03/28/2024

News

Inside the Fight Over Productivity and Wages

One feature of the new EPI analysis is a nifty table (see page 8) that goes some way towards answering why the gap has widened. The table highlights how between 1995 and 2000, labor’s share of income grew, despite larger-than-usual growth in inequality of compensation.  Why? Because when labor markets are tight and productivity is rising–two features of that five-year-long golden age—workers’ pay will rise. This suggests that pursuing full employment, generally considered a 5% unemployment rate or below, could go a long way towards generating long-hoped-for upwards wage pressures throughout the economy.

Read More

A Post-Labor Day, Minimum-Wage Hangover

It’s still early to know how the hikes are affecting the job market, but the preliminary data aren’t good. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, Adam Ozimek of Moody’s MCO 2.26 % Analytics and Stephen Bronars of Edgewood Economics reported last month that the restaurant and hotel industries have lost jobs in all three cities. Mr. Bronars crunched the numbers and discovered that the “first wave of minimum wage increases appears to have led to the loss of over 1,100 food service jobs in the Seattle metro division and over 2,500 restaurant jobs in the San Francisco metro division.”

Read More

LA Plans to Undo 2012 Pension Cuts in New Union Pay Deal

A proposed four-year salary agreement with the Coalition of L.A. City Unions calls for the council to abandon that 2012 pension plan. Those nearly 2,200 workers would revert back to the older, more lucrative retirement benefits that have been in place for decades — and are increasingly viewed as financially unsustainable.

Read More

California State Scientists’ Tentative Contract Contains 15 Percent in Raises

“This tentative agreement would be a start and would provide some monetary relief for state scientists,” said CAPS Vice President and Bargaining Chair Patty Velez in a statement issued late Friday. “But it still falls well short of closing the huge salary gap between scientists and their engineering counterparts at the state, as well as scientists at the local level and in the private sector.”

Slow website
Read More

Beige Book, September 2, 2015

Upward wage pressures strengthened across the District. Hiring picked up in the information technology (IT) sector, and contacts reported robust across-the-board wage gains for workers in the Internet services and information security sectors. Wage pressures continued to mount in the construction sector with contacts from urban technology centers, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, reporting shortages of skilled labor and significant wage increases. A few contacts in the banking sector observed strong demand for talented employees and, due to vigorous competition, were unable to pass higher wages through to the prices charged for banking services. Hospitality sector contacts in some parts of the District expressed concerns that recent minimum wage increases may raise costs in their industry.

Read More

After Raising Wages, Walmart Slashes Hours

The cost of that wage increase has been estimated at more than $1 billion, and it seems as though the retailer is offsetting that cost with cuts to employee hours. The reductions began weeks ago, during the busy back-to-school shopping period.

Read More

Sacramento New Home Construction Slowed by Worker Shortages

But the massive industry shutdown seven years ago that sent workers scattering is having a residual effect. Builders are having a hard time bringing those workers back. They cite several reasons: Many of those laid-off workers retired during the recession or “aged out” of the more physically demanding trades. Some took up other jobs and are reluctant to re-enter the industry, fearful the bottom might fall out again. Still others are commuting to work in the Bay Area, where the home-construction market is hotter.

Slow website
Read More

26% of Employers Could Face the “Cadillac Tax” on Health Insurance

A new analysis released this week by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that just over a quarter of employers that offer health plans would pay the 40 percent tax in 2018 on at least one plan if they don’t make changes. The National Business Group on Health, a nonprofit association of large employers, found that half of its members reported that at least one of their health plans would trigger the tax in 2018. Both groups predicted that the proportion of employers affected would go up significantly over time.

Read More

Minimum-Wage Waivers for Union Members Stir Standoff

In at least a half-dozen of those communities, the pay-floor ordinances include a provision allowing unions to waive the wage mandates as part of a collective-bargaining agreement.

Site has paywall
Read More

California Minimum Wage Initiative Cleared for Signatures

A union-backed proposal to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour was cleared Monday to begin collecting signatures for a ballot initiative next year as local efforts continue nationwide to boost the minimum wage to better reflect the cost of living.

Read More

Despite Strong Returns, California Pension Funds’ Fiscal Hole Got Deeper

California, the nation’s most populous state, also has more government workers than any other. Nearly 1 in 10 Californians belongs to one of 85 government pension systems, according to a new report by Kevin Cook of the Public Policy Institute of California. About two in three pension members belong to either the California Public Employees’ Retirement System or the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

Slow website
Read More

Pension Initiative has “Significant” Savings, Costs

The official analysis of a proposed public pension initiative issued last week said “likely large savings” in retirement benefits would be offset by pressure for higher pay and other costs.

Read More

Effects of the Minimum Wage on Employment Dynamics

The voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment. We argue that the minimum wage will impact employment over time, through changes in growth rather than an immediate drop in relative employment levels. We show that commonly-used specifications in this literature, especially those that include state-specific time trends, will not accurately capture these effects. Using three separate state panels of administrative employment data, we find that the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years.

Read More

US Labor Costs Rise at Slowest Pace in Three Decades

U.S. labor costs rose at the slowest pace in at least three decades in the spring, a sign of persistently sluggish wage growth that could weigh on the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise short-term interest rates.

Read More

Why Union Leaders Want LA to Give Them a Minimum Wage Loophole

Guarantees that organized workers should be allowed to bargain for a subminimum wage appear to have scant legal justification, some experts said. They are not a universal feature of local wage ordinances, in California or other states. San Diego, the largest California city to raise its minimum wage in recent years before L.A., did not include such an exception.

Read More