Wages and Salaries

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Are Trump’s Followers Too Gullible?

      by

      More from our inbox:The Illogic of the Big LieSalary Negotiations for WomenThe Costs of Homelessness for Society  Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:“An Assault on the Truth,” by Rebecca Solnit (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 9), masks the political reality our country faces. I object to Ms. Solnit’s focus on gullibility as a factor in the right’s disavowal of facts.Donald Trump does not change people’s minds. The beliefs of people on the right are immutable. They are the opposite of gullible.Mr. Trump and others simply create convenient tales readily acceptable to an existing psyche. It’s easy enough to do. Focus on white privilege and the demonization of “others,” and espouse individual rights to the exclusion of all else. You will then have a very serviceable electorate at the ready to hand you power.Any thought that the right’s psyche is in any way malleable needs to be abandoned. Outvoting the right is the only way forward to preserve democracy — and, of course, that may not be enough.Ned GardnerApex, N.C.To the Editor:Rebecca Solnit does not discuss the role of the media in spreading lies among Republicans. There is Fox News, which has become a propaganda front for Donald Trump, before, during and since his presidency. And there is the plethora of right-wing internet sites, whose most outrageous lies are often repeated and brought into the mainstream of political opinion by Republican office holders.The stream of misinformation is pervasive. Democrats have participated in this, too, even if not to the extent that Republicans have. It takes motivation and effort to sort fact from fiction, and for many people that is too hard.Michael E. MahlerLos AngelesTo the Editor:As a clinical therapist who worked in addiction treatment facilities, I was reminded each day of the basic human need for approval and acceptance. We all seek to feel a part of our community, our family and our country. This promotes interdependence and solidarity, and generally strengthens our social bonds.The need for approval, however, can be so great (even desperate) that we surrender ourselves to the group in exchange for the validation it offers. The group embrace is very reassuring — particularly if one’s self-image is a little shaky — and eliminates the need for the thought and self-reflection that take time and effort, and insist that, sometimes, we stand alone in our ideals and beliefs.An integral part of the addictive personality, the need for approval further explains the gullibility and cynicism that Rebecca Solnit describes so accurately.Gary GolioBriarcliff Manor, N.Y.To the Editor:I thought this was an excellent opinion piece, along with other similar pieces you have published. At this point, however, the point has been more than adequately made. The logical next question: What do we do about it? I for one would welcome some commentary on that issue.I am myself completely flummoxed. How do you reason with, and reach out to, someone who believes only what they want to believe, no matter how cuckoo?Douglas ReevesRaleigh, N.C.The Illogic of the Big LieTo the Editor:The gaping hole in Big Lie logic is this: If Democrats were sufficiently corrupt and crafty to throw the election to Joe Biden, why didn’t they “steal” four or five additional Senate seats? Or House seats? Were they too dumb to see that there were other boxes to check below the one for president?The answer, plainly, is that they didn’t because there was no fraud, there was no organized conspiracy. (To true believers: Where are the incriminating emails or evidence of phone calls between corrupt parties?)Republicans, long the party of personal responsibility, have turned into petulant sore losers.Michael H. HodgesAnn Arbor, Mich.Salary Negotiations for WomenJordan Sale’s company aims to help job candidates navigate salary negotiations.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What Do You Think You Should Be Paid?” (Sunday Business, Jan. 2):Massachusetts was the first state to prohibit prospective employers from asking about applicants’ compensation history before making a job offer. In response, we began asking possible employees about compensation expectations. We were initially surprised that this created new problems.Some women voiced lower expectations than men for the same job. Others proposed salaries lower than average market value and awkwardly tried to revise them later. But declining to engage in salary discussions is also not an optimal strategy, as prospective employers want to make offers that are likely to be accepted and match relatively closely to expectations.First, be prepared for this question. If you are caught by surprise, there are several options: Applicants can ask the salary range of the position, defer until they have completed their research or cite the market percentile they are aiming for.For equal pay legislation to have the desired effect, education and resources are also required to help women learn how to expect and deftly handle these salary conversations.Alexa B. KimballBostonThe writer is president and chief executive of Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and a professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School.The Costs of Homelessness for SocietyLori Teresa Yearwood’s journey into homelessness was traumatic and incredibly expensive.Niki Chan Wylie for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000,” by Lori Teresa Yearwood (Opinion guest essay, Sunday Review, Jan. 2):Yes, homelessness causes profound problems for homeless people with regard to trauma, debt, mental health and so much more. But the costs are not limited to the homeless. Society pays a huge amount for homelessness.According to the Innovation for Justice Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, the cost of homelessness to Pima County (where Tucson is located) in 2018 was $64,740,105 for 9,984 families evicted that year. The costs of homelessness include increased child welfare cases, medical and emergency room visits, shelter fees, involvement in the juvenile and adult criminal justice system, mental health crises and more.Clearly, assisting the homeless with housing, work and clearing debt so that they can be productive and happier members of society is far cheaper. It is time for all of us to work toward ending this scourge.Nancy Fahey SmithTucson, Ariz.The writer works on social justice issues for Pima County Interfaith, a nonprofit. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Why Trump Still Has Millions of Americans in His Grip

      by

      Beginning in the mid-1960s, the priorities of the Democratic Party began to shift away from white working and middle class voters — many of them socially conservative, Christian and religiously observant — to a set of emerging constituencies seeking rights and privileges previously reserved to white men: African-Americans, women’s rights activists, proponents of ethnic diversity, sexual freedom and self-expressive individualism.By the 1970s, many white Americans — who had taken their own centrality for granted — felt that they were being shouldered aside, left to face alone the brunt of the long process of deindustrialization: a cluster of adverse economic trends including the decline in manufacturing employment, the erosion of wages by foreign competition and the implosion of trade unionism.These voters became the shock troops of the Reagan Revolution; they now dominate Trump’s Republican Party.Liberal onlookers exploring the rise of right-wing populism accuse their adversaries of racism and sexism. There is plenty of truth to this view, but it’s not the whole story.In “The Bitter Heartland,” an essay in American Purpose, William Galston, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a senior fellow at Brookings, captures the forces at work in the lives of many of Trump’s most loyal backers:Resentment is one of the most powerful forces in human life. Unleashing it is like splitting the atom; it creates enormous energy, which can lead to more honest discussions and long-delayed redress of grievances. It can also undermine personal relationships — and political regimes. Because its destructive potential is so great, it must be faced.Recent decades, Galston continues, “have witnessed the growth of a potent new locus of right-wing resentment at the intersection of race, culture, class, and geography” — difficult for “those outside its orbit to understand.”They — “social conservatives and white Christians” — have what Galston calls a “bill of particulars” against political and cultural liberalism. I am going to quote from it at length because Galston’s rendering of this bill of particulars is on target.“They have a sense of displacement in a country they once dominated. Immigrants, minorities, non-Christians, even atheists have taken center stage, forcing them to the margins of American life.”“They believe we have a powerful desire for moral coercion. We tell them how to behave — and, worse, how to think. When they complain, we accuse them of racism and xenophobia. How, they ask, did standing up for the traditional family become racism? When did transgender bathrooms become a civil right?”“They believe we hold them in contempt.”“Finally, they think we are hypocrites. We claim to support free speech — until someone says something we don’t like. We claim to oppose violence — unless it serves a cause we approve of. We claim to defend the Constitution — except for the Second Amendment. We support tolerance, inclusion, and social justice — except for people like them.”Galston has grasped a genuine phenomenon. But white men are not the only victims of deindustrialization. We are now entering upon an era in which vast swaths of the population are potentially vulnerable to the threat — or promise — of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.This revolution is driven by unprecedented levels of technological innovation as artificial intelligence joins forces with automation and takes aim not only at employment in what remains of the nation’s manufacturing heartland, but increasingly at the white collar, managerial and professional occupational structure.Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T., described in an email the most likely trends as companies increasingly adopt A.I. technologies.A.I. is in its infancy. It can be used for many things, some of them very complementary to humans. But right now it is going more and more in the direction of displacing humans, like a classic automation technology. Put differently, the current business model of leading tech companies is pushing A.I. in a predominantly automation direction.As a result, Acemoglu continued, “we are at a tipping point, and we are likely to see much more of the same types of disruptions we have seen over the last decades.”In an essay published in Boston Review last month, Acemoglu looked at the issue over a longer period. Initially, in the first four decades after World War II, advances in automation complemented labor, expanding the job market and improving productivity.But, he continued, “a very different technological tableau began in the 1980s — a lot more automation and a lot less of everything else.” In the process, “automation acted as the handmaiden of inequality.”Automation has pushed the job market in two opposing directions. Trends can be adverse for those (of all races and ethnicities) without higher education, but trends can also be positive for those with more education:New technologies primarily automated the more routine tasks in clerical occupations and on factory floors. This meant the demand and wages of workers specializing in blue-collar jobs and some clerical functions declined. Meanwhile professionals in managerial, engineering, finance, consulting, and design occupations flourished — both because they were essential to the success of new technologies and because they benefited from the automation of tasks that complemented their own work. As automation gathered pace, wage gaps between the top and the bottom of the income distribution magnified.Technological advancement has been one of the key factors in the growth of inequality based levels of educational attainment, as the accompanying graphic shows:Falling BehindThe change in weekly earnings among working age adults since 1963. Those with more education are climbing ever higher, while those with less education — especially men — are falling further behind. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Grapple With Raising the Minimum Wage

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublicans Grapple With Raising the Minimum WageThe politics of a $15 minimum wage are increasingly muddled, but some Republicans are gravitating toward a higher base pay, citing the economic needs of working-class Americans.A grocery store cashier in Charlottesville, Va., on Friday. The state is among those with the highest share of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage.Credit…Eze Amos for The New York TimesAlan Rappeport and Feb. 26, 2021Updated 7:44 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The policy debate over raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is the latest fault line between Democrats, who largely support the idea, and Republicans, who generally oppose such a sharp increase as bad for business.But it is also revealing new fissures in the Republican Party, which is straining to appeal to its corporate backers, some of whom believe that more than doubling the minimum wage would cut deeply into their profits, and the working-class wing, which fueled President Donald J. Trump’s rise and would stand to gain from a pay increase.After decades of either calling for the abolishment of a federal minimum wage or arguing that it should not be raised, Republicans are beginning to bow to the realities facing the party’s populist base with proposals that acknowledge the wage floor must rise. President Biden is likely to try to capitalize on that shift as he tries to deliver on his promise to raise the minimum wage, even if it does not make it into the $1.9 trillion aid package because of a ruling Thursday evening by the Senate parliamentarian.For years, Republicans have embraced the economic arguments that were laid out in a letter this month to Congress by Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth and other conservative groups that promote free enterprise. They point to studies that assert mandated wage increases would lead to job losses, small-business closures and higher prices for consumers. And they make the case that the economic trade-offs are not worth it, saying that more jobs would be lost than the number of people pulled from poverty and that those in states with a lower cost of living — often conservative-leaning states — would bear the brunt of the fallout.In 2016, as Republicans moved further to the right, moderate candidates such as Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, argued forcefully that the federal minimum wage did not need to be raised above $7.25, which is where it still stands today. Mr. Bush said the matter of wages should be left to the private sector, while Mr. Rubio warned about the risk of making workers more costly than machines.But Republicans have at times grappled with the challenging politics of a position that so clearly sides with business interests. In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, said that he believed that the federal minimum wage should rise in step with inflation, as measured by the national Consumer Price Index.And after arguing early on in his 2016 campaign that wages were already too high, Mr. Trump later said he could support a $10 minimum wage.That is the number that Mr. Romney, now a Republican senator from Utah, and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced in a plan that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $10 over four years and then index it to inflation every two years.On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, went a step further by matching the proposal that Democrats have made for a $15 minimum wage. His plan comes with a big caveat, however, and would apply only to businesses with annual revenue of more than $1 billion.“Megacorporations can afford to pay their workers $15 an hour, and it’s long past time they do so, but this should not come at the expense of small businesses already struggling to make it,” Mr. Hawley said.The proposal drew a sharp rebuke from David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, who suggested that Mr. Hawley was adopting bad policies in a bid to appeal to Mr. Trump’s voters. He said that his organization would not support Republicans who promoted minimum wage increases and said that they should be pushing for payroll tax cuts to give workers more take-home pay.“This is another example of his ambition driving him to these populist positions that completely violate any principles he has about free markets,” Mr. McIntosh said in an interview.While the talking points surrounding the minimum wage have remained largely the same over the years, the politics are shifting partly because the federal wage floor has stagnated for so long — and a growing economic literature has suggested that the costs of higher wage floors may not be as significant as analysts once worried they might be.After rising gradually over the decades, the minimum has held steady at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Prices have gradually increased since then, so the hourly pay rate goes a shorter distance toward paying the bills these days: Today’s $7.25 is equivalent to $5.85 in 2009 buying power, adjusted by consumer price inflation.Given how low it is set, a relatively small share of American workers actually make minimum wage. About 1.1 million — 1.5 percent of hourly paid workers and about 0.8 percent of all workers — earned at or below the $7.25 floor in 2020.A restaurant worker last week in Brooklyn. The politics of the minimum wage are shifting partly because the federal wage floor has stagnated for so long.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York TimesStates with the highest share of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum are often Southern — like South Carolina and Louisiana — and skew conservative. About seven in 10 states that have an above-average share of workers earning at or below the minimum wage voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election.While only a slice of the work force earns at or below the minimum, lifting the federal base wage to $15 would bolster pay more broadly. The $15 minimum wage would lift pay for some 17 million workers who earn less than $15 and could increase pay for another 10 million who earn just slightly more, based on a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis.Still, raising wages for as many as 27 million Americans is likely to come at some cost. The budget office, drawing on results from 11 studies and adjustments from a broader literature, estimated that perhaps 1.4 million fewer people would have jobs in 2025 given a $15 minimum wage.Some economists who lean toward the left have questioned the budget office’s conclusion.In research that summarized 55 different academic studies of episodes where a minimum wage was introduced or raised — 36 in the United States, 11 in other developed countries — Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that even looking at very narrow slices of workers who were directly affected, a 10 percent increase in minimum wage might lead to a 2 percent loss in employment. Looking at the effects for low-wage workers more broadly, the cost to jobs was “minute.”More recent work from Mr. Dube has found next to no employment impact from state and local minimum wage increases.Yet many Republicans have seized on the budget office’s job loss figure.In a column titled “How Many Jobs Will the ‘Stimulus’ Kill?” Stephen Moore, an adviser and ally of Mr. Trump’s, and the conservative economist Casey B. Mulligan suggest that the $15 federal minimum wage will cost a million jobs or more. Mr. Moore said in an email that they were relying on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate.Still, a variety of economic officials emphasize that the cost to jobs of a higher minimum wage are not as large as once believed, and that the federal minimum wage has not kept up with inflation.“Higher minimum wages clearly do help the workers who are affected,” John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said during a virtual speech on Thursday. “There are some job losses,” but recent evidence suggests that it is not as many as once expected.There is precedent for raising the minimum wage toward $15, because as the federal base pay requirement has stagnated, states and localities have been increasing their own pay floors. Twenty states and 32 cities and counties raised their minimum wages just at the start of 2021, based on an analysis by the National Employment Law Project, and in 27 of those places, the pay floor has now reached or exceeded $15 an hour.The drive toward $15 started in 2012 with protests by fast-food workers and was initially treated as something of a fringe idea, but it has gained momentum even in states that are heavily Republican. Florida — which Mr. Trump won in November 2020 — voted for a ballot measure mandating a $15 minimum wage by 2026.Like in many of those local cases, Democrats are proposing a gradual increase that would phase in over time. Janet L. Yellen, the Biden administration’s Treasury secretary and former Fed chair, suggested in response to lawmaker questions after her confirmation hearing that the long runway could help mitigate any costs.“It matters how it’s implemented, and the president’s minimum wage will be phased in over time, giving small businesses plenty of time to adapt,” Ms. Yellen wrote.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Can Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?

      by

      Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionCan Biden Save Americans Like My Old Pal Mike?A childhood friend’s deadly mistakes prompt reflection on our country’s — and my own.Mike Stepp in McMinnville, Ore., in 2018.Credit…Lynsey AddarioSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistFeb. 13, 2021, 2:30 p.m. ET More