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Premium pay for frontline workers (often referred to as “hero pay”) is one of the ways state and local governments can use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. This toolkit is a comprehensive guide to premium pay – who can get it and how it works – with policy recommendations, supporting data, and relevant examples from across the country. It is intended for policy advocates and policymakers alike.
Publication
As workers struggle to keep up with rising costs, Louisiana continues to be one of only five states without a state minimum wage. This means many workers in our state continue to work for the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which has not been raised since 2009. Over the last 13 years, increases in the cost of living have eroded the purchasing power of that $7.25 by about 25%.
Publication
There’s a crisis in service work in Milwaukee. Too many of these jobs—in food service, janitorial work, security services, and human and health services—offer low wages, inadequate and often unpredictable hours, and benefits packages that are usually weak, if they exist at all. For Milwaukee, these jobs have been a sorry replacement for the good union manufacturing jobs that once defined opportunity in the city. This economic transformation has especially damaged Milwaukee’s Black community, resulting in extreme racial disparity.
All of this was well documented before COVID-19. In the last two years, the underlying crisis in these jobs has been exposed and it has grown. Until we build a strong, consistent floor of better wages, more predictable hours, and stronger benefits in these jobs, the crisis will continue.
The City of Milwaukee can help to lead this effort. In every aspect of policy, the City can seek to strengthen job quality, raise labor standards, and support and build a high-road approach to service work in the city
Publication
A thriving community depends on the work of everyone, from the retail clerk who greets customers to the janitor who cleans the countertop. But for decades, corporate executives held down pay for the typical Ohio worker, while they lavished enormous pay growth on themselves. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the disparity is as glaring as ever: While Ohioans on the frontlines continue to do vital work months after hazard pay ended — if they ever got it — CEOs in 2020 took home windfall gains from stock price growth. CEOs’ pay reflects their privileged status to set their own pay, and it further separates the fortunes of the wealthiest from the rest of us.
Among 54 of Ohio’s 100 largest employers that reported to the Securities & Exchange Commission, the median chief executive officer was paid 322 times the rate of the median worker at the same company last year. More than two-thirds of the reporting corporations paid their CEO more than 200 times what they paid typical employees. One-third paid their CEO more than 500 times as much, and seven companies paid their CEO more than 1,000 times more than their median employee.