Publication
Overall, the pandemic economy has not been kind to women, particularly women of color. Since March 2020, women have lost 5.4 million net jobs, nearly 1 million more than men. Service industries that tend to have higher concentrations of women workers, including women of color, were the hardest hit by the virus. Pre-pandemic, those jobs often paid less and offered fewer benefits—like health care or paid leave—that might have helped women better weather this particular crisis. Frankly, the pre-pandemic economy wasn’t particularly kind to women either, especially women of color and immigrant women who were more likely to work in these industries.
Half of all workers in New Mexico cannot earn paid sick leave and have to either go to work when they or a family member is sick or stay home and lose pay. This is the highest rate in the nation. Because the federal government has no paid sick leave policy, several states and municipalities have enacted paid sick leave policies but paid sick leave legislation for New Mexico stalled during the most recent legislative session. The report looks at which sectors (among other employer demographics) are most and least likely to offer paid sick leave. The report concludes that statewide paid sick leave and paid family leave laws would go far to ensuring all New Mexico workers and their families have opportunities to lead healthier lives and are crucial to building the strong workforce our state needs to support a thriving economy.
Washington’s Department of Labor & Industries has launched a long overdue process to establish an updated salary threshold and other rules that determine who is exempt from basic legal protections. Families across the state struggle to achieve and maintain economic stability in the face of slow wage growth and skyrocketing costs for housing, health care, childcare, and other necessities. Because Washington’s threshold is so woefully out-of-date standards, almost any salaried employee can now be required to work more than 40 hours per week with no additional pay and can also be denied access to paid sick leave. Updating our state standards would benefit up to half a million individual employees and their families, restoring Washington to a position of national leadership in protecting the health and well-being of its people and communities.
Media
Each Labor Day the Keystone Research Center releases an annual checkup on the health of the Pennsylvania labor market, “The State of Working Pennsylvania.” (https://www.keystoneresearch.org/SWP2018). The 2018 edition focused on state-level data, mostly available through June 2018. This addendum to that report focuses on 2017 data released last month by the Census Bureau on incomes and poverty for Philadelphia. We complement the Census data with statistics on employment and unemployment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide a comprehensive assessment of the performance of the Philadelphia economy since 2005. We start with the year 2005 as that is the first year in which data at the county level are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.