Publication -- do not use

In 2014, a New York Times investigation into Starbucks’ scheduling practices revealed a troubling disconnect between a company whose mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit” and work schedules that left its employees exhausted, stressed, and struggling to care for their families and g

How much stronger could the economy be if everyone who wanted a job could find one—regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender?

The American economy remains too weak. Over the past 35 years, the vast majority of workers have seen their wages stagnate. And, racial and gender wage gaps have persisted.

Nearly eight years after the start of the global financial crisis, hedge funds and private equity firms have found yet another way to make big profits: distressed housing assets. Often, the very same corporate actors that precipitated the housing crash in the first place are buying and selling off delinquent mortgages and vacant houses that are a product of the crash.

This paper reports the findings of our original survey aimed at understanding whether retail workers’ experiences of their opportunities at New York City Zara stores was different based on skin color or race.

Bernalillo County, New Mexico has almost 472,000 hourly workers—nearly two-thirds of
its total workforceb—who would benefit from updating workplace protections to match our
modern workweek. Across multiple measures, hourly workers are more likely than salaried
workers to experience volatile, precarious schedules.

Nationwide, more than 38 million women work in hourly jobs. Most women, and most Americans, are paid by the hour, yet today’s workweek is changing—the 40 hour workweek and the 8-hour day are no longer the norm for a significant part of this workforce.

Our nation’s workplace protections are badly out of sync with the needs of today’s working families and we need policies that provide everyone an opportunity to get ahead. Particularly, labor standards have not kept up with rapid changes to the fastest growing industries like retail, healthcare, and food service. Part-time workers in the service sector—overwhelmingly women—have borne the greatest burden of these new just-intime scheduling practices, which have largely gone unregulated. But what begins in these sectors will soon spread, as the distinctions between part-time and full-time work grow increasingly blurred, and more and more Americans experience work hour instability and economic uncertainty.

A well-funded and well-designed transit system helps increase access to opportunity across a region and connect residents to each other, jobs, education, grocery shopping, health care, and recreation. However, a transit system that does not serve current housing, employment, and education patterns exacerbates existing racial and economic disparities.

In the ten years since Hurricane Katrina, post-storm changes to the state’s charter school law have dramatically grown the number of charter schools in the state. Since 2005, charter school enrollment in the state has grown 1,188 percent. Through this growth, the Louisiana Department of Education’s Recovery School District—created to facilitate state takeover of struggling schools—has become the first charter-only school district in the country, with other states lining up to copy its model. Louisiana taxpayers have invested heavily, paying billions of dollars to charters and state takeover schools since the storm, including over $831 million in the 2014/2015 school year alone.

America suffers from disturbingly low voter registration and turnout rates. Almost 50 million eligible people were not even registered to vote in the 2012 election, and another 12 million had problems with their registration that kept them from voting.