BURNING BRIGHT
When the BioLab chemical plant recently exploded in Georgia, prompting evacuation and shelter-in-place orders that disrupted thousands of lives, many wondered how something like this could possibly happen in the United States of America in 2024. Isn’t our country the kind of place that regulates the safety of plants like this to protect the health of workers and communities?
And the answer is that yes, we do… which is why it’s on the record that after a different BioLab plant caught on fire in Louisiana earlier this summer, an investigation by those regulators found the company responsible for the disaster on account of negligent practices and five distinct safety violations. So, if the regulators stepped in after a disaster and did their jobs, why did something so similar happen again at a similar plant owned by the same company? Well, it turns out the company was fined just $2,500 for the first disaster of the summer. And if that is what our system thinks periodic chemical fires are worth… we’re going to keep on having chemical fires.
Make it make sense.
will be Seattle’s minimum wage next year, with no subminimum rates or carveouts for tipped workers. Seattle’s economy has boomed since becoming the first big city to pass a $15 minimum wage ten years ago.
will be paid to every Alaska resident through the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests the state’s oil revenue on behalf of the public. While this fund is unique in the US, many countries operate similar “sovereign wealth funds,” including Norway, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
owe more than $10,000 in medical debt. A new rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would bar credit bureaus from using medical debt when calculating credit scores.
The chart below is rightfully famous for how it highlights one of the most central impacts of the trickle-down era on workers: the stark divergence between ongoing increases in productivity, and near-stagnant wages. After several decades where workers benefited from increasing productivity, things changed as neoliberalism took hold in the late 1970s. Instead of workers and employers thriving together, more and more of the benefits of growth were taken by CEOs and the ultra-wealthy.
In the latest video on our Pitchfork Economics YouTube channel, Civic Action founder Nick Hanauer digs into another implication of this chart — how it illustrates how the idea that people are paid what they’re worth is simply ridiculous. As Nick explains, you’re not paid according to what you produce — you’re paid according to what you have the power to negotiate.
There are all kinds of personal and idiosyncratic ways of assessing the strength of the economy. If you have to spend half your income on rent, you’re probably going to feel stressed about paying your bills, no matter what the unemployment rate is. And if your community lost its major employer a couple decades ago, you’re probably not going to feel terribly optimistic about the future, no matter what college financial aid packages are available.
But step back and look at it in the aggregate, and the strength of the US economy is unmistakable. As Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute details in a brief but important piece: “The share of the population ages 25–54 with a job is at a 23-year high, median household incomes rose 4.0% last year, and real wage growth over the last four years has been broad-based and strong. The economy has not only regained the nearly 22 million jobs lost in the pandemic recession, but also added another 6.5 million.” The bottom line deserves to become a mantra of middle-out economic success: “More workers have jobs and wages are beating inflation by solid margins.”
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