CPD IN THE NEWS

Research published by worker groups including the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and the Center for Popular Democracy argue that private equity firms were directly and indirectly responsible for the

According to a new report from the American Investment Council (AIC) that clearly addresses private equity's image problem, the PE industry supports more than 958,000 Ohio jobs and provides state and local taxes of nearly $2.2 billion.

Ohio ranks seventh in the country in terms the number of PE-supported jobs, according to the report. (The top three, in order, are California, Texas and New York.) The job numbers represent direct employment at PE firms and PE-backed companies, as well as related supplier jobs. By the same metrics, PE supports more than 26.3 million jobs nationwide.

Read the full article here. 

Alicia Fleming had worked as a server at restaurants in Massachusetts for a decade and a half. She enjoyed the work, but after she had her son at the age of 32, she found it impossible to stay in the job.

“The restaurant is looking at their bottom dollar,” Fleming said, “and won’t schedule you unless they absolutely need you. And then you don’t know until a few days before whether or not you’re even going to be asked to work.”

The result was that — as a single parent without close family nearby — Fleming was often scrambling to find childcare. When she wasn’t able to do so on short notice, she’d have to miss a shift. Her income fluctuated from week to week, and even though she was still employed at the restaurant, she was struggling to make ends meet.

Read the full article here.

Looking at economies around the world, it’s easy to think that reconciling markets with justice, or profit with basic fairness and human decency, is simply impossible. With the looming risks that come with automation and other technology-related shifts in the nature of work, the tension between what’s good for investors and what’s good for workers has seemed increasingly difficult to resolve.

There is great uncertainty about the future of work—and for many reasons, not least the lack of focused political will and policy attention to the future of work and workers. One reminder of that inattention is the sharp growth of economic insecurity over recent decades, even as the income and wealth of the affluent soared. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz persuasively argues, based on decades of economic trends across the globe, “inequality is a choice,” not the inevitable consequence of technological progress, the laws of physics, or the iron law of the market.

Read the full article here.