligations to pay for its pension obligations. If you’re a progressive, fixing this problem may be the most important issue facing the state.

In theory, the high-wage jobs of the technology industry could be filled by people working anywhere. But in practice, the best tech jobs in the U.S., offering salaries in excess of $100,000 a year, are becoming increasingly concentrated in the metropolitan areas of just eight cities, according to new research. The eight leading U.S. tech hubs account for slightly less than 10% of U.S. jobs and about 13% of overall job postings. But the cities — Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, Raleigh, Washington, Baltimore and Boston — account for more than 27% of the listings for U.S. tech jobs, research from Jed Kolko, the chief economist of the job-search website Indeed, shows.

The state Supreme Court will review San Diego’s five-year-old pension cutbacks that, if overturned, would require the city to spend millions creating retroactive pensions for more than 3,000 workers hired since 2012. The court voted unanimously on Wednesday to review an April ruling by the Fourth District Court of Appeal that had vindicated the city and its pension cuts.

At a time when politicians and pundits decry the end of middle-class jobs, it may come as a surprise that there are 30 million jobs paying more than $35,000 a year for U.S. workers without four-year college degrees. Now for the bad news: there are 75 million U.S. workers without college diplomas, or 2.5 workers for every one of those good jobs, meaning that high-school grads have far lower odds of winning the career lottery than they did 25 years ago, according to a new report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. . . The number of good jobs for noncollege graduates rose to 30 million in 2015 from 27 million in 1991, but the labor market grew, too. By 2015, the share of all good jobs that went to noncollege graduates fell to 45% from 60% in 1991—leaving 45 million workers in low-paying, sometimes part-time roles that don’t offer a path to the middle class.

California’s second-largest public pension fund rode a booming stock market to post its best year of investment returns since 2014.

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System gained an investment return of 13.4 percent for the budget year that ended June 30.

The earnings eclipsed the 1.4 percent net return that CalSTRS reported a year ago, and the 4.8 percent gain the pension fund notched in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2015.

Workers who retire from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power enjoy a higher monthly pension, on average, than retired public employees from the city and county, according to an audit released this week by City Controller Ron Galperin. LADWP retirees received an average monthly pension payment of $5,212 in the fiscal year ending July 1, 2015, the audit said. That figure is higher than the $4,023 average monthly payment for other city retirees and the $3,881 pension amount per month for retired county workers, amounts that are used as comparisons in the audit performed by contractor, Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting.