Equity in Apprenticeship is a report series from COWS at UW-Madison. It highlights programs that use apprenticeship to extend occupational opportunity to historically marginalized groups, especially people of color and women.
The Worker Education and Resource Center (WERC) in Los Angeles has become highly adept at preparing health care workers who share a cultural affinity with LA’s patient populations.
Equity in Apprenticeship was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are grateful for their generous support. The findings and conclusions presented in this series are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
While a handful of New Mexico municipalities – including the cities of Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Santa Fe, and Bernalillo and Santa Fe counties – have raised their minimum wages in recent years, the state-wide minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. Still at $7.50 an hour, its purchasing power has eroded considerably over that timeframe. In fact, when you factor in inflation, that $7.50 buys only $6.30 worth of goods today.[iii] If the wage had been adjusted for inflation, it would now be $8.95 an hour. While New Mexico’s minimum wage has remained stagnant and lost purchasing power, 28 states, including Colorado and Arizona, have increased their state minimum wages.[iv] As these states have found, raising the minimum wage benefits thousands of working families and local economies.[v]
In order for children to have nourishing environments where they can thrive, families need to be economically secure so they have the ability to invest in their children’s futures. If the state passes legislation to increase the minimum wage incrementally until it is $12.00 an hour by 2022 – and protects workers by prohibiting training wages and allowing municipalities to enact even higher wages – nearly a quarter of a million workers will see their wages rise as $204.8 million a year is added to their paychecks. This achievable policy reform will vastly improve the state’s overall well-being and give families, children, older adults, people of color, and women more opportunities to thrive. Local economies will see benefits as well.
The goal of the Working Families Benchmarking Project is to identify economic and related issues affecting Utah families and examine them through a comparative lens, evaluating Utah using a peer state as a benchmark. Many existing economic comparison studies and rankings look at the economy as a whole or at its impact on specific sectors or on employers. This project seeks to augment those very useful comparisons by focusing on how the economy is experienced by moderate- and lower-income families. It is these families whose children are most at risk of not achieving their potential in school and later in the workplace. Thus, how they experience the economy is of particular interest to Voices for Utah Children.
Infants and toddlers in Ohio need high-quality child care. There are nearly 400,000 working mothers in Ohio with children under age six and most use some form of child care when parents are working or for child enrichment purposes. This paper discusses how best to make sure children get good care and parents can continue to work, particularly for the 200,000 Ohio children who live under the official poverty line.[1]
Child care is expensive for Ohio families. Child care in Ohio is also often low quality which means that children aren’t getting the enrichment they need at a time in their life when high-quality care is essential to future success. Finally, Ohio’s child care system is complicated to navigate, with parents not always knowing how to find or determine what constitutes quality care. For these reasons, the public sector has a crucial role to play in pushing quality improvements and in helping parents with the costs.