With headlines practically blinking red with warnings about a labor shortage, there’s a lot of talk about what the American worker is owed. I think honesty is a good place to start.
We do have an emerging economic crisis. What we don’t have is a lack of options to slow this train down before it heads over a cliff.
First, we have to confront the most immediate crisis, one that existed long before COVID-19: a shortage of jobs that afford workers and their families a future out of poverty.
Pennsylvania had a child-poverty rate of 17% in 2019. That’s 435,000 children whose family income fell below the federal poverty line that year.
At $7.25 an hour, Pennsylvania’s legal minimum wage is state-sanctioned poverty for anyone who works 40 hours a week at that rate.
For seven years, Gov. Tom Wolf has encouraged the Legislature to implement a $12 minimum wage with a pathway to $15 by 2027 — a proposal that would boost the incomes of more than 1 million Pennsylvania workers.
For seven years, the Republican-led General Assembly has failed to act.
Meanwhile, every state that borders Pennsylvania – New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia – has increased its minimum wage beyond the federally required floor of $7.25 an hour. In fact, most U.S. states increased their minimum wage between 2020 and 2021. Pennsylvania has stalled since the federal government forced an increase in 2009.
Our economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic depends on what we do now in...
A British science journalist-turned-attorney who initiated a lawsuit that saw a Harvard University-affiliated cancer centre pay $15 million (11 million) to settle claims of alleged data misreprese...