The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt
Institute’s top 5 stories of the week.
1. Reimagining the Rules
of Race
A Wall
Street Journal profile of Roosevelt Fellows William Darity Jr. and Darrick
Hamilton explores their groundbreaking theories on
stratification
economics and
charts the increasing ubiquity of their racial wealth gap solutions in
political discourse. With decades of pioneering policy proposals
ranging from reparations to baby
bonds to
federally
guaranteed jobs,
the two experts continue to expand the political parameters of
race-based economic remedies. “No matter how hard blacks work to
improve their education or earn more, the two men say, they won’t
catch up financially,” writes Jacob M. Schlesinger.
“Only significant government intervention can address
the disparity, they argue."
2. Rightsizing
the Workplace
In her 2018 report
“Left
Behind”
(co-authored with Senior Program Associate Jess Forden), Roosevelt
Fellow Rakeen Mabud analyzed the high-level structural trends shaping
the future of work—and leaving millions at risk of economic
insecurity. In “Rightsizing
the Workplace: How Public Power Can Support a 21st Century Labor
Market That Works for All,” a follow-up issue brief published this week, Mabud takes a
closer look at trucking and domestic work, two seemingly dissimilar
industries afflicted by those same structural problems.
“While these challenges manifest in different ways, a
shared set of policy responses would support the many workers across
various industries, including truck drivers and domestic workers, who
help grow our economy,” writes Mabud.
3. Concentrating Industries, Concentrating
Profits
Corporate concentration is among
the hottest topics of the 2020
race—and for good
reason. As Roosevelt Fellow Mike Konczal notes in a newly published
Nation piece, over 75
percent of US industries have become more
concentrated in the last 20 years, and the most concentrated
industries have seen the largest spikes in profit. Workers, he argues,
haven’t seen the payoff.
“While workers today must compete relentlessly to secure the basics in
our society, large corporations don’t face the same pressure. With
every year, industries get more concentrated, and businesses have to
do less to reap ever higher profits,” he writes.
4.
Dollars and Values
Protesting Wayfair’s $200,000 sales
to inhumane detention facilities at the US southern
border, five hundred of the company’s workers recently staged a
walkout. In a Forbes piece, Roosevelt’s Rakeen Mabud draws two
lessons from the demonstration: Workers can and will organize for
their moral values, and the reliance of private companies on
government contracts is a key leverage point for that social action.
“Given the large impact government contracts have on
the American labor market, they are an important lever for both those
inside a firm—workers—and those outside the firm—political leaders—to
use to push for a more ethical private sector,” writes
Mabud.
5.
Stop Wall Street
Looting
On Wednesday, a group of US House
representatives and senators—including 2020 presidential contenders
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
(D-NY)—released the Stop
Wall Street Looting Act, a bill to curb the private equity (PE) sector’s most
extractive fees and tactics. In a press
statement,
Roosevelt experts weighed in. “If we want to make real changes in our
economy, we need to rewrite the laws so that PE firms
are liable for their investments and cannot leave companies, and their
workers, to bear all the risk,” said Roosevelt Senior Economist and Policy Counsel Lenore
Palladino.
What We’re
Reading
Because of deliberately
exclusionary rules enshrined in our legal and economic structures,
domestic
workers have long lacked the essentials of economic security: wage and overtime
guarantees, paid time off, and protections against gender and racial
discrimination. The Domestic
Workers Bill of Rights, announced this week by presidential contender Sen. Kamala
Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-CA), builds on a
decades-long fight for power and agency in the workplace. As National
Domestic Workers Alliance founder Ai-jen Poo argued in an op-ed for
the New
York Times,
“No one understands the future of work better than
domestic workers.”
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