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For years, employers had access to a labor force where workers were so desperate that they’d take any job offer. The combination of poverty-level minimum wages, historically low unionization rates, at-will employment, worker misclassification, a battered safety net, a lack of paid time off or employer-sponsored benefits, and a host of other policies and practices have firmly tilted the scales toward employers, allowing for pervasive exploitation and abuse, particularly for the nearly 3 in 4 Americans living paycheck to paycheck even before the pandemic.

The situation is more dire after a job loss. Recently laid-off workers are likely to have almost no safety cushion — more than half of consumers had $3,000 or less in their checking and savings accounts combined in 2019. They may also have no access to unemployment benefits — just 28 percent of eligible unemployed workers in 2019 actually received benefits. That makes workers desperate for any job, no matter how terrible, that can help them scrape by. During a recession with mass layoffs, when millions are facing that same desperation, businesses have all the power to offer unsafe jobs in places like crowded meatpacking plants and bustling restaurant kitchens to overqualified applicants with meager compensation, unless the government intervenes.

Unemployment insurance, especially the enhanced benefits during the pandemic, gives workers breathing room. The benefits aren’t enough for people to live large — even with the extra $300 a week, unemployment benefits will fall noticeably short for a modest family budget in every county in the country. Benefits just let workers be slightly less desperate, alleviating the pressure to take unsafe jobs — many of which are especially dangerous during a pandemic — that pay poverty wages. Instead, they can hold out a bit longer for better-paying jobs that match their skills, education, experience, and interests.

One dishwasher, Jeremy, told journalist Eion Higgins that “the stimulus and unemployment benefits have definitely helped me be more picky about what jobs I’ll take since I don’t have to take anything I can get in order to cover rent and groceries.” Another, Alan, reported that “I have a degree in forestry and since I’m currently relatively financially secure I can take more time to find a job in the field that I actually want to work in.” A third, Owen, said “I left because having some time off to think and plan helped focus my desire to be paid better and treated better… I expect to make at least double and finally have nights and weekends off. Hopefully I’ll be treated with a little more dignity but I know that’s not always the case.”

This is very different than saying unemployment benefits are discouraging work in general. Studies of unemployment insurance have shown that laid-off workers who receive benefits search harder for jobs, receive better paying offers, and take roles that better match their education level. Specifically during the pandemic, several studies have looked at the $600 enhanced benefits and found that they had little to no effect on employment or job search. It’s hard to see how the current $300 boost would be any different.

Despite what many businesses, commentators, and lawmakers are trying to claim, the data is continuing to prove that unemployment insurance isn’t standing in the way of hiring. Though overall job growth in April was disappointing, the leisure and hospitality sector — where most of the cries of labor shortage from employers are coming from — actually accelerated job growth with 206,000 new hires in March and 366,000 in April. In total, 430,000 people joined the labor force (meaning they weren’t searching for work before but now are), but that growth came entirely from men while women actually left the labor force on net in April, suggesting that this has more to do with a continued lack of child care. States with higher unemployment benefit levels, as well as low-wage sectors where benefits are more often higher than previous income, have actually seen faster job growth, indicating that unemployment insurance isn’t the cause of slow hiring.

In reality, few workers even had access to unemployment insurance in the first place. From April 2020 to January 2021, only 18 percent of unemployed people had received unemployment benefits in the last two weeks at any one time. It’s been even worse for Black (13 percent) and Asian (11 percent) workers and those without a college degree (12 percent), all of whom are overrepresented in low-wage industries like leisure and hospitality. Undocumented immigrants are also totally excluded from unemployment insurance, yet they are 10 percent of restaurant workers nationwide and almost 40 percent in cities like New York and Los Angeles. We saw the consequences of this early in the pandemic when meatpacking plants convinced the government to declare them essential, allowing them to call their employees back into work and leading to large COVID outbreaks among their workforces, disproportionately made up of immigrants and people of color, and in communities where the plants are located.

Even so, employers have managed to complain loudly enough about the possibility that they may have lost a hint of power that sympathetic legislators are rushing to accommodate them. As of mid-May, in 16 states and counting, Republican governors had announced their plans to block all of their residents from receiving their rightful federal unemployment benefits, citing anecdotes of businesses struggling to hire at their current wages as justification. Ending those benefits before the jobs are there and while millions are still losing their jobs each month will take billions of dollars — over $10 billion from almost 2 million unemployed workers by one estimate — out of the economy in those states, even if some of those people cut off find work, and will effectively slow the recovery through decreased spending.

If there was a labor shortage, employers have common sense options to make themselves more competitive: They could raise wages to livable levels, as many businesses have found success doing, or pressure their lawmaker friends to support vaccination efforts and fund safe and affordable child care. Instead, some businesses are relying on half measures, such as offering one-time signing bonuses specifically because they know those are insignificant when compared to what a worker would earn long-term from permanently higher wages. Many others are simply pushing the same narrative they have fallen back on for more than a century — through the New Deal, the Great Society, welfare reform, and the Great Recession — by claiming workers who dare demand more are lazy and ungrateful. It’s not a coincidence that the same people shouting to end unemployment benefits now are also opposing the Raise the Wage Act, the PRO Act, and other measures that might materially improve the lives and build the power of workers.

This power struggle has made its way to the president’s desk. In a White House speech on Monday, President Biden said, “Anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits.” (Emphasis added.) Now the government has to decide who gets to define “suitable.” Businesses would like it to mean the pre-COVID status quo: low wages, inconsistent hours, minimal (if any) benefits, and limited protections. Workers want it to mean that jobs are safe and offer a decent quality of life — including livable wages, manageable hours, and accommodations for caregiving and quality of life.

The Biden administration has taken some positive steps in defining a good job for federal contractors, setting a $15 minimum wage, raising standards, and strengthening anti-discrimination protections. It’s vital that the administration continue to support all workers in the face of overwhelming employer power. There’s no shortage of ways to do so: They can push to improve the unemployment insurance system through federalization or establishing minimum standards and automatic stabilizers, like those proposed in the Wyden-Bennet reform bill; pass the Raise the Wage Act to raise the minimum wage to $15 and eliminate subminimum wages; implement better regulations and enforcement to prevent wage theft, overtime abuse, misclassification, and OSHA safety violations, among other abuses; pass the PRO Act to ensure workers can exercise their right to come together in unions; and so much more.

We can’t continue to give employers all the power in the labor market. President Biden and other lawmakers must make it clear that now is the time to stand with workers and give them some say in their own working conditions and livelihoods.

Kofi Assabil, a member of the class of 2020 from University of Colorado Boulder, knows the grim job market all too well. Assabil started his job search in January 2020, months prior to his graduation. But when the pandemic reached the United States and everything went remote, he started to worry. “I realized that things were going to be harder. I was going on LinkedIn and Indeed…calling a few connections every two weeks to see if they had any opportunities,” but “even with internships, it was tough.” Along with several of his roommates, Assabil opted to wait out the labor market crunch in graduate school instead.

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The most recent estimates from Georgetown University indicate that approximately 70 percent of college students work part or full-time during their studies, suggesting 30 percent of new grads — up to 1.2 million recent college students — may be ineligible for unemployment once they graduate, unless they have proof of a rescinded job offer.

As a result, this generation of college graduates is struggling to find work. Coupled with a lack of government support and mounting student debt, personal financial conditions are proving difficult for many. According to the most recent data, among the 69 percent of college students that took out loans in 2019, the average debt upon graduation was $29,900, although numbers are higher for students of color. While Congress placed a temporary moratorium on payments for federal loans, there is still $137 billion in outstanding private student loan debt that is unaffected by the moratorium. Those bills are coming due, whether recent grads are ready for them or not. For the 22 percent of college undergraduates who are also parents, the financial burden is only heightened by the need to care for dependents.

The combination of insufficient economic opportunity and inaccessible unemployment benefits could have serious long-term implications. Elaine Weiss, an analyst from the National Academy of Social Insurance, believes that this will push new college graduates into lower paying jobs, since they cannot afford to wait for an offer that provides a higher wage.

According to a UCLA study, individuals who graduate college during a recession can expect between 10 to 20 percent lower lifetime earnings compared with their peers. According to the Federal Reserve, 40.3 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. Further, this effect has become more amplified over time, as successive graduating classes experience higher and higher post-college unemployment rates.

One potential solution for new grads is a jobseekers’ allowance that could support them while they look for work. The allowance, which could partially replace foregone wages, would allow recipients to support themselves while they continue to look for work. Australia has a similar program dedicated specifically to providing financial assistance to youth and student job seekers with monthly benefit levels ranging from $1,153 to $1,924, depending on financial and family circumstances. While it’s no windfall, a benefit of that size would help cover a large portion of living expenses for many Americans. Other countries, such as Sweden, provide $1,101 per month, while also providing public child care and a child allowance for any families with children under the age of 16.

The results of these stronger unemployment programs have been well documented. One study from Georgetown University found that during the Great Recession, the enhanced unemployment insurance increased workers’ wages by 2.6 percent, with greater benefits for women, people of color, and people with lower educational attainment. This suggests that unemployment insurance programs help facilitate the job search process, allowing workers more time to find a job aligned with their skills.

With another college class soon to graduate into a still-weak labor market, the imperative of stronger unemployment insurance only becomes more important. While the passage of the American Rescue Plan is welcome news for the American economy, the bill failed to include unemployment protections specifically targeted at recent college graduates. The U.S. should take note of the work done by other nations to provide adequate financial stability for recent graduates as they enter the labor market. History tells us that the failure to do so will have lifelong impacts for college graduates.

They are considered “working poor,” a classification that simply means they are not paid enough. Many of these families are regulars at CANV, visiting the market-style food bank once a week. Before the coronavirus crisis began in earnest, the organization served about 30 to 40 of these workers and their families a day, three days a week.

Almost overnight, that number has tripled.

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Food banks, like unemployment numbers, act as a weathervane for determining the severity of our current crisis — and the crisis is severe. But they are not built to single-handedly tackle the increased demands these crises create.

As of the first week of April, 17 million Americans have applied for unemployment insurance, shattering a decades-old record and providing a clear look at the unprecedented scale of the current economic and health crisis. According to an early April estimate from the Economic Policy Institute, that number could reach 20 million by summer. Though the President signed a relief bill in late March that bolsters unemployment insurance and will issue direct cash payments to low and middle-income Americans and families with children, it will be months before most people receive that help — and undocumented families will never receive it at all.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which could help people immediately, received relatively little additional funding. Food banks will be, as always, left to pick up the slack.

Food banks in Napa, Contra Costa and Solano, and Humboldt counties all report higher demand than they’ve ever seen, topping last year’s record-setting wildfires. Food is harder to track down since hoarding has decimated supply chains and shelter in place orders have constricted the supply of volunteer workers, most of whom, staff say, are over 65 and more vulnerable to complications from the novel coronavirus. As a result, demand is up, supplies are strained, and the labor needed to distribute them is increasingly unavailable.

At Humboldt county’s main food bank location, nearby construction crews had to volunteer to help manage crowd control, freeing up the remaining regular volunteers and staff to develop and run a drive-thru model that reduced person-to-person contact. Contra Costa and Solano counties in the Bay Area are moving towards a home delivery-only system, but the labor-intensive delivery strategy is only possible with the support of the National Guard, which started providing 1,000 hours of service per week for the food bank at the end of March. Across the state, an increasing number of food banks were looking to do the same, seeking the Guard’s help with deliveries, crowd control, and assembling supplies.

But for many of the people relying on these resources, the sight of uniformed law enforcement is not necessarily a comforting one. Each food bank, regardless of location, noted the profound anxieties that uniformed law enforcement trigger in their Latinx and undocumented communities. In Napa County, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have terrorized the close-knit town. In one particularly traumatic instance, ICE apprehended a father at his child’s school after morning drop-off. To many, gathering as a community at a law enforcement-run food drive-thru feels like a bigger risk than their current desperate circumstances.

Food banks are not intended to be the first line of defense in the fight against hunger, but a place to turn to when other options like SNAP, WIC, free and reduced school meals, and unemployment insurance aren’t enough. When these programs are properly funded, they work. The last time America was on the brink of economic collapse, in 2009, the most successful policy in Congress’ $800 billion stimulus package was its SNAP expansion. For every $1 in additional funding, $1.74 was generated in economic output.

Because SNAP was mostly sidelined in the COVID-19 response, already-strained food banks are now left scrambling.

Each problem these California food banks face is exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, but the problems themselves are not new. Increased demand, dwindling supply, and a lack of capacity to meet their communities’ need has been their daily reality long before this crisis. The overwhelming need they’ve been forced to meet so far definitively shows how catastrophic this crisis already is. The federal government’s plodding and inadequate response to it shows why these communities were so precarious to begin with.

None of those claims are exactly true, but the one that happened during his State of the Union address this year is what keeps me up at night. While making the case for his economic platform, Trump specifically touted low black unemployment, saying, “[It’s] something I’m very proud of, African American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded.” Republicans cheered; Democrats grimaced. I rolled my eyes.

The average black unemployment rate since November 2017 is 6.5 percent — indeed the lowest it has been since the United States started recording unemployment for black workers back in 1972. But that does not mean all black Americans are in full economic health, as the president’s proclamation would suggest. More to the point, it is debatable whether Trump should get any credit for such low unemployment metrics or whether they are just a continuation of the Obama administration’s efforts.

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First of all, black unemployment is still nearly double white employment nationwide. (In 14 states and the District of Columbia, black unemployment rates are more than double white rates, and in South Carolina black unemployment is triple white rates.) If white unemployment levels were anywhere near this high, it would be considered a national crisis.

There were only 11 times in the past 50 years when the white unemployment rate has been higher than today’s black unemployment rate — and five of those were during the worst recession since the Great Depression. As a reminder, the government responded to that recession with a $831 billion stimulus to boost the economy and lower unemployment. Yet, Trump is praising the same unemployment rate for blacks today without a similar economic response.

What’s worse, the jobs that black workers and white workers get do not pay the same: Black workers earn less money and build less wealth than white workers.

The typical full-time black worker still earns about $12,000 less annually than a white worker. Gender pay gaps also compound this inequity. On average in 2017, black women earn 66 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. That has a serious impact on peoples’ lives: Roughly 20 percent of black and Hispanic people live in poverty compared to less than 9 percent of white people. This is, in part, because black workers are more likely to be trapped in low-wage work, and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for nearly a decade. A yearly income at this rate is just over $15,000.

Structural racism contributes to pull black men, in particular, into low-wage work, especially for those with a criminal record. Black men are incarcerated at six times the rate of white men. With an estimated 87 percent of employers conducting criminal background checks, formerly incarcerated individuals are more likely to remain unemployed one year after their release and formerly incarcerated men are paid 40 percent less annually than non-incarcerated men.

In addition to wages, wealth disparities along racial lines are even more disturbing. Wealth, which is often held in the form of a person’s homes, savings, and investments, is a cushion that helps families pay for education or keep themselves afloat during periods of unemployment. In 2016, the median wealth of white Americans was $142,180 compared to $13,460 for black Americans.

This directly impacts black Americans’ social mobility. Racial gaps are identifiable with respect to college completion, homeownership, and criminalization. Black Americans hold college degrees at only 62 percent the rate of whites. Among black households, one-third fewer are homeowners compared to white households. Even when black Americans do become homeowners, if the neighborhood they reside is more than 50 percent black, their homes are valued at nearly half the price of similar homes in communities with no black residents. And, with a prison population of 487,300, black Americans account for one-third of America’s federal and state prison inmates, which is more than twice their share of the U.S. population.

Trump’s rosy economic picture is dangerously misleading for black workers in America. The unemployment rate may be lower for black Americans than in the past, but it is still high compared with white rates — and a web of discrimination, criminalization, and low wages is still holding people back. Glossing over those truths to focus on the statistic that suits the president’s talking points doesn’t make the reality of things any better. Black people should not be used as a convenient political prop — especially without meaningful investment in our communities to better our full economic outcomes.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the nature of employment statistics for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Congress has already agreed to allow states to test UI claimants in two specific, narrow circumstances: if a worker was fired from their previous job because of drug use, or if the worker is looking for a new job in a field that regularly drugs tests employees.  But since the Great Recession, some states have been clamoring to expand drug testing for UI applicants—they believe that they’d be able to shrink the program as workers test positive for drugs, or that workers would decline to apply for benefits because of their drug use. Despite the complete absence of data to support this theory, three states—Texas, Mississippi, and Wisconsin—have enacted laws that permit the drug testing of UI recipients (though they have all held implementation until the Labor Department rule was finalized).

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Lawmakers aren’t just hoping to roll back the Labor Department rule. They’re also counting on passage of a bill introduced in the 114^th Congress by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) that would effectively allow states to drug test all jobless workers filing for unemployment insurance.

Here are five reasons that shouldn’t be allowed:

1. It’s unconstitutional

Drug tests have historically been considered searches for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment. For searches to be reasonable, they must be based on “individualized suspicion.” That means the government would need to have a specific reason to believe that each person they drug tested was doing drugs. Otherwise, it’s like conducting a search without a warrant.

The only exception to this rule has been if the government can show there is a special need, such as public safety, that warrants it.But governmental programs like Unemployment Insurance, TANF, SNAP, and housing assistance do not naturally evoke the special needs exceptions that the Supreme Court has recognized in the past.

2. It’s redundant

Twenty states already explicitly deny people UI benefits if they lost their job because of drug use or a failed drug test. In addition, virtually all states treat a drug-related discharge as disqualifying misconduct even if it is not explicitly referenced in their discharge statutes. Adding an additional regulation when state regulations are already accomplishing this task would add to the bureaucracy that this administration has vowed to reduce.

3. It’s expensive

Creating a new qualifying requirement for UI would be very expensive, and federal law prohibits states from making potential beneficiaries pay for drug tests. States would have to absorb the cost of drug testing thousands of unemployed workers, and UI programs are already too under-funded and under-staffed. Though there are no comprehensive estimates of how much this would cost, when Texas was considering drug testing UI applicants a few years ago, it was estimated to cost $30 million per year.  In FY 2012, federal funding fell short of covering states’ administrative expenses by an estimated $231 million.

4. Workers have already paid for access to the program

Unemployment Insurance is funded through payroll taxes. Workers earn that benefit over the course of their career—and they don’t have access to it unless they lose their job and are working to find a new one.

5. It’s based on negative stereotypes, not data

This attempt to violate the privacy of every American who is unlucky enough to lose a job is rooted in a blanket assumption that the ranks of the unemployed are crowded with lazy drug abusers. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. When states have attempted similar drug-testing initiatives in the past, only a small fraction of recipients—less than one half of one percent—actually tested positive (and finding that small group of people cost hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Realistically, two-thirds of Americans will struggle with unemployment at some point during their careers. Imposing an expensive, ineffective, and unconstitutional new obstacle to a program that most of us will need doesn’t actually solve anything.

And now he has nominated Andrew Puzder, the billionaire fast-food executive, to lead the Department of Labor.

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If Trump’s actual goal is to display utter contempt for American workers, then burger-czar Puzder is a pretty strong choice. He’s a key figure in an industry that’s notorious for labor abuses, including low wages and wage theft, and he has personally played a strong role in perpetuating those injustices. According to a recent Labor Department investigation, the majority of Puzder’s own restaurants—about 60%—were found to be in violation of labor laws.

And now Puzder will be tasked with enforcing the very laws he has repeatedly broken.

Puzder vocally opposes labor protections that are crucial for most Americans, including overtime pay, protections from workplace discrimination, and access to affordable health care. But his nomination deals a particularly violent blow to the nation’s most vulnerable and lowest-paid workers. Despite the fact that he makes more in a day than the typical fast-food worker earns in an entire year, Puzder believes that low-wage workers are paid too much. He has been an outspoken opponent of the minimum wage, which puts him at odds with more than 90% of Americans. And his claims that higher minimum wages lead employers to cut jobs runs counter to decades of rigorous research showing that moderate minimum wage increases boost family income without affecting employment.

Nowhere is Puzder’s nomination more devastating than in the 21 states where policymakers have refused to raise the minimum wage above the federal level of $7.25 per hour. The overwhelming majority of those states—19 out of 21—voted for Trump after he promised to be “a president who will protect them and fight for them.” They have been waiting more than seven years for a raise, and every year the purchasing power of their $7.25 shrinks—making it even more difficult to make ends meet. But with a Labor Secretary who thinks “some jobs don’t produce enough economic value” to justify a minimum-wage increase, a president who has declared that wages are “too high,” and a Republican Congress that has repeatedly rejected widely supported minimum-wage legislation, these workers will likely have to keep waiting.

If the federal minimum wage stays at its current level, by the end of Trump’s first term it will be worth 20% less than it was worth when Congress last increased it in 2009. That means a full-time minimum-wage worker would earn just $13,750 per year in today’s dollars—nearly 15% below the poverty line for a family of two.

Adding insult to injury, Puzder penned an op-ed last year that lambasted Americans who must turn to public assistance to make ends meet. But there’s a simple reason that low-wage workers are eligible for public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid: It’s because employers like Puzder pay their employees too little to survive.

It’s the height of hypocrisy that Trump—who sold himself as a champion for American workers—has crowned an anti-labor billionaire to be the nation’s chief advocate for working people. To preserve and protect American workers’ rights, security, and dignity—and to prevent the most vulnerable, lowest-paid workers from sinking further into poverty—lawmakers must take a strong stand against the coronation of this anti-labor secretary.

I decided I wanted to do more than just survive, so I did the things that people do when they embrace their lives. I took a spontaneous girls’ trip. I went to a Jill Scott concert. I bought myself a fancy pair of shoes, and I cut my hair short.

For a while, I felt like everything would be OK. Then, a few weeks after my 35^th birthday, I lost my job.

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The morning that I was laid off, I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked into my boss’s office. There was a woman in the room I’d never met before, from Human Resources. She said all the things she is trained to say to soften the blow—“it’s not you, it’s the budget,” and “there are ways to deal with a ‘Reduction in Force’”—but there was no amount of wordsmithing that could change the facts.

I was unemployed.

That night, I sat down with my husband to figure out how we were going to make ends meet. We made a lot of deep cuts in our budget, including taking our seven-year-old daughter out of the aftercare program she loved. We tried to explain it to her the best we could and she seemed to take it in stride—but her sleep terrors told a different story. One night, in her sleep, she asked: “Mommy, what happens if we run out of money?”  My heart was broken, but I couldn’t tell her how worried I really was.

The truth is, her aftercare wasn’t the only major loss. I also lost my health insurance, which is crucial for managing my symptoms. The medications and appointments are expensive, and without them I could form new lesions on my brain that make the condition worse. Plus, stress alone can exacerbate MS. Treatment for that requires IV steroids—another expense, which leads to more stress, which leads to more symptoms.

The problem is, it’s hard to stay calm when your identity is being called into question. I had been working in public health for a decade, and I’ve kept a steady job of some kind since I was 13 or 14 years old. I was raised to be a “worker bee”—I’ve been staff at daycares, offices, restaurants, and my church’s youth program—and I didn’t know what to do without a job.

I searched for a new position with fervor: I checked with community colleges, health departments, department of human services, and universities. It was important to me to find a job that I loved, and that matched my experience, but they were few and far between—and my family needed an income.

To help us get by, I applied for unemployment benefits. I completed most of the process online, and I was able to call and speak to someone when I had questions. Soon, I was approved and began receiving a weekly stipend.

The benefits certainly didn’t replace my job—they only make up for about one-third of my income—but they’ve given us a little time. We have been able to keep our two-year-old in daycare so that I can go to job interviews, and we can pay the power bill, buy groceries, and put gas in the car. But my benefits are about to run out, and our household expenses are not.

Compared to a lot of Mississippians, I’m truly blessed. Last year, less than 15% of unemployed people in the state received these benefits—the other 85% were left to piece together a living however they could. Still, politicians are talking about cutting the program even further.

I can’t help but wonder if they have ever had to walk a mile in these shoes. Have they had to make the decision to take their children out of school? Or choose between paying the mortgage and buying groceries? If they had, maybe they’d choose differently.

Women, people of color, and young workers are among those hardest hit by the recession and the subsequent weak recovery.

These data further confirm what many working families experience on a daily basis—the economy is off-kilter, with gains from economic growth concentrated at the top, and low- and middle-income families continuing to struggle with stagnant incomes and barriers to employment.

In this context, here are three things you need to know about the new data for 2013 and how they affect looming policy choices:

1. The economic recovery is not translating into income growth more broadly, as a result millions of families are trapped in economic insecurity;
2. Young workers are still struggling to stay afloat, even though they are more educated than in previous generations;
3. Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act, there has been some progress for women and people of color, but persistent racial, ethnic and gender disparities remain.

These trends and their implications are examined below.

Economic growth isn’t being shared

Adjusting for inflation, median family income stayed flat between 2012 and 2013 and remained lower than in both 2007 and 2000. This decline in family income is due in large part to stagnant wage trends.

Given that the vast majority of Americans, including those at the bottom of the income scale, rely on their paychecks and work-related benefits as their primary source of income, wage stagnation is obstructing our ability to improve economic security and cut poverty. As economists at the Economic Policy Institute recently documented, real wage growth has been negative since 2000 for workers in the bottom 30 percent of the wage distribution and basically stagnant for workers in the middle. Only workers in the top 5 percent have seen solid gains.

Flat incomes combined with rising costs have also meant that household balance sheets are in trouble. Flat wages mean that low- and middle-income families must borrow to keep pace with the rising costs of basic goods and needs such as child care and health care. This leaves families more vulnerable to economic shocks, which can send them spiraling below the poverty line. Moreover, as Figure 1a shows, increasing income inequality has exacerbated the increase in wealth inequality, with families in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution experiencing particularly large declines in net wealth between 2001 and 2013.

Absent policy action, these trends are likely to continue. In August 2014, low-wage industries such as food services, retail, long-term care, home health care, and temporary help comprised 37 percent of new jobs in the private sector. Fortunately, there is evidence that establishing and strengthening basic labor standards is part of the solution. A recent Economic Policy Institute analysis showed that in the past year, real hourly wages declined for all workers except those in the bottom 10 percent of the wage distribution, with workers in states that raised their minimum wages accounting for the increase. This underscores that public policy—and specifically, minimum-wage increases—have an important role to play in combating wage stagnation.

As the economy slowly recovers, improving job quality and boosting wages must be a central strategy to ensure that the gains of economic growth reach struggling families.

Young workers are still struggling to stay afloat, despite more education than previous generations

While children experienced significant declines in their poverty rates in 2013, these gains were less dramatic for youth transitioning to adulthood. According to the new Census data, 19.4 percent of people ages 18 to 24 had incomes below the poverty level last year, and young adults ages 25 to 34 did not see an improvement in their poverty rates, which were stuck at 15.8 percent in 2013. High poverty for these groups is particularly striking given their education levels. Young people today are much more educated than their counterparts 50 years ago; yet 18- to 34-years-olds today face higher poverty rates than people of the same ages and educational levels did 50 years ago. Figure 2a charts poverty trends for 25- to 34-year-olds by education level between 1968 and 2013. It shows, for example, that even poverty rates for young people with college degrees or more were about twice as high in 2013 as in 1968.

While some of this increase is due to continued high unemployment, there has also been a clear long-term trend toward higher poverty rates for young people at all levels of education. The vast majority of young people living in poverty today have a high school diploma or more, and more than one-third have some postsecondary education, including 14.5 percent with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  (See Figure 2b.)

Higher education is still a key pathway towards economic security, making it possible for millions of Americans to join the middle class. As Figure 2a shows, the more education one has, the less likely he or she is to be poor, with workers who have at least a four-year college degree experiencing the lowest poverty rates.

The high poverty rates of young people carry long-term consequences. Researchers have found that college graduates who started their careers during recessions earned lower wages over the next 15 years compared to college graduates who entered the workforce in a better economy.

Improving the mobility and opportunities of young workers will require improving job quality. This can be done by raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, adjusting it annually to keep pace with the costs of living, and enabling young, childless workers to access the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); providing more avenues for young people to access employment—for example, through expanding apprenticeships; and addressing their crushing levels of student debt through refinancing options.

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Despite some progress for women and people of color, persistent disparities remain 50 years after the Civil Rights Act

The poverty rate is too high across the board, but certain groups face much higher risks of poverty and economic insecurity than others. These include women and people of color.

Fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it is important to acknowledge the progress that has been made in cutting poverty, particularly for African Americans. From 1966 to 2013, the share of the private sector workforce comprised of people of color rose from 11.2 percent to 29.7 percent, and women’s share grew from 31.2 percent to 48.2 percent. As Figure 3 shows, black poverty rates fell from 55 percent in 1959 to 27.2 percent in 2013, due partly to greater civil rights protections and opportunities in the labor market. And Latinos were the only racial or ethnic group to see a statistically significant decline in their poverty rate in 2013.

That said, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans are still significantly more likely to live below the poverty line than white non-Latinos. People of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods and places with very high poverty rates, often for reasons related to systemic discrimination; to face employment discrimination; and to bear the brunt of policies that have led to mass incarceration. As with young people, their poverty rates remain relatively high despite considerable educational advancement. For example, in 1965, only one-third of working-age African Americans had a high school diploma or additional education; today, nearly 90 percent do. In short, there is still plenty of work to do to ensure equal opportunity.

The story is more mixed for women. As Figure 3b shows, while elderly women’s poverty rates dropped from 32 percent in 1966 to 11.6 percent in 2013—a testament to Social Security and other federal policies’ effectiveness—the poverty rate for non-elderly women remains elevated. While the poverty gap between non-elderly men and women has narrowed some over time, this has more to do with the deteriorating economic positions of many men than with improvements for women.

For women, basic labor standards and the workplace environment have not caught up to the reality of their central role in the labor market. The United States is the only developed country with no paid family and medical leave and no paid sick days, which forces workers to make impossible choices between work and family responsibilities. The lack of these family-friendly policies is an important factor of the persistent gender wage gap, as well as making it more difficult for families to escape poverty.

These disparities for women and people of color also affect our overall economy. By 2042, people of color will make up the majority of our workforce. Allowing racial and ethnic disparities to linger now will undercut our economic competitiveness in the future. Similarly, if we close the gender wage gap, we can cut the poverty rate of working women and their families in half and add nearly half a trillion dollars to our gross domestic product.

Conclusion

While the past decade of economic growth has left low- and middle-income Americans behind, there are policy solutions that can reverse these trends. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 and indexing to inflation would lift 4.6 million people out of poverty; expanding the EITC for childless adults and lowering its eligibility age would allow more young workers to achieve economic stability; and policies such as paid family and medical leave and paid sick days, investments in child care and early education, and criminal justice reform would help close persistent racial, ethnic, and gender disparities while improving our economy.

Our nation cannot afford another year of stagnation. These data should serve as a wake-up call that policy action is needed to provide greater economic stability and opportunity for all Americans.

That’s why in my last piece I echoed a call to combine a guaranteed $4,800 credit for every child with a guaranteed $15,000/year job for every family. That combination would drop child poverty to below one percent. The economic case for the child credit is simple and powerful: child poverty is really expensive, and addressing it early saves a lot of money in the long run.

Can the same economic case be made for a guaranteed job? To do so, you’d have to find jobs that cost the public more by not paying people to do them than the proposed $15,000 annual salary. You’d also have to find jobs that you reasonably believe the market would not provide alone. Finally, you’d want to find enough jobs that you could actually move the needle on poverty and employment.

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I can think of three areas of public job provision that should meet all three criteria.

Infrastructure jobs. Congress has once again artlessly avoided fixing our highway trust fund in a sustainable way. Spending on infrastructure has fallen steadily for fifty years, and our country has dangerously crumbling roads, bridges, levees, public transit, and airports.

A Brookings Institution brief estimates that the annual economic cost of poor infrastructure is more than $170 billion. Funding a national corps of infrastructure workers would meet criterion one: it’s costly not to. It also clearly meets criterion two: inadequate infrastructure spending is not exactly a new problem. If the market alone were going to create these needed jobs, it would have by now.

Does it meet the third criterion? The proposal calls for jobs that pay $15,000 a year. For several years—at least as we upgrade our infrastructure—$170 billion in economic savings would pay for 11 million new jobs at that salary.

Community health workers. As the US population ages, healthcare spending will consume an ever-greater share of national resources. A principal economic goal, then, should be to reduce the cost of per-person healthcare spending.

The Urban Institute recently published a case for Community Health Workers, which would do just that:

Community health workers help people improve their health, manage their illnesses, and obtain services in timely and appropriate ways. Community health workers are lay people with close ties to the communities they serve who readily win clients’ trust. Trained to have health knowledge and selected for “people skills,” they promote wellness and connect clients with medical and other services, especially disadvantaged clients.

These types of services represent one of the more promising ways to keep costs down by improving health and the value of care, according to the Urban Institute. In fact, there is growing evidence that Community Health Workers do just that, but they lack adequate funding: Medicare and Medicaid don’t pay for them and so far private insurers have not done so either.

Community health workers therefore meet all three criteria: they provide cost savings, the field is not growing organically, and in the coming decades there will be great demand for their services.

An army of “sous-teachers”. This op/ed by a public school teacher argues poignantly that, for teachers, “there is never enough”—never enough time, energy, resources:

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual’s instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

A good teacher knows these things, the writer argues, but with 30 hours a week of planning and grading and mandatory lunch and recess duty and overcrowded classrooms and not enough money for school supplies…no teacher can actually reach that standard.

So, let’s pair every public school teacher with a sous-teacher. Sous-teachers will complete a training program that equips them to grade simple assignments and quizzes, make copies, manage the classroom, and supervise playtime, all while leaving teachers time and space to realize the goal of that “perfect” classroom.

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen as clear an evidence base on the cost-effectiveness of this third idea. But we know that investing in children’s early development leads to health benefits and increased productivity. Improving the richness and quality of our children’s classroom seems a promising route – and in the meantime we could create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

If we, the public, adopt a long-term mindset of investing in our own economy, children, and workers, then we will find a long list of ideas that meet the criteria outlined here. It’s a matter of moving away from our “fiscal cliff” version of emergency governing to a long-term vision—one that empowers workers and families and builds a sustainable economy.

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