Page 112 – Equitable Growth

Brad DeLong: Worthy reads on equitable growth, July 4–11, 2019

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Ed Paisley

Worthy reads from Equitable Growth:

Equitable Growth earlier this week convened an event, “Racial and Gender Wage Gaps: Overcoming Structural Barriers to Shared Growth,” that was very much worth attending. In case you missed it, you can find some highlights here. The event featured “a conversation on wage gaps for women and people of color, and what we can do about it. Wage stagnation and falling economic mobility are endemic economic problems in the United States. Their effects fall most severely on communities of color and women, who also face large wage gaps compared with white men. Key to solving wage stagnation and overall income inequality is a recognition that deeply ingrained structural forces keep many Americans from sharing in economic prosperity. This event will feature research and discussion from policy experts on the wage gaps in U.S. society.”
Equitable Growth Executive Director Heather Boushey had a “fun chat” on Monday with David Beckworth about their work together on a new book, Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy.
Boushey also appeared in this piece by PBS Newshour, “Amid Long Economic Expansion, Why so Many Americans Are Still Struggling,” in which she explained: “We need to understand and do more to address the ways that inequality obstructs, subverts, and distorts the processes that lead to growth …. Reams of … evidence … that investments in early childhood are some of the most important … We’re not making the investments that our economic competitors are in early childhood … We’re not making those investments because we haven’t created the tax revenue to do that.”
It was the philosopher Santayana who wrote that those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. Unfortunately, the rest of us are condemned to repeat it alongside them. Thus, it is very, very important that we stamp out those who do not remember history. How? By educating them. The piece of history we need to remember as we approach the next recession, whenever it starts, is that there never was any evidence that austerity is good or necessary during the bust. Read my “Risks of Debt: The Real Flaw in Reinhart-Rogoff,” in which I write: “Economists … don’t watch just quantities … but prices. And the prices of government debt are the rate of inflation, the nominal interest rate, and the level of the stock market as people trade bonds for commodities, bonds for cash, and bonds for stocks. And all three of these prices are flashing green: saying that markets would prefer and it would be better for the economy if government debt were growing at a faster pace than under current forecasts … The principal mistake Reinhart and Rogoff committed in their analysis and paper—indeed, the only significant mistake in the paper itself—was their use of the word ‘threshold.’”

Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:

Central banks may remain independent if they manage economies in a way that produces a modicum of stability and prosperity. If they fail to do so—if their management produces instability and poverty—I can guarantee you that they will not remain independent. Read Barry Eichengreen, “Unconventional Thinking about Unconventional Monetary Policies,” in which he writes: “Defenders of central-bank independence argue that quantitative easing should have been avoided last time and is best avoided in the future because it opens the door to political interference with the conduct of monetary policy. But political interference is even likelier if central banks shun QE in the next recession.”
From the past, and worth highlighting. Why? Because when the next recession comes, the usual suspects will, once again, start claiming that they should not do anything to shorten or cushion it. And the usual suspects will, once again, be wrong. Read Paul Krugman’s 2008 piece, “Hangover Theorists,” in which he writes: “Somehow I missed this: via Steve Levitt, John Cochrane explaining that recessions are ‘good’ for you … The basic idea is that a recession, even a depression, is somehow a necessary thing, part of the process of ‘adapting the structure of production.’ We have to get those people who were pounding nails in Nevada into other places and occupations, which is why unemployment has to be high in the housing bubble states for a while. The trouble … is twofold: 1. It doesn’t explain why there isn’t mass unemployment when bubbles are growing as well as shrinking—why didn’t we need high unemployment elsewhere to get those people into the nail-pounding-in-Nevada business? 2. It doesn’t explain why recessions reduce unemployment across the board, not just in industries that were bloated by a bubble … The current slump is affecting some non-housing-bubble states as or more severely as the epicenters of the bubble … Unemployment is up everywhere. And while the centers of the bubble, Florida and California, are high in the rankings, so are Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. So the liquidationists are still with us. According to Brad DeLong, ‘Milton Friedman would recall that at the Chicago where he went to graduate school such dangerous nonsense was not taught…’ But now, apparently, it is.”
Why does our economic system work as well as it does, and why is it as intelligent as it is? This is a deep question in need of much more thought. Michael Jordan thinks it noteworthy that the human brain is not the only system that looks capable of “intelligent behavior.” I wonder if the things that have made our economy appear intelligent in the past may disappear in the future. Read Jordan’s “Dr. AI or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economics,” in which he writes: “I view the scientific study of the brain as one of the grandest challenges that science has ever undertaken, and the accompanying engineering discipline of ‘human-imitative AI’ as equally grand and worthy … [But] what else is intelligent on Earth? Perhaps the Martians will notice that in any given city on Earth, most every restaurant has at hand every ingredient it needs for every dish that it offers, day in and day out. They may also realize that, as in the case of neurons and brains, the essential ingredients underlying this capability are local decisions being made by small entities that each possess only a small sliver of the information being processed by the overall system … This system is intelligent by any reasonable definition—it is adaptive (it works rain or shine), it is robust, it works at small scale and large scale, and it has been working for thousands of years … The Martians may be happy to conceive of this system as an ‘entity’—just as much as a collection of neurons is an ‘entity.’ Am I arguing that we should simply bring in microeconomics in place of computer science? And praise markets as the way forward for AI? No, I am instead arguing that we should bring microeconomics in as a first-class citizen into the blend of computer science and statistics that is currently being called ‘AI.’ This blend was hinted at in my discussion piece; let me now elaborate.”

Research Shows: Raising the Minimum Wage Does Not Spell Job Loss

Posted on July 10, 2019January 25, 2021 by Ed Paisley

(This opinion piece first appeared in Morning Consult on July 9, 2019)

Policymakers opposed to raising the federal minimum wage above $7.25 per hour have long argued it would lead to significant job losses. Some of those same opponents will now likely use a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the proposed minimum wage legislation currently before Congress to argue against passing it.

Their claims — and to a large degree, CBO’s analysis — are rooted in flawed theoretical foundations and outdated research. Sophisticated research methods from multiple studies show no job losses, or virtually none, result from raising the minimum wage. These studies also draw from previously unavailable empirical methods, which CBO did not fully account for in its own analysis.

How long has it been since we last increased the minimum wage? Nearly a decade, which is the longest interval without an increase since the minimum wage was created more than 80 years ago.

Coronavirus Recession

Why minimum wages are a critical tool for achieving racial justice in the U.S. labor market

By Ellora Derenoncourt, Claire Montialoux, Kate Bahn,

October 29, 2020

Boosting Wages

Broad structural change is needed to boost wages in a U.S. economy that is more equitable to produce strong, sustainable economic growth

By Kate Bahn, Jesse Rothstein,

January 14, 2021

Boosting Wages

Strategic enforcement and co-enforcement of U.S. labor standards are needed to protect workers through the coronavirus recession

By Janice Fine, Daniel Galvin, Jenn Round, Hana Shepherd,

January 14, 2021

Despite Congress’ inaction, 24 states and the District of Columbia have increased their minimum wage since 2009, when the last federal increase occurred. This has provided an opportunity for researchers to conduct modern, sophisticated empirical analyses to determine the specific impact of these increases on wages, incomes over time and employment. Specifically, researchers have compared individuals over time in states, cities and counties that have increased their minimum wage to those who have not been exposed to a minimum wage increase. Now we can move past guesses about how individuals or businesses might react to policy changes and observe how they actually behave.

In the largest and perhaps most important recent study in 2018, researchers examined six U.S. cities, all of which have minimum wage levels above $10 per hour. The study, which focuses on the food industry because of its high proportion of minimum-wage or near-minimum wage workers, found that low-income workers’ earnings rose significantly following an increase in the minimum wage. In those cities, they observed between a 0.3 percent decrease to a 1.1 percent increase in food industry jobs. This stands in contrast to the CBO finding that raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour would cost 1.3 million jobs.

In other words, the research finds there is quite a bit of room for wages to rise without causing significant job losses. One reason for this may be monopsony power, where wages are suppressed to a lower level than the value workers contribute, and which employers are able to exploit throughout much of the U.S. economy. Perhaps in part because of this, workers over the past few decades have been receiving a smaller and smaller share of national income. In the case of monopsony, statutorily increased wages correct for a lack of competition.

Another reason is the long economic recovery with the still-tightening labor market — though unemployment remains historically low and corporate profits are high, wages have not kept pace as economists would expect at this point in the recovery. One thing is clear: Businesses can well afford to pay their workers higher wages.

The CBO report confirms that an increase to $15 per hour would raise wages for 27 million workers. Even with the too-high estimate of job losses, the positive effect of boosting wages overpowers any negative effect from job losses for poor households. CBO confirms that families below the poverty line would see a 5.3 increase in income, lifting 1.3 million families out of poverty.

In general, the mere fact of job losses does not disqualify a minimum-wage increase from being a good policy for workers and the economy. Congress needs to balance the overall impact on earnings and family well-being against any effect on jobs. As economist David Howell has written, policymakers must consider all the benefits of a higher minimum wage — not only the increased income for workers and families, but also lower turnover, which leads to higher productivity, for example — with the possible costs. Especially in today’s tight labor market, there is a long way to go before any increase is likely to be accompanied by meaningful job losses.

Low-wage workers deserve to earn a living wage that enables them to support their families. Raising the federal minimum wage would not only help the economic recovery to continue, it would also help address systemic economic inequality at levels not seen since the 1920s. A significant minimum wage increase is past due.

In Conversation with Leemore Dafny

Posted on July 10, 2019July 10, 2019 by Maria Monroe

Interactive: Comparing wages within and across demographic groups in the United States

Posted on July 9, 2019July 12, 2019 by Austin Clemens

This post originally published Aug. 23, 2016. It was updated July 9, 2019 to incorporate new data.

Hourly wages among U.S. workers vary enormously by gender, race, and education level. This simple interactive tool provides a way to see just how much wages vary within and across demographic groups.

The interactive begins by displaying the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile hourly wages for people of any gender, race or ethnicity, and education level. The 10th percentile worker is a relatively low-wage worker, who earns more than 10 percent of all workers, but less than 90 percent of all workers. The 50th percentile (or median) worker is the worker right in the middle of all earners, making more than the bottom half of all workers and less than the top half of all workers. The 90th percentile worker is a relatively well-paid worker, who earns more than 90 percent of the workforce, but less than the top 10 percent. Over the period 2013-2016, the 10th percentile worker earned $9.11 per hour, the median-wage workers earned $18.22 per hour, and the 90th percentile worker earned $43.87 per hour (all wage rates have been adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2016 dollars).

Average Wages by Demographics

An interactive look at how wages vary within and between demographic groups

Use the dropdown menus to create a demographic group of your choice, and hit the add button to load it into the interactive. By clicking download image, you can save a shareable graphic.

Gender

Race/Ethnicity

Education level

To see how a certain group fares in comparison to all workers, use the dropdown menus to select a gender (all, women, men), race or ethnicity (African American, Asian, Latino, or white), and an education level (less than high school, high school, some college, four-year college degree, advanced degree) and hit the add button to display the data for this group. The interactive can create many different groups by selecting different demographic combinations and hitting add after forming each one.

To compare the earnings of white men with college degrees to Latina women with college degrees, for example, use the dropdown menus to create and add each group. The result: the lowest-paid white men with college diplomas earn $14.12 per hour, which is about 39 percent more than the $10.14 earned by Latina women with a four-year college degree. At the median, white men with a college degree make $30.00 per hour, or approximately 48 percent more than the $20.28 earned by the median college-educated Latina women. For the best paid workers in both groups—those at the 90th percentile—the pay gap is 59 percent, with white, male college graduates receiving $67.90 per hour, compared to $42.61 garnered by top-earning Latina women with college degrees.

To call out an interesting row in any group of comparisons, hover over the row and the option to highlight that row will appear to change its color. Tapping highlight again returns the row to its original color. To remove a row, the hover function also provides the option to delete a group from the chart.

To begin building a new chart from scratch, hit the red start over button

After you’ve created the comparisons, tap the download image button at the top of the interactive to save the chart, and, then, feel free to share it with the world.

Methodology

The data behind this interactive are derived from the Center for Economic and Policy Research extracts of the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group. To reduce problems with small samples, we pooled together the 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 CPS survey results. We limited our sample to working-age persons (between the ages of 16 to 64). Finally, our estimates of the 10th, 50th (median), and 90th percentile hourly wage are expressed in 2016 dollars and include earnings from overtime, tips, bonuses, and commissions.

JOLTS Day Graphs: May 2019 Report Edition

Posted on July 9, 2019August 6, 2019 by Raksha Kopparam

Every month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on hiring, firing, and other labor market flows from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, better known as JOLTS. Today, the BLS released the latest data for May 2019. This report doesn’t get as much attention as the monthly Employment Situation Report, but it contains useful information about the state of the U.S. labor market. Below are a few key graphs using data from the report.

1. The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings remains less than one, with a low level unemployment potentially lending more bargaining power to workers seeking new jobs.

2. Hires declined by 266,000 in May, reflecting the lower level of payroll employment growth in the May Jobs Report.

3. The quit rate has remained at 2.3% for one year, with workers voluntarily leaving jobs at a healthy rate.

4. The Beveridge Curve moved down slightly in May, but remains in an expansionary phase.

Equitable Growth’s Jobs Day Graphs: June 2019 Report Edition

Posted on July 8, 2019July 8, 2019 by Raksha Kopparam

On July 5th, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on the U.S. labor market during the month of June. Below are five graphs compiled by Equitable Growth staff highlighting important trends in the data.

1. The prime-age employment rate has held at at 79.7% since April.

2. Employment in manufacturing and construction has recovered since the Recession, but remains lower than their levels prior to that.

3. The unemployment rate for African Americans has trended downward since February, but remains nearly twice that of whites.

4. While the unemployment rate has changed little in recent months, increasing marginally to 3.7% in June, the broader U-6 measure, that includes marginally attached workers, continues to trend downwards.

5. The unemployment rate for workers with a high school diploma increased in June from 3.5% to 3.9%, and remains nearly twice as high than that for workers with a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

Factsheet: Minimum wage increases are good for U.S. workers and the U.S. economy

Posted on July 8, 2019September 25, 2019 by Maria Monroe

Overview

The research is clear: Minimum wage increases are good for U.S. workers and the U.S. economy. This overarching fact is important to bear in mind when reading the recently released Congressional Budget Office analysis on the expected impacts of raising the minimum wage.

This factsheet contextualizes the CBO report in light of cutting-edge econometric research on minimum wage increases from economists and other scholars in Equitable Growth’s network. The research papers cited in this factsheet use sophisticated research techniques that show past assumptions about the minimum wage are not correct. These newer research techniques hone in on causality by drawing on improved empirical methodologies, computing power, and previously unavailable detailed administrative data.

Download File
Minimum wage increases are good for U.S. workers and the U.S. economy

Distribution and welfare

Minimum wage increases significantly lower the poverty rate, increase earnings for low-wage workers, and decrease public expenditures on welfare programs.¹
The earnings boost for low-wage workers from higher minimum wages extends beyond the immediate effect of the legal change and instead grows in magnitude for several years thereafter.²
A 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increases wages by 1.3 percent to 2.5 percent for workers in the food and beverage industry, according to a study of six cities with especially high minimum wages.³
Minimum wage increases can have some of the largest benefits for disadvantaged ethnic groups. The expansion of the federal minimum wage to cover additional industries in the 1966 Federal Labor Standards Act explained 20 percent of the reduction in the black-white wage gap during the Civil Rights era.⁴ And the poverty rate for black and Hispanic families would be around 20 percent lower had the minimum wage remained at its 1968 inflation-adjusted level and not been allowed to languish and atrophy for years.⁵

Jobs and employment

A comprehensive study of 128 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2013 finds no evidence of job losses as a result of minimum wage increases, while confirming the positive earnings effects for low-wage workers as a result of these reforms.⁶
Recent minimum wage increases in six cities did not cause job losses and in some cases were associated with job increases.⁷
Similarly, when the federal minimum wage was expanded in 1966 to cover additional industries, there were no significant disemployment effects for black workers in their study on the federal minimum wage increase in 1966.⁸
Having a lower minimum wage has not created more jobs for workers in the United States compared to other countries with similar economies such as France and Australia, which have higher minimum wages.⁹
In any case, “no job losses” is the wrong standard for evaluating whether the minimum wage is at an appropriate level. Instead, policymakers should focus on the overall welfare of low-income families and establish a “minimum living wage,” given research showing large potential benefits from a higher minimum wage.¹⁰

The importance of the latest research methodology

The empirical revolution evident in the research papers cited in this factsheet allow policymakers and economists alike to move past guesses about how individuals or businesses might react to policy changes involving the minimum wage to observe how they actually behave. Three key studies by leading scholars on the minimum wage that exemplify this new data-driven analysis are:

An analysis that leverages data from 1979 to 2014 with several empirical strategies to confirm that minimum wage increases have minimal employment effects, while illustrating the key methodological flaws in economics papers alleging large employment losses¹¹
A study showing that recent research on the supposed ill-effects of a recent minimum wage increase in Seattle is largely uninformative for policymaking, as it relies on many of the same methodological flaws as previous studies¹²
An expansive study that uses several cutting-edge econometric methods on the most comprehensive dataset in the minimum wage research literature to substantiate large income increases and negligible employment costs in more than 100 state-level minimum wage increases in recent decades¹³

Conclusion

While some states and cities have increased their minimum wages in recent years, the current federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. Recent breakthroughs in economic methodology and analysis prove that raising the federal minimum wage would decrease poverty and increase earnings for workers, especially for low-wage workers and people of color. Yet the recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office unjustifiably discounts the new, more empirically rigorous research, leading it to underestimate the benefits and overestimate the harms of raising the minimum wage. As federal legislators consider the Raise the Wage Act, a bill that would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next five years, it is critical that they have access to the most cutting-edge economic evidence on which to base their decision.

About the authors

Kate Bahn is the director of Labor Market Policy and an economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Will McGrew is a research assistant at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

Where does your state’s minimum wage rank against the median wage?

Posted on July 8, 2019July 12, 2019 by David Evans

This post originally published Nov. 5, 2014. It was updated July 8, 2019 to incorporate new data.

Minimum wages and labor markets vary tremendously across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In light of the recent introduction of the “Raise the Wage Act,” the Washington Center for Equitable Growth has updated its analysis on the minimum-to-median wage ratios across states. While state-level differences are often used as a justification for lower minimum wages in certain regions, this interactive demonstrates that a $15 minimum wage would be beneficial in the vast majority of states.

The ratio of a state’s minimum wage to its median wage measures the strength of its minimum wage, after accounting for each state’s distribution of wages. As our interactive graphic below demonstrates, most states had much stronger minimum wages more than 30 years ago than they do today, pointing to the substantial room for increases in the minimum wage across the country.

The average minimum-to-median wage ratio for the United States was 51 percent in 1979, the first year of data included in our interactive. At that time, 29 states had ratios exceeding this mark, but by 2013 the minimum-to-median wage ratios were below 51 percent for all states (with the exception of Oregon and Arizona) as well as the District of Columbia.

Over the past 39 years, the overall minimum-to-median wage ratio in the United States fell to 43 percent in 2018. Indeed, the ratio has fallen even farther but rebounded in the past five years as a result of a recent round of state minimum wage increases.

The minimum-to-median wage ratio is a measure of how much a given minimum wage will affect a specific state’s labor market. Generally, the higher a state’s minimum-to-median wage ratio, the more workers will be affected by an increase in the minimum wage.

Methodology

The state-level minimum-to-median wage ratio is the ratio of the average of the state minimum wage to the state’s median wage in that year. The median wage is the median hourly wage in the Outgoing Rotation Group of the Current Population Survey of earners who work at least 35 hours per week and who are not self-employed. The national minimum-to-median wage ratio is the population-weighted mean of state minimum wages divided by the median national wage.

Resources

Authors’ calculations from CEPR Uniform Extracts of the Current Population Survey
Download an state_minimum_median_wage_ratios of the data used in the interactive above.

Brad DeLong: Worthy reads on equitable growth, June 28–July 3, 2019

Posted on July 3, 2019July 3, 2019 by Maria Monroe

Worthy reads from Equitable Growth:

Watch Heather Boushey discuss “How can we better measure growth beyond GDP.”
Equitable Growth’s recent tweet informs me that Oregon is leading on family and medical paid leave: “Congratulation to Oregon for passing one of the most comprehensive paid family and medical leave policies in the nation. To learn more about the implications of paid family leave on American families and employers, check out our factsheet.”
Heather Boushey is walking the walk in her tweet about the new staff union at Equitable Growth: “We believe that having a staff union at Equitable Growth will make us a stronger organization and look forward to working with union members.”
While there has been a lot of noise about the changing short-run U.S. economic outlook over the past year, in actuality very little has changed. The U.S. economy continues to grow slightly above its trend rate of 2 percent per year or so, with no outbreak of inflation and with a roughly 1-in-5 chance of seeing a recession begin within the year. Read my “Weekly Forecasting Update,” in which I write: “It is still the case that: [1] the Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut has been a complete failure at boosting the American economy through increased investment in America … [2] U.S. potential economic growth continues to be around 2 percent a year … [3] There are still no signs the United States has entered that phase of the recovery in which inflation is accelerating.”

Worthy reads not from Equitable Growth:

To say that there are now trends for factories to locate close to demand is not an alternative source of regional comparative advantage and disadvantage but rather an amplifier of other sources. Ultimately, customers are located in regions that have regional exports. A region that does not have large regional exports—and the prospect of growing more—will not be attractive to firms making long-run decisions and attempting to locate where their customers will be. It is likely to be a very uphill climb. I do not see this as a “silver lining” at all. Read Rana Foroohar, “Silver Lining for Labour Markets” (subscription required), in which she writes: “Globalisation … bottom of … reasons that labour’s share of national income has declined … The biggest reason … supercycles in areas … which favour capital over labour. … Automation and the speeding up of capital substitution because of technological shifts have hurt traditional industrial areas disproportionately … A mere 25 cities and regions could account for 60 percent of U.S. job growth by 2030 … Tech hubs will benefit, of course, as will commodity-rich areas and tourism centres catering to the wealthy. But so will … regions … capitalis[ing] on a silver lining … being closer to customer demand … Companies such as Nike and Adidas have built highly automated ‘speed-factories’ … to roll out the latest styles faster and more cheaply.”
I do not understand this alternative. Tapping into global markets is great—if you have something to sell. But if low-wage labor is no longer a powerful source of potential comparative advantage, what then do poor countries have to sell that could jump-start development? There is labor, there is capital, there is expertise, there is your natural resource base. Poor counties are poor because they lack capital and expertise. And, as for natural resources, well, the “resource curse” is a phrase often heard for good reason. Read Michael Spence, “The ‘Digital Revolution’ of Wellbeing,” in which he writes: “In the early stages of development … labor-intensive process-oriented manufacturing and assembly has played an indispensable role … Advances in robotics and automation are now eroding the developing world’s traditional source of comparative advantage … E-commerce platforms … [are] the real prize in the global marketplace. Only if digital platforms could be extended to tap into global demand would they suggest an alternative growth model (provided that tariffs and regulatory barriers do not get in the way).”
That Martin Feldstein was certain that we could determine and then agree upon what good public policies were was always heartening and raised my confidence that we could make a better world. Read Larry Summers, “The Economist Who Helped Me Find My Calling,” in which he writes: “Working for [Feldstein], I saw what I had not seen in the classroom: that rigorous and close statistical analysis … can provide better answers to economic questions, and possibly better lives … Marty was a magnet for talent … Marty cared about people’s economic analysis, not their political affiliation. That is why he mentored stars like Jeffrey Sachs and Raj Chetty, who disagreed with him on many questions.”

Washington Center for Equitable Growth Unionizes with Nonprofit Professional Employees Union

Posted on July 2, 2019July 2, 2019 by Maria Monroe

The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union issued the below press release on July 2, 2019, announcing the Washington Center for Equitable Growth joining the union.

Today, the employees at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth (Equitable Growth), a nonprofit research and grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing evidence-based ideas and policies to promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth, announced they have unionized with the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU). Management at the organization has voluntarily recognized the union.

Equitable Growth employees believe that a staff union complements the organization’s mission, which seeds and elevates research and analysis on how inequality obstructs, distorts and subverts the pathways to economic growth in areas ranging from labor standards, social insurance, and taxation to competition, wages, economic mobility, and innovation.

“In the spirit of advancing evidence-backed ideas that promote strong, stable, and broad-based economic growth, the research shows that strengthening workers’ voice is a fundamental part of achieving a more prosperous economy,” said Equitable Growth President and CEO Heather Boushey. “We believe that having a staff union at Equitable Growth will make us a stronger organization and look forward to working with union members.”

“We at Equitable Growth are joining together in union to uphold and further improve the good conditions and workplace standards we currently enjoy,” said Equitable Growth employee and NPEU member Delaney Crampton. “From our organization’s work, we know the importance of having a voice in the workplace, and with our union we will be able to live the values we promote every day at Equitable Growth.”

“We are beyond excited that the employees of Equitable Growth have chosen to join our union,” said NPEU President Kayla Blado. “Nonprofit employees continue to join together and use their collective voice to strengthen their organizations. With a union, Equitable Growth employees will have a greater say in their workplace so it continues to thrive.

Equitable Growth management and staff will now work together to create a collective bargaining agreement—also known as a union contract—that sets forth conditions of employment.

About NPEU:

The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU) represents professionals employed at over a dozen nonprofit organizations, including employees at Economic Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and Community Change. With about 250 members in the Washington, D.C.- area, NPEU gives nonprofit employees a voice to strengthen their workplaces and continue to do work that makes a difference in people’s lives.