Los Angeles’ minimum wage on track to go up to $15 by 2020, By Peter Jamison, David Zahniser and Alice Walton, May 19, 2015, Los Angeles Times: “The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday backed a plan to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, joining a trend sweeping cities across the country as elected leaders seek to boost stagnating pay for workers on the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Lawmakers agreed to draft an ordinance raising the $9-an-hour base wage to $15 by 2020 for as many as 800,000 workers, making L.A. the largest city in the nation to adopt a major minimum-wage hike. Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle already have approved similar increases, and raising the federal minimum wage has moved to the forefront of the Democratic Party’s agenda…”
Day: May 22, 2015
Long-Term Unemployment
- 40 percent of unemployed have stopped looking for work: Harris Poll, By Olivera Perkins, May 20, 2015, Cleveland Plain Dealer: “Forty percent of the unemployed have given up looking for work, according to a Harris Poll released Wednesday. The poll, ‘The State of the Unemployed,’ was done for the Oklahoma City-based Express Employment Professionals. The national staffing company has 25 offices in Ohio. The survey takes a close look at the jobless in a time when unemployment rates are falling. This is the second year the company has conducted such a poll. Last year, 47 percent of people without jobs had given up looking. Robert Funk, the company’s CEO and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said the number is still too high, especially since the nation’s unemployment rate for April was 5.4 percent, down 0.8 of a percentage point from the year before…”
- Many jobless (still) giving up looking for work, By Jeff Cox, May 21, 2015, NBC News: “About 40 percent of the 8.5 million jobless Americans have given up looking for work altogether. The revelation, contained in a new survey Wednesday showing how much work needs to be done yet in the U.S. labor market, comes as the labor force participation rate remains mired near 37-year lows. A tight jobs market, the skills gap between what employers want and what prospective employees have to offer, and a benefits program that, while curtailed from its recession level, still remains obliging have combined to keep workers on the sidelines, according to a Harris poll of 1,553 working-age Americans conducted for Express Employment Professionals…”
Poverty and Academic Achievement
Poverty, family stress are thwarting student success, top teachers say, By Lyndsey Layton, May 19, 2015, Washington Post: “The greatest barriers to school success for K-12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems. Those were the factors named in a survey of the 2015 state Teachers of the Year, top educators selected annually in every U.S. state and jurisdictions such as the District of Columbia and Guam…”