 It should come right up on our website, epi.org, but you can also find it at epi.org backslash pay. As a co-author of the paper, I'm going to feel free to give a round of quick thank yous before we start. First, the research assistant team at EPI did even more impressive work than usual in managing the data and figures for this paper. We thank them. The publications team worked under unreasonably short deadlines, and were incredibly accommodative. So thank you to them. Our communications team has done everything, but walk onto the street and grab strangers to tell them about the paper, and so we thank them for that. And the launch of Raising America's Pay was made possible with funding from Jules Bernstein and Linda Lipset. So thanks to all of you without those efforts, this is not happening. And we think this is important, so thank you. For those in the room and those watching online, maybe motivation is not necessary because you're here and you're watching, but I just want to spend a minute to try to convince you that the topic of today's paper and of the Raising America's Pay project is really important. About six weeks ago here at EPI, we co-hosted an event with Thomas Piketty talking about his book and research into income inequality, and as people in the room know, people are really interested in this topic. In March of this year, the nation marked the 50th anniversary of the kickoff to the war on poverty, and there was a lot of commentary about just how incredibly difficult it has been to make significant sustained progress in reducing poverty. In January of this year, a new study documented sort of similarly frustrating stubbornness and improving relative income mobility, and that got a lot of attention. And all throughout this year, the bluest of blue chip economists, Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, many others, have been debating whether or not the US economy is going to enter a prolonged slump because changes in the economy have basically said that American households, businesses, and governments just won't spend enough money to secure full employment. So this rising inequality, stubborn poverty and mobility, a creeping secular stagnation. These are all incredibly pressing and economic policy challenges. What we're going to argue today is that the root of all of them is the failure of hourly wages for the vast majority of Americans to grow at an acceptable rate. If you care about income inequality, if you care about making progress on poverty and mobility, if you want to actually secure reliable full employment, you better start caring much more than policymakers in DC have about securing. In turn, generating this prolonged, broad-based wage growth is going to require a much different set of economic policy decisions going forward. We think that the list of things that affect wages is just much longer than is commonly acknowledged, realms from macroeconomics to tax policy matter. And we think lots of the policy changes over the past couple of decades in all of these realms have had a predictable, common theme of sapping bargaining power of low and moderate wage workers and sending bargaining power to the top and allowing income to be redistributed upwards. So we hope to really, first, lengthen the list of things people think about as wage policy. And then we also really want to add a new bucket of policies that doesn't get enough attention that we're calling changes in labor market practice and policy. This includes minimum wages and securing the rights of workers to bargain collectively, but also includes lots of other things that by themselves don't seem like they're going to move the dial on something as big as the overall march to income inequality. But when you add them together, we think they could have real bite. And so just one example that's been the news recently, regulations governing who's eligible for overtime pay and who isn't. So we really want to raise up this category of labor market policy and practice as a category worthy of both further study and further agitation. One way or another, we need to do everything we can to get American wages and gear. Too much depends on it and to not treat this with real urgency. So to explore these issues in some real depth, let me start with the first panel, which is going to be moderated by Harold Meyerson, who's a columnist for the Washington Post, an executive editor for the American Prospect, and just generally one of the keenest and most curious observers of the American economy. Take it away, Harold. Thank you, Josh. And to note that EPI, the Economic Policy Institute, is the indispensable think tanks in DC for dealing with really centrally. I get a lot of non-economic surveys coming across my desk, my email, Lord knows my tweets. And one that really struck me recently came out of a Pew poll in January. It asked, how do you identify yourself? Middle class, lower class, upper class. Now in 2008, just before the collapse of the economy, 53% of Americans identified themselves as middle class. But this January in 2014, years into what is labeled a recovery, just 44% of Americans labeled themselves as middle class. That's a decline of 9%. Lower class? I mean, we think of Americans as the kind of people who think of themselves as middle class, right? Not entirely. In 2008, 25% of Americans identified themselves as lower class. But this January, 2014, that 25% had risen to 40%. Of the American people, that's an increase of 15%, identify themselves as lower class. And indeed, I've seen some private polling from Democratic consultants which say, don't say, here's what we're going to do to help the middle class. Because so many Americans and potential Democratic voters no longer identify themselves as middle class. To say this is an existential crisis for the United States is, I think, simply stating a flat truth. And the paper that EPI is produced and this project that they are beginning to work on, I think, really will begin to address its central element, which I think would understand. There is all kinds of pressure out there from cities and states, and not enough in DC, of course, to raise a minimum wage. As we meet today, Seattle has just raised its minimum wage over a four to seven year period to $15 an hour in New York. It now looks like New York City will be able to raise its own minimum wage. My favorite odd example of something addressing this indirectly, there was a bill in the California State Senate which got a plurality but not a majority of votes. It would have changed the California corporate tax code. It would have lowered corporate taxes on companies that paid their CEOs less than 100 times their median workers pay, and raised corporate taxes on corporations that paid their CEOs more than 100 times the median workers pay. Interesting idea. Didn't make it, but it was just sort of the first of its kind. And I will bet you that we will see more, if not exactly that, more such ideas coming. Because I think the mass of America's people understand in a simple phrase that the wages are too damn low. So that's not necessarily the understanding, surprise, surprise, here in Washington, where even people who are concerned about growing inequality, the growing lack of social mobility have seized upon other issues, which I regard as often good but insufficient to deal with the real problem. So today we have a panel of EPI staffers, economists, noted economists, who have written a paper and come up with a project that really deals with what I think is the central issue, the declining wage share, the declining wages, the stagnating wages of the American people. Going from my immediate left to my far left, we have Valerie Wilson, whose specialty is economic issues affecting people of color and women and minorities. We have Elise Gould, who has written widely on poverty and inequality and mobility. And of course, the president of EPI, Larry Michelle, who has written on just about everything and then some. So let's begin with Larry. Larry, as I said, the woods are full of people concerned with economic inequality, with the quality of American education, with the absence of social mobility, with a lack of full employment. Why wages? Why are wages central to this discussion? It is remarkable that in the press and in policy discussions, addressing income inequality hovers way above wages. And it's really obvious why you have to talk about wages. A simple fact, the vast majority of households, including low-income households, get the vast majority of their income, what they earn to spend from wages and benefits. Therefore, if you want to boost middle-class incomes, if you want to bring more people into the middle class, you have to boost wages. And what that means is if you want to address income inequality in the sense that we want to see over the next 10 years more inclusive economic growth, then we have to have more inclusive wage growth. To address wages is to pretend to deal with income inequality. And that is a lot of what we hear, unfortunately. Let me turn to Valerie. There, obviously, we talk about the wage gap among genders, between genders. Maybe it's among genders now. And obvious disparities in wage income among people of different races and so on. How does that figure into this? How much of a contributor is that to the growing economic malaise in the United States? So from the perspective of racial and gender equity, there are really two gaps that we have to pay attention to. One is that overall gap between productivity growth and wage growth. The second really is the gap between what people of color make relative to whites and then what women make relative to men. And so as we've seen over the last 30 years or so, wage growth really has been far below productivity growth for nearly everyone except the top 5%. What that means is that regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, for the majority of workers, they've failed to reap the economic rewards that they've helped to produce in that time. And so as we've seen a shrinking piece of the pie available for the majority of workers to divide, what that has meant for black and Hispanic workers is that they've been left with only. And so when we think about the way that we measure race and gender inequity in terms of wages, the wage gap, we find that the median black worker in 1979 earned about $0.83 on the dollar relative to whites. That's now $0.77 on the dollar. For Hispanic workers, we've gone from $0.81 on the dollar down to $0.69 on the dollar. Now in terms of the gender wage gap, we've actually seen that gap narrow over time. But a lot of that progress, at least over the last decade or so, has been because women's wages have grown slower. I mean, sorry. Men's wages have grown slower than women's wages. So neither have had spectacular wage growth. But just because men's wage growth has been worse than women's wage growth, we've seen that gap narrow somewhat. And so these initial observations really present some interesting questions that we are going to explore over the next several years in this project. In looking at things like the question you raised, how much of the growth in the racial wage gap can be attributable to just the overall growth in wage inequality? And how much is attributable to things like differences in education experience and even labor market discrimination? Occupational segregation is another important issue, both for gender inequity and racial inequity. And then there are a number of social trends that we want to observe, specifically related to African-American men in particular, the rise in mass incarceration. What effect has that had on wage growth? And then we think about the growth of immigration and specifically the rise in undocumented workers. What impact has that had on Hispanic wages? So there are a number of questions yet to be answered about why we've seen the trends that we have. Would it be a reasonable inference to think that if the undocumented were documented, if we essentially passed immigration reform, that this could have a positive effect on that sector of the population? I think that's absolutely a reasonable assumption to make. That's a class of workers, a group of workers, that is left open to be exploited by virtue of the fact that they're undocumented. At least, the people sometimes say that the problem of poverty is a problem of not really being in the workforce, of dropping out, of being perpetually unemployed. You get most of your income from transfer payments anyway. So why don't we just increase transfer payments, not that any powerful group is really pushing significantly for increasing such payments. What did the data show on that? So as Larry mentioned, the vast majority of income for the vast majority of Americans comes from wages. And that low income Americans are no exception. If we look at the bottom fifth of American households, so that bottom fifth of households, the low income households, we find that the majority of their income comes from wages. In fact, almost 70% of their income comes from wages and other wage-related income, like benefits or transfers that are tied to the workplace, like EITC. And so 70% of their income is coming from these wage activities. So wages have to be key to reducing poverty. We also think about the transfer system, and I absolutely agree with you. We need to use all of the levers that we have at our disposal. We need to look at TANF, we need to look at food stamps, we need to look at unemployment insurance, social security, all of these things. We absolutely need to strengthen the social safety net. And we've seen over the last 30, 40 years, the social safety net has made in that gone up. And it's not just in the Great Recession, although it did jump up pretty significantly through the Great Recession. If we look even just over the last 40 years before the Great Recession began, we saw wage-related poverty rates going up. So we can't leave wages on the table. We need to use all of the levers, the social safety net, and wage to alleviate poverty if we're serious about alleviating poverty. You know, my hometown is Los Angeles, which I often described when I was a journalist there as the capital of low-wage work. There was a study out this year from a group called the LA Economic Roundtable that looked at what percentage of workers in Los Angeles made less than $15 an hour, and it was 47%. So, you know, there are a lot of workers out there simply not making a lot of money. And that contributes to technology, that the culprit is globalization. It seems to me there are a range of culprits. Why don't you grapple? Is that our wage problems are due to technological change. And in recent years, they've added globalization. We can set aside why they ignored that for so many years. But what it really is interesting is that that is offered as a way to say that there is nothing we can or should do about it because you're not gonna change technology. We certainly can change globalization according to some. What we think is that this ignores a huge realm of policy actions which have generated wage suppression and income inequality. And it's easy to think about if you divide up what happened to different parts of the workforce. So if you look at the bottom half, and why low-wage workers didn't do as well as middle-wage workers over the last 30 years, which mostly happened in the early 1980s, it's almost entirely due to the fall in the minimum wage. And excessive unemployment at different times. If you wanna look at what happened to middle-wage workers relative to high-wage workers, it's well documented. We know that the erosion of unionization, the weakening of unions, has created somewhere between 25 and 33% of that wage gap. We know that industry deregulation has hurt. And excessive unemployment at the top leaves less for those at the bottom because those wages went up not because people became more productive or contributed more to the economy. They're just claiming more. When they claim more, that leaves less for other people. So we think generally, policy has its imprint on this. We think there's a Roma policy as Josh said. Income jobs disproportionately raise the value of the stock. Seems not to have occurred to any but a handful, if even that, of CEOs that they could raise wages. Which suggests to me that the decline in worker power is a real factor here. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean as Larry said, productivity is the potential for wages to rise. So we've seen tremendous productivity growth over the last 30 years, but it has not translated into wage growth for everyday Americans. And that hasn't always been the case in the 30 years following World War II, we actually saw wages track productivity growth. Over the last three and a half decades though, wages for the typical worker went up about 8% compared to 64% for productivity. So productivity has been rising eight times, has risen eight times faster than wage growth for typical workers. So there is plenty of room there to increase. One other thing I'm gonna just point out. On our website, so we're gonna be putting out a bunch of papers as you hear. And also on our website, we have this wage calculator. And it can show you it's fun to play with, I suggest you go to it. And you can put in your wages today and you can see what your wages today would have been. If your wages, wages for workers like you had actually grown with productivity. So you'd see that if you put in wages of $50,000, you'd see that your wages should actually be. And I mean that, should actually be. They could have been, they had the potential to be. If they had risen with productivity, $50,000 would be $73,000 today. Or if you make $60,000, you should actually be making $84,000 today. So I suggest you go check that out. That sounds like a pretty grabby website there. Well, this gets to one of my hobby horses. So one of the things distinguishing the first three decades after World War II, where in fact worker compensation did track almost exactly for a while with rises in productivity, is we're really looking at the one period in American history where workers did have power, where there was a relatively high by American standards. Anyway, level of unionization and with the decline of unions and at the moment only 6.7% of private sector workers belong to unions. So we're effectively looking at almost the end of collective bargaining, not the permanent end, just it's lapsing now. It's, you know, I would suspect there's a causal relation. Now I was struck by the fact that a guy who was really the leading intellectual light of the Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Galston, who's a brilliant guy, but tended to disagree with us on most everything, has been writing in a column in the Wall Street Journal that this is a huge problem, that we can't have this rising gap between productivity and workers' wages and suggested something that I've suggested, which is sort of your plan B when you don't have collective bargaining. Any comments on this? And I admit, I'll readily admit that the fact that Galston and I both suggested this doesn't mean it's necessarily a great idea. But what do you guys think about this? Well, just to comment, you know, one of the things that Tommas Piketty's book points out that has me rethinking some things is that that period of the late 1940s to the 70s is really an exception over 200 years of capitalism. And I think it means forces to lean towards it. So I'm of the opinion that we need all of the above. I think some things will have to be related to taxes. I mean, there's nothing sure to get income from one place to the other. The politicians like to use the tax code because they think that that is the one thing they have a handle on and they know how to legislate. But it ignores these broader things, like we need deeper and broader social insurance. We need full employment. I mean, full employment is the best recipe for good wage growth, right? So when we say we need wage growth, that is inclusive of an agenda to get very low and persistent unemployment. In fact, we will never, I mean, the only time that there was a modest closure of the Black Way wage gap was in the late 1990s. So you really have to do that. And I think we have to really work, regulating work. People should be treated well on the job. We need high labor standards. I should say just to give President Obama a little bit of credit, although they don't describe it. The administration has in the last year adopted somewhat of a wages initiative. They moved from the $9 minimum wage up to the 1010. They are imposing that minimum wage on contractors. They've agreed that they're going to have a new ruling standard on overtime, which will likely lift overtime protections for 10 million or more workers. So there is a wage agenda. They don't talk about it like that. I think they should. We should acknowledge it. And those are the kind of things they can do with the pen. But we need a much deeper set of policies that really will only come when you actually have a Congress that you can work with. One thing we constantly hear is that if only American workers were better educated, that would take care of this. Now, in one sense, this is, to a certain degree, saying it's your own fault that incomes and wages aren't rising. That's the least charitable interpretation of that. But on the other hand, it's said by people such as ourselves that, yes, it'd be great if there were universal pre-K and policies like that. Isn't it? Aren't American workers, in fact, better educated today than they were? And let me ask, Valerie, among women and minorities and Elise and just in general, what do we know about the education levels of workers in different groups? And how much potential does that have? Well, absolutely. Over the last 30 years or longer, we have seen educational upgrading. And educational upgrading has absolutely gone far to trying to lift wages, trying to improve skills in our economy. However, the workers, we haven't seen their wages move for a decade. So there's absolutely been educational upgrading, and that has helped. And in some sense, maybe that has what has helped close the gender wage gap a little bit in some portions of that. But it has not done very much. I mean, if we think about low-wage workers, low-wage workers are working more today. They are more educated, and yet their pay has not moved at all in the last 30 years, really. Their hourly wages have not improved. Valerie, in terms of specifically workers of color and women, what are the limits, and what are the pluses on the education argument? So for African-Americans, we've definitely seen the same kinds of trends. There's been an increase in educational attainment over time. But that has not been reflected in wage growth. And as I talked about the way that the wage gap has actually grown. But if we think about, if we look at those workers who are the highest earners, these are also the workers that tend to be the most highly educated. So the way that I sort of see what's going on is that more education has helped minorities and women to get higher wages. It hasn't necessarily gotten them to equal wages, though. So that's an additional step that needs to be taken in order to close the gap. Can I weigh in on that? Yeah, sure. One of the things that's confusing about this debate, but this discussion of education, is a lot of things get smushed together. And I want to kind of unshmush them. So getting more education as a way to help growth in the future, to build human capital, that's essential. Providing the most education training as we can to working class and disadvantaged students so that they have a chance, that's essential. That will help with social mobility. Where they are mobile to is another whole question, whether the jobs they can get are really good jobs. That's going to be determined by the wage issue. But if the issue is inclusive income growth over the next 10 years, which is what I think about when I say we need to address income inequality, addressing education is not very high on that list. And I think that people, sometimes purposely, or sometimes just because people aren't clear about what issue they're addressing when they say we need more education. Oh, the one that's confused in here is should someone go to college? Yes. I would think anybody who has the capability, the wherewithal, we should give the wherewithal to everybody get as much education as they can. And whether someone who is college educated does better than someone who's not could happen with modestly falling wages for college grads and rapidly falling wages for high school grads. That's not really a recipe for why we need to send people to college. But it still remains to be true. And so we need to disentangle these issues. I was several, a number of years ago, I was out in the exerbs of Los Angeles looking at these vast warehouses where a high percentage of the goods coming in from Asia and China are trucked after they arrive at the LA and Long Beach harbors. And these warehouses employ about 100,000 people in total. And there's the Walmart warehouses and there are the Target warehouses. None of them, however, are labeled as such. They're owned by property people, they're logistics companies managing them. And the workers are employed by temporary employment agencies of which there are 270 in the area. Whether or not the workers often have a permanent job. Their employer keeps changing. And Walmart and Target and the logistics companies say, oh, they're not ours. We don't have any responsibility for them. The whole issue of misclassification and putting layers of pseudo-employers between the ultimate company and the actual worker who is working for that company really reduces the power of the worker and the liability of the company to be held responsible for violations of overtime. I mean, what about this whole issue of misclassification, which exists in many sectors beyond just the one I'm talking about? How central is addressing that to the issue of wages? Well, I think you're highlighting a really fundamental shift. Nel had a conference on this a few weeks ago, which raises the question, and I know my board member, Wilma Liebman is here, she's working on this, who's the employer? Yeah. It makes it hard when you have all these corporate shells and games to hold people accountable to legal labor standards or to bargain with them or to hold people accountable in any which way, which we have to update our laws, we have to, so to accommodate that. The worker misclassification of making people an independent contractor when they're really an employee is rife within the construction industry, which is especially important because there's very high costs of worker comp in construction because it's a very dangerous industry. So those people who are independent contractors, you don't pay their worker comp. So you could have a $2 edge per hour work relative to your, you are a scarless employer and you do this. And we know that this is happening even on federal contracts, federal construction projects and many other places. So it's something I know that the Department of Labor is gonna be working on. It's a really important thing to do. It's the kind of thing we can do to help lift wages that doesn't require a law. It's that kind of thing. Also, we lose money, we lose tax revenue as a result. So there should be a coalition of the Treasury Department, the Department of Labor to deal with that, but it's been slow to emerge. Yeah, I should add that Jerry Brown, who is a governor often pretty good on labor issues and not so great on fiscal issues, has a state labor commissioner who has indeed held Walmart and its logistics company liable for the violations of wages and hours. So there are things that state governments and not to mention the federal government can do in this regard. I think we're on the clock, we're hitting a time limit. What? Yeah, you have five minutes. We have five minutes, okay. Okay, I had timed it exactly to this, now I have to think of one. In that, most of income that goes to people who own stuff, financial assets, is held by the top 1%. And not only that, the top 1% has a larger share of capital income now than it did 30 years ago. So despite the stuff around the ownership society and. Yeah, ownership society has a lot to apologize for. So I think it's really useful because it focuses on a large scale dynamic and focuses on the top rather than what can we do for those at the bottom. And it really talks about the bottom 90%. And I think what we're talking about here is the flip side of it. I mean, if wage growth were more robust, there would be less there for the top 1%, okay. And so there has to be a two tracks. He focuses on a tax policy. But in fact, he also acknowledges that the period of the great 30 years in France, I don't know how to pronounce that. It's haunts blue, yeah, that's our post war. You know, it was a deepening period of social insurance and unionization and broad wage growth. And we need to do, that's part of the picture as well. Elise, did you, you know. No, but I'm gonna go on and add anything, something anyway. Okay. I think, you know, when we were talking about education before and sort of how we think that it's important that people have that opportunity, something you mentioned at the beginning was sort of that link, you know, people are very focused on social mobility today and aren't talking, and talking some about income inequality, but certainly are not talking as much about wage inequality. And I just wanted to put a two cents in. We've seen recent research that's shown that there is this link between social mobility and income inequality. And what we find is that, you know, it's not surprising that there's this link. Poor children go to school with middle class kids or wealthier kids, and it's heroic to think that schools can do anything to close these gaps that we see, to give them any sort of opportunity to again get to those education levels that would be great for everyone to get to see. And we're really failing the American society by not trying to close some of these gaps because we should have the most skilled workers going to college, and that would help the American economy as well. And I think that, you know, we see mobility as low in this country, and it's been low a long time, and it's lower than many of our peers. And so we absolutely need to do something about that. But if we don't do anything to change where these rungs are in the wage distribution, if we don't change what this income distribution looks like, then some people are always going to be at the bottom. Some people are always going to be at the bottom. We know those low rungs are really not a great place to be. OK. Do we have time for one more? I think we're good. OK. Well, Valerie, Elise, and Larry, thank you all very much. All right, let me introduce you. It's my pleasure to introduce the next speaker, the president of the communications workers, Larry Cowan. He's got a strange first name, but you can forgive him for that. He's also from my hometown of Philly, my homeboy. But he's a great champion for all workers. He's a great champion for democracy. As I'm sure you'll hear, he's a great champion of the power of collective bargaining and the need for it. Thank you very much for coming, Larry. My pleasure. Thank you, Larry. Good job. So if you see me grimace, it's not just because of this chart. It's not because you endowed it. It's battling some back pain here. So that's the reason for that. I actually do think this chart is really critical, and my comments, in many ways, are going to come back to it. In addition to everything we just heard, this is by far the worst chart in the world for any nation that calls itself a democracy. So today's the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. Wages in China have risen significantly during that period. That doesn't mean that there's a trade off for human rights. Absolutely not. And they've risen not the way that we would want them to, not because working people have rights in China, more because of a state-controlled economy, where they actually understand the demand curve of 80 years ago that we seem to have forgotten, which is that when you don't have demand, you don't have supply. So many of the comments we just heard and why companies park their money in other countries, why they don't invest, why they buy back their own shares, why they increase their dividends, all of which is true. Historic highs for all of those is because they have learned on a micro level not to produce if there's no demand. And this is largely our demand curve for the last 40 years. Not exactly. It's a little higher than that immigration, despite its huge problems as practiced in the United States. The lack of equality for immigrants does create some demand or other things that create demand. But by and large, it's this. So we passed out. It's not labeled, but these three they directly fit with what you heard. So I'm going to sort of cut down on what I would have said about them. Those charts are from activist trainings, not just stewards, but mobilizer training that we do in CWI from this. Anybody interested can download this. 50 million people building a movement for economic justice and democracy. So we would say, if there's one thing you remember from my 10 minutes, it's not going to matter what our policy ideas are if we don't build a democracy movement in this country. It's not going to matter one bit. There's great people in this room. You mentioned Wilma, Dave Bonner. They struggled as hard as I did, or we did, to build a working class movement in America on the inside. This is the aggregate results. This is also the aggregate results of, and this only matters to me and maybe my kids, but 40 years, union organizing, starting as a worker, 80 hours a week or more for 40 years. This is my watch as a key union leader in this country. We need to face up to this. And it's not just this. Let's take a look at the chart that I think Harold mentioned, the number, 6.6, the first chart. 6.6 is not because working class people don't understand that without bargaining rights, forget about joining a union. It's about bargaining rights. Without bargaining rights, they can't raise wages. If you can't raise wages on a micro level, you're stuck with picketing, frankly. And I say stuck deliberately, because now you've got a policy argument, and without a democracy movement, we have zero chance of moving forward on the policy agenda that we in this room could come up with. Larry laid a lot of it out. And his colleagues, it's in the paper. We've got a great policy agenda. We have no power to enact it. It isn't just that working class people can't organize on the job. It's that this democracy is literally in the trash can. But we keep pretending as if it's not that the next election is going to reinvent it. And yes, our union, others, we will be there because elections have consequences, and there are differences between candidates. But we are also there, and we need to all be there to build a mass democracy movement in this country. Now in the booklet, which we didn't pass out, 20 different bills that the woman we call the best speaker ever got through the Congress between 2009 and 2010 never got discussed for one second on the floor of the US Senate. That's not what democracy looks like. Lots of good policy ideas, including 60% for the Employee Free Choice Act. And we have policy people who, believe me, I argue with, oh, if you just hadn't gone for majority sign-up, or if you hadn't gone for first contract arbitration, well, then there would have been no reason to go for anything, let me just add. And they also forget that we have 80 years of corporations are people. Many of us in the democracy movement discovered that with Citizens United, that that was a problem. That goes back to labor law in the early 1940s. Only in America, corporations run orchestrated campaigns to destroy the lives of working class people. They run them every day. A lot of my anger comes from being with those people, seeing those results. Companies like T-Mobile, controlled by the German company Deutsche Telekom, where one less than half the members of the board are elected and are union Verdi members. And yet they sit back and say, we can't do anything about. We won't do anything about. John Ledger, the pig who runs that company here, and he is a total pig. And I could go on beyond that about him. But let's just relate it to this last conversation. He made $28 million. He was given $28 million last year by Deutsche Telekom. The CEO in Germany made $3 million, who controls the company. This guy is a clown and buffoon, but this is an industry we know really well. 2,000 co-workers in this country are needed to aggregate the demand to equal his income last year. While he fires the workers, literally, the NLRB to its credit, again, struggling to make some difference in a policy framework that's virtually impossible about what labor law is, almost unprecedented, has consolidated the cases at T-Mobile. The firings, this workers' rights, 35,000 workers in this country, they've consolidated only two companies, Walmart, for the actions taken against strikers and T-Mobile, for the coast-to-coast suppression of workers' rights, including firings of leadership. That's just one example that we happen to be focused on. If we had the time we could take from different organizations hundreds of examples like that. That's the micro level of what it means to be a worker in this country. If you're lucky enough, as you just heard, to be classified as a worker. That's another policy problem that for five years, Larry, this labor department, and they're the best bureaucrats we could have. And I mean that in the best sense, and I will say that, assuming Tom comes in and I get to introduce him, you couldn't have better people running this labor department. But the framework is rotten to the core, and we get sidetracked. We're gonna nibble away at this, we're gonna nibble away at that, and we should. But if we don't have the overall narrative of what's driving this, that you can't have a Senate function like this so that even when we win the biggest political landslide in generations in 2008, we changed almost nothing here. Almost nothing. And we have to, some of us anyway, have to brag about the incremental steps on healthcare reform. And I don't wanna get into that. And we would defend them as incremental steps as opposed to the 400 items that passed the Pelosi Congress that never got discussed. 400 of them, including much better healthcare reform that everybody understands is much better healthcare reform where when an employer doesn't provide healthcare, they pay a real penalty, not 2% but 8%. That's four times higher. What we're seeing now is employers all over the lot abandon healthcare. Starts with retiree healthcare is virtually abandoned in the United States already. So it's not hopeless as I say in our union. It's just the hardest it's ever been, ever been. So this first slide, the 6.6, the cheery news Larry, is that it was at 13.3. Now, just to get back to 13.3, that's 10 million workers with collective bargaining rights. But it was at 13.3 before the National Labor Relations Act was passed. And not because the act was passed but because there was a mass movement for democracy that wasn't just workers organizing. It wasn't just political change. It wasn't just community organizing on an unprecedented level. It was these things combined with a common narrative. This is the lessons from there. And as I'll talk about in a minute, it's also the lessons from Brazil in the last 25 years. And with a more mixed record, South Africa in the last 20 years. So it can go up or down. And I talk here about collective bargaining because it's not about union membership. Yeah, that's what I spent a lifetime on. It's about collective bargaining rights. In France, collective membership is the same as the US around 10 or 11%. But there's universal collective bargaining rights. And union membership takes on a different dimension there somewhat because of works councils and other very French or Southern European aspects. But when you have no collective bargaining rights, there's no ability to deal with the micro tendency. And we shouldn't skip it for a second. I've heard this lecture from CEOs of the top fortune 10. They're not gonna raise wages no matter how much money they make if they don't have to. And they're not gonna keep jobs in America if they don't have to. The CEO of one of these companies said to me, it's like gravity. We're gonna take the job to the lowest place, the lowest cost place we can produce it unless there's policy to stop us. We're not gonna have policy to stop it whether it's trade policy or labor policy unless we have a mass movement with a political dimension and take the money out of policy so we don't have the most expensive and worst elections in the world. Seven billion dollars was the 2012 federal election. That's up 500% in 12 years. And that's not just Citizens United and it's not just McCutcheon although those are major factors. It's at this point totally deregulated spending and a Supreme Court that says if you can't show corruption there's nothing wrong with the system. And that's a second leg of the democracy movement. And we heard about immigration rights. That's a third leg where 20 million people not just the undocumented, 10 million with green cards and no real path to citizenship on top of the 10 million undocumented. And then we have voting rights. So these are the four legs. The worst voting rights since the Voting Rights Act was passed. We now have no path to pass anything but a sort of symbolic voting rights act. If you don't know that, it's critical moment right now in this Congress. Republicans in the House will only agree to a stripped out section four or section five. Section four provides the basis for section five. And these things may seem off topic these democracy issues when it comes to this. But they're not off topic because how do we change it? I don't care if you're Thomas Piketty and I read that book before I go to bed. It's better than any sleeping pill for me. But it is the charts are really useful. And at that rate I'll never finish it. So that's another story. But the charts are really useful but we so often get confused between the policy that's in our head. Why didn't somebody come up with this idea and the democracy movement we need to adopt it. The second chart here is the one that EPI and others have helped popularize and it's critical and it was alluded to. I'm not gonna go into it. This productivity gap but our little message that's in this book for every CWA activist and steward. The first thing they learn is that these two charts are directly related. The number one or two causal factor of the collapse of real wage gains, only in America, we'll get to that in a second, is the collapse of collective bargaining rights in the private sector. The charts are directly parallel as you can see. Focus on the red lines in both and then you see the productivity gap that was alluded to. The third chart and I'm gonna more or less end talking about this global economy. We hear global economy, global economy, wage rates in the U.S. have a ceiling. They're fixed by the tradable sector and where those wage rates are elsewhere. It's blamed for the collapse of collective bargaining in part as well, particularly in the manufacturing sector. That's great and some of those things there's some truth to it. I could have a hundred other countries here and the U.S. would still be at the bottom. Now this chart is wrong, George, as you know. It should say 10% where it says zero, zero is the base but the U.S. is just above 10%, about 12%. That's when you factor in the public sector. The 6.6 isn't wrong, just the public sector's 35. So overall collective bargaining coverage in the U.S. is about 12, they're abouts and the public sector's under attack as well. But what's the important part in this chart? It's not so much the comparison of collective bargaining rights in France to the U.S. or Germany and lots of important lessons we could learn from Germany where even Angela Merkel says we don't need the same economic stimulus you need President Obama. We have collective bargaining. It raises wages, it's sectorally based. We raise wages in Germany. And again in the telecom sector for example, this year they bargain, they bargain sectorally. Wages went up 3% above inflation. In our collective bargaining we're one of the strongest industries in terms of bargaining coverage. We have barely stayed even with inflation for this entire period. You know, you have to factor in that we have to pay for healthcare and in Germany they don't, but nonetheless. But as I mentioned Brazil. So 25 years ago in Brazil, most of us in this room would either be, definitely me, either in prison or in exile. And the famous picture recently, and again this connects back. Who led Brazil, what did they look like? Brazil, Argentina and Chile 25 years ago. And that picture, this is a great picture of this. Three guys saluting in military uniforms. Those were the leaders. And who are the leaders today? Three women, similar picture of them. Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Southern Cone. Three women all of whom are socialists. Brazil, Dilma, who succeeded, who was in prison. And who succeeded Lula, who himself was a union leader. A machinist and the metal workers. And helped build the workers party from nothing. And I'm not talking here about where we have to just build another party and that'll do it, it's not that. It's that they build a political movement with democracy elements in it to say to the oligarchy, which we now have ourselves, to say to that oligarchy, we've had enough. And even with all the obstacles, we're gonna fight our way through that in a peaceful way. Now they didn't have campaign financing problems, the voting rights problems, they did have some voting rights problems. South Africa, we all know the story of 20 years ago, ending apartheid. Well, let me just say the key on Brazil is actually, this one's a little low. Over 40% of workers in Brazil have collective bargaining coverage. This issue of the informal sector, that's the generic term for misclassification, has gone down some, it's still a huge issue in Brazil. And wages go up, I'll give you one example. The finance sector is organized, they have sectoral bargaining. Finance sector wages in Brazil are now higher than in the US, in fact, the Brazil bank workers came to us and said, we're really troubled, we're raising wages at Bank of New York, we're raising wages at Bank of America, we're raising wages at Chase, and what are you doing? And they literally said, we're gonna give you a grant, now that grant doesn't begin to attack six million financial workers in the US with no rights. And they did, hundreds of thousands of dollars they've poured into community groups to help us form similar to fast food, sort of big community organizing approach to financial workers in five key US cities. But again, so there's two sides to that, right? What do we do in a global economy? We unite and fight. But the other point is, those bank workers in Brazil have a higher standard of living than back office bank workers in New York, let alone the other four cities, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. So 45% in Brazil, it's going up from maybe five to 45, South Africa had 10% collective bargaining before apartheid was smashed. Now it's about 40%, don't go, and this is too often conventional wisdom, you'll get back. They don't go necessarily down. They go up or down based on what kind of a movement we build. And so, finally the other aspect of this global economy is, and again it was mentioned already, is trade. We don't have trade policy in this country. We have foreign policy that substitutes for trade policy. It's a critical problem. We're not against trade. We want 21st century trade and we're building alliances because of TPP. That's the only good thing about it. And TTIP, which is Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Policy, the big trade deal with the EU, is pushing us to build partnerships, not just with labor, the partnerships among green and consumer and labor on a global basis to define what should 21st century trade be. But early on in the Obama years, I had my own sort of private meetings with key White House economists and they said, okay, we're gonna actually produce a paper to show why this is the reality in America. Will you be disappointed, Larry, if collective bargaining is only number two or number three because you have the informal sector growth and you have globalization? Well, they've yet to produce that paper, sadly. But what does globalization mean is a leading cause. It means that at least 25% of our jobs in this country, including call center jobs, we have 100,000 people. Hi, Tom, I'm gonna get to your introduction in one second. 25% of our jobs are tradable. And that means that, for example, when we bargain with an AT&T for internet jobs that we actually brought back from the Philippines, they say at the bargaining table, and this is why the micro doesn't work. We can raise wage rates, but the jobs will go back to the Philippines. That's the reality for 25% of American workers, either directly or indirectly. So this wage stagnation in real dollar terms, what are the major factors that explain it? Number one is our approach to globalization that we call trade policy. It's not trade policy, it's investment policy. As Larry said so well, the growth of the finance sector to 16% of GDP unprecedented. In every other nation, it's around five or six. The clout they have in any White House, they've had it in terms of trade policy. It's Clinton, Bush, Obama, virtually the same degree of authority they have. It comes back to campaign finance issues and huge amounts of money they have to contribute. But we have investment policy. We don't have trade policy. Trade policy for every one of the other nations that you see here that Tom referenced in his recent talk in San Francisco, and I'm gonna come back to that. I should be calling you secretary at this point, especially since you're in the room. And because I love you. In his recent talk in San Francisco, there's so many of these ways, starting with collective bargaining rights, where we are so far behind the rest of the world. And yet what we end up doing, each one of us, whether we work in the best labor department ever, or in any labor union, or in great NGOs that are in this room, we end up and it's understandable. We work on what we can to make a difference. And if we didn't do this, we would be irresponsible. But if we also don't look at what are these other factors? Why is it that greens and labor and consumers are gonna go at this trade policy as if our life depended on it? Because it does. It's not just the tradeable jobs. It's the effect that the lack of a trade policy coupled with no macro labor policy, collective bargaining rights, has on wages that directly suppresses 25% of wages in America and indirectly the other 75% because when you take out the demand factor of the 25%, it bleeds into all of the rest. And so when we move forward, because of the democracy problems, Senate rules, money, and politics, no rights for 20 million immigrants, including green card holders, and voting rights suppression that holds back all the legislation that would have bubbled up from that Pelosi-led Congress, including Employee Free Choice Act, the Dream Act, much bigger economic stimulus, a much better healthcare bill, the list is on and on and on, disclosed so we at least know where that money came from. We have to say to ourselves, we can't just do that micro work that we must do, that some folks in this room, including this Labor Department, have done in the best imaginable way. We also have to go out and build this 50 million, why do I say 50 million, that's roughly half of who votes in a typical election, so at least on voting, a narrative that shields us all, what we call a common narrative from the 99% spring training that we did with all kinds of other groups two years ago, common narrative, not just coalition on a transaction, a common narrative about the demand side that produces this mess that we all should go home remembering that line, government after government, not addressing it because in many ways they can't, whether it's the Senate rules of the voting rights or the money in politics, which just gets worse, or the suppression of the rights for 20 million immigrants. And so, I'm now gonna shift from that, so remember it's the common narrative, building a movement of 50 million, linking the democracy issues to these macro economic issues, at the same time doing the best sort of micro work we can do. And as I already mentioned, Secretary, I read your unprinted out, your comments just days ago last week in San Francisco White House Summit on Working Families, and since you're now here and everybody wants to hear from you, I could give a long introduction about you. No, but I mean, you say that no matter what, but I do have to say before I get to this that your whole life has been on our side and I couldn't be more thankful and that's a huge blessing for all of us. Your friend George Cole sitting over there worked in your first election, lives in your neighborhood and works with me. And since that first election, Montgomery County Council, your role as whatever they call the Secretary of Labor in Maryland, your work, incredible work on voter suppression in the Justice Department and every one of the, actually I know almost exactly how many days you've been Labor Secretary because of the fight we had on the Senate rules to get you confirmed. Since August 1st of last year as Labor Secretary, you've been absolutely tireless. And MB who's sitting next to you, an amazing friend of ours, I also wanna say if you look at who the Secretary has named to these key jobs, you couldn't find better people and we couldn't get better people. So again, I just wanna underscore this, this is the best we can be unless we can find a path to attack these macro issues that this Labor Department cheers on every day. So in this speech, which I recommend to folks just last week, the Secretary ties it all together, starts out with the minimum wage and then clearly says that's not enough. And Secretary, that's what we've been talking about all day, that the narrative that just talks about the minimum wage, number one, politically it's dangerous because the 85% of working class people who are above the minimum wage, even above $10 or even 15, think, hey, my life is really, really hard. Who's speaking for me and where do we find at least the narrative that speaks for me even if we can't get the policy? But in this speech, you have the narrative because he goes on to talk about overtime, talks about global comparisons and talks about the role of the labor movement, says specifically in his speech. No one else in this government is saying this. Raising the minimum wage is a good start but we also must protect and strengthen collective bargaining rights. The opportunity to negotiate for your fair share. I have this stapled so I'm missing a word. I don't take it. Oh, anyway, that's my first introduction to CWA and y'all have been great folks and I want to thank not only one Larry but Larry and Michelle as well because EPI has really been a remarkably important entity. Your, the data that you produce and not only the data but the way you're able to communicate data is indispensable to which would grow the economy. We'd be growing even faster and one example, I've been doing very well over the last year in construction jobs. When you look in the aggregate, we've recovered 25% of the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession and so we, in 1979, but as you know from this curve here, wages for production and non-supervisory workers have barely budged and it's frankly, as one person told me, I feel like I'm running in place and it's not like there's not a lot of wealth or prosperity, the reality is that workers aren't getting their fair share. They're receiving a smaller slice of the pie that they helped to bake and as we all know, a key to a thriving democracy and a thriving economy is a thriving middle class with ladders of opportunity for everyone who's willing to work hard and play by the rules. A recent New York Times story and I've read this story about 20 times because it really, while it wasn't a surprise, it was nonetheless jarring, it documented that the United States no longer has the world's most affluent middle class and one of the reasons cited in the story and documented by a number of economists is the following and I quote from the story, companies in the United States economy distribute a smaller share of their bounty to the middle class and poor than similar companies elsewhere. That's one of the factors that is leading to the fact that our middle class is no longer the world's most affluent. Now I wanna take great care to note that not all companies are stingy and I always take great care not to paint with an unfair and unduly broad brush and I speak to high road employers all the time who are working hard who understand that their most precious asset is their workers who understand that it's a false choice to suggest that you can either take care of your workers or take care of your shareholders but not both. You see Costco, you see so many other business models where they are able to do both. You see it in big box with Costco, you see it at the eight hardware store that's a half a mile from our office, the owner there who has incredibly loyal employees because she takes care of them and she pays them a decent wage. I spoke to an employer yesterday, he's actually the largest domestically owned brewer of beer in America, Sam Adams. Now I didn't speak to Sam, Sam's been dead for a while in case you're wondering. And this is what he told me. And by the way, the median W2 from last year in his company was something like $55,000. People are doing well, they're making a middle-class wage. And he said, my employees are not an item on an income statement where he is every ounce of profit out of them. What he is most proud of in building that company started it out of his kitchen 30 years ago is that his workers have prospered along with him. And that's what America was. You know, Henry Ford when he doubled the wages on the assembly line, it was a similar concept. And I spoke to another employer recently who told me, Tom, this is a consumption deprived recovery and what I need most right now are customers. And so when businesses uphold this better bargain that we have talked about, it creates win-win situations for businesses, for workers, and for communities. And when you look at the data, and I can't talk at EPI without talking about data, the data bears this out. In 2012, the top 5% of earners were responsible for 38% of domestic consumption, which was up from 28% in 1995. And again, by way of background, remember that GDP growth, about 70% of GDP growth is consumption. So if we want to grow this economy, we need to stimulate consumption. Now, since the recession ended, by the way, my wife is doing her best to stimulate the economy, God bless her. Since the recession ended, I love her dearly by the way, so just make sure everybody notes that. 26 years of marital bliss. Since the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by that same top 5% has risen 17% compared with 1% increase for the bottom 95%. In other words, have enough money in their pockets because they're not making enough right now. And so when you raise wages, they're not gonna put the money that they're making into some offshore account. They're gonna spend it. And so when we address wage fairness as we are talking about today, this is a business imperative, or should be a business imperative, well as an imperative for workers. And I meet so many workers across this country, and you do as well. And those are the stories that keep me up at night. You know, the person in Connecticut who said, I'm making choices between a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk. The person in New Jersey who can't purchase a birthday gift when their child turns 16 because there's just no money to purchase a birthday gift. The choices between buying medicine and paying the utility bill, these are false choices. The woman in Delaware who quit her job as a home health worker to go to work at McDonald's because she thought that that had a better career path for her moving forward. And I hear of these all the time. The fast food worker who came in to see me along with Mary Kay and others a few months back who was told by his employer, if you don't produce a doctor's note explaining why you couldn't make it to work the other day, he was deathly ill and couldn't go into work. If you don't produce a doctor's note, you're gonna be fired. Well, he said to me, and he said to his employer, how can I produce a doctor's note if I can't afford to go to a doctor because I don't have health insurance. These are the tough choices that people are making every day. And every one of these people I talk to tell me the same thing. They don't wanna hand out. They don't wanna be on food stamps, but they have no choice. They have no choice because they're not earning a wage that enables them to make ends meet fast. And yet, we continue to subsidize business models for so many industries across America. And that's something I just don't quite understand. And much of the data has already gone out on this issue. We know it in the retail sector to the tune of billions of dollars in subsidies. But you may not be aware that 30% of bank tellers are on some form of public assistance. I think the banking industry's just doing fine right now. And the notion that they need a federal subsidy for a percentage of their workers strikes me as rather ill-advised inside voice. I mean, nobody wants to be on food stamps. And what's interesting in this discussion about low-wage workers is we have two very starkly contrasting viewpoints on how to reduce stamp recipients. The bill that was introduced by the House Republican leadership would actually, I think the CBO scoring on it said it would reduce the ranks of food stamps by food stamp recipients by somewhere between 3.5 and four million people. And it does it by simply slashing benefits, period. End of story. Now, there's another proposal that actually would reduce the ranks of food stamp recipients by a very similar amount. And, by the way, would save the federal government billions of dollars over the course every year. And that's called Harkin Miller, raising the minimum wage. The more you raise the wage, you get up to 10-10. Less people are eligible, roughly three and a half million less people eligible for food stamps. And they welcome that. That's what they tell me day in and day out. And we know the minimum wage has lost its purchasing power. Imagine you coming in for a job interview and being told you need to take a pay cut, Larry, from what, I need you to take a 20% pay cut from what you were making 30 years ago. Well, that's what minimum wage workers are doing because the purchasing power of the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation. But this isn't simply an issue of the minimum wage not keeping up with inflation. That's not what this flat line is about, although that's a big reason about what we're talking about here. But also, many jobs that used to pay a decent wage and provide decent benefits and retirement and other security no longer do so. I read a very gripping story. I think it was in the Washington Post recently. It was about a young who worked at the Nissan plant down in Tennessee. And he works there, but he's not an employee. He's a contractor. And if my recollection served me, he was making like $9 or $10 an hour, no benefits. And he worked for the contractor that brought in additional workers as production picked up. And he makes about half as much as his coworkers. And if he's out with an injury and he had a bad back, Katie bar the door because he never knows whether he's gonna be asked to come back. He has no security in his life. Every day is a struggle. And his mother, incidentally, raised him comfortably in upstate New York on a single salary working for GM. But Chris today really embodies that notion. The next generation's supposed to be better off than you are. And in Chris's case, it's not feeling like that. And in the case of so many others, it's not feeling like that. That is why the role of the Department of Labor in my judgment has never been more important in my lifetime. The gold standard at the Department of Labor was Frances Perkins, her portrait is right behind my desk. I look at her every day and I ask her advice every single day because she was a learned and she has spoken up. So, you know, we're moving forward but we have a lot of work to do. And we are using our pen and we are using our phone as the president says and I have good news. The phone's ringing off the hook at DOL and the president issued the executive order on the minimum wage for government contractors and we're in the middle of implementation of that. The president has also directed us to address the issue of overtime. You know, overtime stands for a simple proposition that, you know, if you work extra, you should be paid extra. And yet I've met so many people working 60, 70 hours a week. An assistant manager, some of the most valuable employees in these organizations and they're making $455. They're effectively working 10 to 20 hours for free. That's not right and we need to correct that. And so we are engaged in a very open and inclusive process of outreach listening to all stakeholders to figure out what the right wage is, what the fair wage is and we will be issuing a proposed regulation for public comment in the not so distant future. We also, last year, and I was very proud to be involved in this, gave home health workers for the first time the full employment laws that they deserve. Amen is right. Now, let me give you a little demographic profile of home health workers. 90% are women, half are people of color and 40% of them are on some form of public assistance. And the reason of, and example after example, the people working 70, 80 hours a week and making $400 because as a result of a loophole in the minimum wage laws, they were not entitled to minimum wage protection, not entitled to overtime protection. That was wrong, that is wrong and we fixed it and we're working very closely with states, with other key stakeholders, with unions, with others to make sure that we effectively implement this regulation because that is wrong when you say that you're working 80 hours a week and you're treated like a babysitter. That's literally how they were treated. They are not companions, they are professionals and they should be treated as such and I was very proud to be involved in that. We also need to address, and we are addressing workplace practices that erode worker protections, undermine wages and create an unlevel playing field. One of the issues I worked on in Maryland and we continue to work on in Washington is the issue of misclassification of workers. You look at this curve and there are many explanatory factors here but one is the number of employers are cutting corners. I mean, I'll call it what it is. You know, in Maryland, I hate the word misclassification. That sounds like you put it in the wrong folder. You know, oh, the file should have been in the third door instead of the fourth door. No, misclassification is this. It's cheating. In Maryland, we call that workplace fraud and there are three victims of workplace fraud. There is the worker, him or herself, who doesn't get the wages that he or she should get, doesn't get workers comp benefits, doesn't get other benefits that he or she should be getting. There is the, and so they underbid me and so we wanna support employers who play by the rules and then the third victim is Uncle Sam because if you're not getting, if you're misclassifying a worker, if you're cheating, then we're not getting those unemployment insurance taxes. We're not getting workers comp insurance fees and others. So that is wrong and that is why we are doing so much. And by the way, we are working in partnership with states across this country and it is not just a red blue thing. We are working in partnership with Utah. We're working in partnership with Massachusetts. We're working in partnership with a host of states. We have roughly a dozen memoranda of understanding because this problem is a pervasive problem across the country. Yes, we need to be competitive in America but no, we don't cheat. That is what misclassification is about. And last year we settled and secured a settlement of a million five in back wages for 250 cable installers who had been misclassified and we're gonna continue to use our full authority there. Our wage and our division is one of our most important there are more women in the workforce is a wonderful development. And what we need to do is make sure like other industrialized country countries have done that we are working hard to reflect the fact that our workplace has changed and evolved. You know, that we're in the modern family universe but we've got public policy that's more like leave it a beaver and we need to change that. You know, when you shouldn't have to make a choice between the family you love and the job that you need, you know, the most important family value is time with your family. You know, I wanna make sure that you make enough money, you know, to put food, but I think it's equally important that you be home to eat that meal with your family and too many people I know are not able to do that because they're working two and three jobs just to make ends meet. When I was in local government, people would ask me why aren't more parents engaged in their school and their children's schoolwork? Why aren't they coming to PTA meetings? Especially, you know, parents of color that was an easy question. And third job at night, they're dog tired, well to help. And that is why we are so focused on these issues. You shouldn't have to win the boss lottery in order to be able to take your kid to the doctor when he or she needs to go. But that's the parent of the United States. That is why this issue is so important to us and that's why we need to continue our movement. And that's why also we're gonna continue our efforts and I meet very frequently with workers who are involved. I met with the fast food workers. I met with workers recently, you know, in Pittsburgh, I met with them here who are involved in an organizing drive because these things are important. You know, the whole is so much better than the sum of the parts. That's what the union movement has been about. That's what collective bargaining has been about and that is why it is so important. It is also equally important as we figure out what to do here that we continue to invest in our human capital. A big part of what we do at the Department of Labor is make sure that people have the skills to compete. I was in Wisconsin recently and I was meeting with a group of manufacturers who said to me, you know, the average age of somebody in the skilled trades is 59 years old. Folks, you know, present company excluded, the population is aging. And a couple weeks ago, a wonderful partnership between businesses and labor. I met all these kids graduating from high school in the city of Philadelphia and they had a hop in their step because they were in this apprenticeship program that was gonna allow them to become a glacier, was gonna allow them to become other skilled tradespeople and at the end of that, they're starting out at $26 an hour, plus benefits. And these are kids who see a future for themselves. And so I spend a lot of time in this space because we think that there are remarkable opportunities that present themselves there. And my parents always taught me that education is a great equalizer and when we provide people with those skills, we can help them punch their ticket to the middle class. I was at an IBEW training program in San Francisco and this one guy, he was referring to Willie Wonka and he said, Tom, you know, I got the golden ticket. I got the golden ticket because I'm a journeyman and he was so excited and he was making 60 grand. He had 60,000 reasons to be excited. He was about 23 years old and he was making 60 grand. You know, I hope my kid when she graduates college in four years is gonna be somewhere near that. I suspect she may not. And so stop shaking your head, no, you gotta give me optimism. So you know, so the investment, our human capital is a big part of what they're doing, what we are doing because what I have seen when I talk about opportunity gaps for all too many people across this country, especially kids living in cities, kids who have gone to schools where they have received the tools to succeed. They have a diploma, but they don't have the core competencies necessary. We need to lend them a hand and that's what we're doing through the work that we do, investing in human capital. And when we see those opportunities arise, we are working in partnership. I come to you, not withstanding this flat curve with a remarkable sense of optimism. And I come to you with optimism because I travel across this country and I have seen partnerships at work that are making remarkable progress. I was at the Ford plant in Louisville a few months back, you know, in the depths of the recession, they were down to 700 workers. Now there are over 4,000 workers in growing and they are gonna add more and that doesn't include their supply chain. Why? Because management and labor came together. They had shared sacrifice during the depths of the recession and now they are sharing the prosperity. That is the basic bargain of the middle class. When you go out to Las Vegas and you see the Culinary Academy and you see the partnership between businesses out there, hotels, the notion that a service industry job is always a dead end job. That is not accurate. It doesn't have to be that way. And they have proven that out in Nevada and elsewhere. And I applaud those partnerships. You go to New York in the healthcare sector, you see the partnerships between 1199 and the hospital community and you see people with a career ladder, home health workers with a career ladder, with skills and with a future. So those are the things we need to replicate. Those are the things we need to take to scale and those are the partnerships that give me remarkable optimism. I talk to CEOs all the time who recognize that we do have a consumption-deprived recovery, that we need to make sure we grow a robust middle class, that we need immigration reform, we need strong collective bargaining across America, we need these partnerships. And so I come to you with a real sense of optimism because we've got a long way to go. These trends are many years in the making. They're not gonna be completed overnight and they're not gonna be turned around overnight. But you have a president who is focused like a laser on expanding opportunity, on making sure we restore that better bargain for the middle class. And we are using every tool in our arsenal here at the Department of Labor. You know, change never comes easily and change never comes quickly. I know that work in civil rights work. I know that work in labor work. This is the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It was first introduced in 1948 by Adam Clayton Powell. So change took time. And you know, as Dr. King said, progress will not roll in on wheels of inevitability. That's why I'm so excited to be here today because you are looking at the world as it is and saying, you know what, we can do better. And here's the roadmap. And we agree that we can do better. We agree that productivity and progress should be shared. And that is what we are going to work for. We see it across America. It can be done. It's being done elsewhere in the world. We need to reject false choices. We need to continue to redouble our partnership efforts. We need to continue to invest in skills so that people can continue to compete for these jobs. And we need to make sure that we reward responsibility with decent wages. We can do this. I have no doubt about it. It will not happen overnight. We can hit a lot of singles and we can hit a lot of doubles. And once in a while, I think we can connect with a home runner too. But only if we are working together, building a coalition that is not simply the usual suspects, but a coalition that cuts across ideological lines, that includes the business community, that includes labor, that includes nonprofit, faith leaders, and others. And that's exactly what we are doing. And I am so confident, and I will leave you with this, the arc of the moral universe bends toward those who work to expand opportunity. We've seen it. I did a lot of work in the voter space. And the reason why I know we will succeed is that history has proven that when you seek to expand opportunity for people, you're on the right side of history and you are on the right side of the American moral fabric. When you look to expand opportunity for workers to punch their ticket to the middle class, it's a ladder. It's not an escalator. They're no free rides. But when you allow people to climb that ladder by providing the opportunities that we're providing, the arc of the moral universe will bend toward justice. We will not allow a second gilded age to be the beginning of the 21st century. That is not an option. No way, shape, or form. And we will work because there is a business imperative to increase wage fairness. There is a worker imperative. There is a family value imperative. There is a moral imperative. And there is a global economic imperative to address the issue of wage fairness. And that is why we will succeed because the arc of the moral universe is bending and will bend in our direction. Not fast enough for my liking, but we're gonna make it fast as fast as we can. Thank you for your work. Thank you leadership. Thank you to the Larry's. Thank you to everyone in this room. A little different than economics reporters. He doesn't just simply report the data or try to translate data into roughly lay speak. He tries to give us an understanding of the human dimensions and impacts of economic policies on real people, real human interest side of things. So we think it's a contribution to the field of economics reporting and we're glad that he's brought it up. Jim is that the kind of work that is represented there in Seattle, work with labor, with community organizations, with small business groups like the Main Street Alliance, immigrant organizations like One America to win a breakthrough victory, which is happening there, but we can also see happening in other localities and other states around the country is the kind of work that needs to be going on right now to put front and center the issue of raising wages on the table. So I think that that kind of work, the work that we're seeing with the fast food worker organizing that's going on over these past several months, walkouts and actions in hundreds of places around the country and just a couple of weeks ago, a big action which resulted in many arrests at the McDonald's shareholders meeting. Other organizing in various sectors in the low wage labor market, home care, we've heard about child care, the possibility of winning breakthrough victories in different places around the country is I think where we're putting a lot of our Center for Community Change. Great, riffing off what you were just saying, we talk, Mikey, a lot about wage stagnation with low wage workers, but you are focused on some sort of higher skill workers who don't get paid anything at all. Do you want to tell us about that a little? Absolutely, so my name is Mikey Franklin, I'm the Founder and Executive Director of the Fair Pay campaign. How's that? I'm not going to hear my accent. So I'm the Founder and Executive Director of the first national organization devoted to ending unpaid internships. And it's funny, when I tell people that's what I do, the first response I normally get is, I can't believe such an organization didn't exist already. Unpaid internships are a $2 billion a year issue. We don't have particularly good data, unfortunately, but based on our best estimates of somewhere between 750,000 and 1.2 million unpaid interns every year, we're looking at over $2 billion a year of wage theft. And there's another side to it as well. I want to particularly recognize Ross Eisenbray of the EPI, who's created a lot of the intellectual foundation for the work that we do, focusing on how unpaid interns' wages are stolen. But equally important with unpaid interns is the fact that an unpaid internship is only open to someone with economic privilege. Unpaid internships, which typically happen here in DC, we're getting up to intern season in New York, in LA, these incredibly expensive cities. They're only open to people who have the economic privilege that enables them to work for free for long periods of time. And that's an enormous problem. When we're asking ourselves, as we do, why do too many people in too many rooms like this one look like me? This isn't the only reason, but it's got to be one of them. And of course, no issue, no problem occurs in a vacuum. And the issue of unpaid internships is no different. We've heard a lot today about wage stagnation, about the fact that even though work of productivity is going up, wages aren't. And this is a really clear example of that. Companies, unscrupulous employers think that they can get the labor employees, but they don't have the responsibility of paying them. And this is a perfect example. Today, back in my native UK, I saw that Coca-Cola were recruiting people for a music video. Coca-Cola, it turns out, not short of money. They were recruiting 40 unpaid dancers. They wanted 40 people to appear in their new commercial and they didn't want to pay them. How did we get here? How did we end up in a situation where the benefits of labor aren't going for people who do the labor? Whether that's workers who haven't seen a minimum wage increase in far too long, whether that's workers who have seen very small wage increases, even though their productivity has gone up, or whether it's unpaid interns who are working hour after hour at companies that can afford to pay them, but are receiving no wages. Thanks, and Carrie, just to build on that even more, can you tell us about how sort of the structure of the way that we work now relates to this? Work weeks, work hours, all of these issues? Yeah, so I just joined the team at the Center for Popular Democracy to direct the Fair Work Week Initiative. And prior to that, I organized retail workers at the Retail Action Project. And many of our members don't have the economic privilege, but also juggle unpaid internships with their unpredictable retail schedules to try to get ahead in the industry that is fast growing, but not offering opportunities for advancement. What we're seeing, and a trend I've seen growing over the past 10 years that I've been working deeply in the retail sector, is a trend called just-in-time scheduling where workers' hours change almost in real time because of the integration of new technology. Employers are adjusting worker schedules according to the ebb and flow of the market. And workers, as a result, have an extreme amount of unpredictability, variability in their schedule, and very little say over how much they work and when they work. And this isn't just retail, this isn't fast food. And in addition to that, there's another trend where we're seeing job growth in sectors that employ a large number of part-time workers. And so in healthcare, in education, and in addition to retail and restaurants, we're seeing workers who want access to full-time jobs, not being able to find those jobs. In addition to the quality of part-time work, in spite of its persistence in our economy and growth in many sectors, the quality of part-time work has actually gone down. So part-time workers earn a third less than full-time workers per hour. There's a penalty, and if you're part-time, you're more likely to be working poor. This is 28 million workers in our country across the sectors. And what we're seeing is that the combination of part-time employment with this just-in-time scheduling is rapidly changing the shape of employment today. And so workers are now experiencing an increased patterns of underemployment, employment instability, and it's fueling occupational segregation, it's fueling structural unemployment, and it's hitting workers of color and women the hardest. And so this is very much a racial and gender justice issue. And overall, what we're seeing as we're thinking about, well, what are the mechanisms that are depressing wage growth? And I'm so glad that Larry asked me to join the panel today. EPI is really looking at the mechanisms that are fueling inequality in our country, and we need to understand those mechanisms. And one of them is these new just-in-time scheduling practices. And these practices, if you think about, well, why aren't workers organizing to elevate their wages? Well, they don't know each other because their schedules change all the time, because their jobs change all the time. And so these trends and work hours and the lack of protections on work hours is really undermining workers' ability to bargain with their employer to organize, to lift up standards like fair wages. Okay, so now to push back on everybody just a little bit. First question, we live in a world now where just-in-time isn't just about scheduling. It's about everything for business. And when we think about businesses investing in creating jobs in America, which we can all agree isn't happening nearly enough right now in this recovery, one of the things that businesses will tell you is that their money flows to the path of least resistance. They don't want to have to put up with a bunch of new rules or regulations or even higher people if they can just get a robot to do the job. So how do you contextualize what you're arguing for here with a world where businesses have more options for how to spend their capital? I agree that businesses have a choice. And I think that, let me fix my microphone, I agree that businesses have a choice. And this technology is not determinative, right? Like you can short shift workers and get them to work harder to get more hours or you can offer them stable full-time jobs and advancement and develop their skills so that they offer a better quality of work. And I think what we're seeing is that there's this short-term vision that employers are engaging in to boost their stock market prices, their stock prices, as opposed to thinking about the hidden costs of high turnover, the hidden costs of having a workforce that is having a paycheck cycle. I remember a few years ago during the holiday season, the Walmart's media spokesperson talked about their holiday sales numbers and said, well, we were successful this holiday season, but we had to discount our already discounted items even further because too many workers were caught in a paycheck cycle, right? So they were too many workers were working paycheck to paycheck. And so they couldn't even afford products at Walmart. And so Walmart had to discount their prices in order to boost sales. And I think that if you put more money into workers' pockets, you create more full-time jobs, more jobs with career opportunities, you're going to see the economy do better and our communities do better. Mike, do you want to build on that? I mean, I'm about to say the kind of thing that gets me into trouble, but we like those things on panels. Yeah, this is hopefully a friendly audience. Some employers had to be dragged, kicking and screaming into everything that we now take for granted, whether it's protections against child labor, whether it's the 40-hour work week, whether it's equal pay for women which we should still be fighting harder for. These things didn't come because they were handed to us on a silver platter. We got them because we organized and we fought for them. We organized with unions, we organized with community organizations, with faith groups. Frankly, of course, there were going to be employers that are going to take the path of least resistance, and that's why we fight. That's why we have a labor movement. That's why we organize. And so you think, because what I heard Kerry saying is that there's a macroeconomic argument that this is essentially in their best interests also. And one of the things that the API report today is talks about business practices. I mean, is that part of the argument here? Are we essentially saying that the case needs to be made to employers, that this is in their interest as well? To me? To anyone? Yeah. I think that there's definitely business professors out there like Zayneptan at MIT who's making the case to businesses saying that good jobs are good for your bottom line. And I think that we can make the business case that better quality jobs is good for business and that shaving off labor costs this month is not going to help your bottom line long term. Kerry, can you tell us? Sorry, go ahead, did you just take a step? Well, I just want to say that I think that the point that Mikey made about the centrality of organizing has to be part of what we take seriously. There needs to be smart policy and there are obviously a lot of people in this room and on the earlier panel and at the Department of Labor who are thinking about that. But there has to be work done in a way that's going to really tap into the experiences that people are having around the country that are creating bold enough and galvanizing enough demands and a sense of possibility of what could be that whether it's around wages, whether it's around scheduling or other job quality issues. And I think that's where for those of us that are on the community organizing side or on the labor side where we need to be putting our attention and resources because without that, it's a discussion that's going to stay in rooms like this and that's not going to be a winning strategy. I wanted to ask you from earlier, we heard there's a lot of talk about trade policy and obviously this is an issue you're talking about locally, community organizing, but that is really playing out on a global scale. Your competitors in a job aren't, the people who want to do the same job aren't just in the next state over. Now they're all the way halfway across the world. So how do you do community organizing in a global labor market? Well, it is interesting. Larry talked earlier about some of the kinds of alliances that have been built around the bank worker campaign, the McDonald's campaign had actions going on in 30 other countries outside of the US during the same period when things were happening. So I think increasingly there's a lot of work to form alliances. That said, there are also a host of jobs that are in sectors that are not going anywhere. Home care, childcare, your local McDonald's are not, they're not going to be moving anywhere quickly. And so we need to think creatively about how that plays in this larger picture. And I think when we think about how the US is in terms of public policies that relate to today's workforce, the social safety net that covers all workers in our economy, that if you look at the standards in Europe or other countries or even Brazil, we could use, we could take a page from the part-time worker directive in the European Union to think about the ways in which all workers in this country do need new standards as related to work hours, but a host of other levels. And so I think that, I agree, I also echo what Mary said, the fight is global, right? Like workers in the UK at the same time, employers are finding ways to even evade the laws and the regulatory environments in the EU. So there's like zero hour contracts in McDonald's in the United Kingdom at the same time that Walmart workers are also fighting around fair scheduling practices. Is there some sort of a tipping point level of organization in an economy? I mean, it appears, one of the charts here, there's obviously wide differences across the OACD countries in terms of how much organizing you have, but it's not clear from that data that those countries are necessarily the ones that have done best at a median income level. Is there a particular point at which you start getting better or worse outcomes? I think the chart that I think is most important is not necessarily union density across OACD countries, but it's the chart of union density in the US against the share of income that's going to the middle class. And as union density go down, so does... Where that tipping point breaks? I think that Seattle is a tipping point. I think that in terms of what we think about the strategies that we need, I was really appreciated your discussion, Larry, about democracy and that workers, they don't have the workplace power to bargain with their employee or they're bargaining with corporate practices. It's not their manager anymore, that's the bad guy. It's the CEO earning a million times what they earn. It's a global corporation like McDonald's or Walmart. And so the power that workers have, and what they're facing in the workplace, out of the workplace and into the public sphere, that workers are bargaining with political power. We need to change the structures that are setting the terms and conditions of employment. And I think that if we can take the fight into the political sphere and bargain with our employers through policy change and new strategies of organizing that we're seeing advance across a variety of sectors, I think we're gonna see the floor lift and restore the right to organize and bargain collectively and the right to join a union. So, I just want to say, I think there's one other thing where we've seen some shift going on. And there's certainly a lot more work to do here, but it's in making visible people's stories. And we've seen this in the immigrant rights movement in a way that sort of shifted the understanding of who immigrants are and what some of the challenges are that they and their families face. And I think we've seen it over these last several years in thinking about and telling the stories of people who are at the bottom of the labor market. And I think looking at how that gets built on, gets built out both in old and new media is, I think, a challenge for all of us, groups in the room, people who work on that, like you, full-time. And it, in some ways, I think has helped set up some of the broader conversation around inequality and the conversation that's distinct but linked around poverty in this country. So I think there's, it's an area that could be mined a lot more as we look ahead. I'm going to resist the urge right now to plug our forthcoming policy and storytelling site on washingtonpost.com, which launches in the next few weeks. And instead, go and switch back. I am an economics reporter but I'm a recovering political reporter. And from back in the days when I lived election cycle to election cycle, I'm curious to ask all three of you, we have a contested on both sides presidential campaign coming up and we have both parties really trying to hone a better message to reach working class people. How do you all see these issues playing out among candidates in these primaries as we look to pick the next president? Well, you know, if you talk about the workers that are most impacted by today's trends of least around the fair work week issues, it's women, workers of color and young people and that's the rising American electorate. And so I think that we're going to need, I think what is going to drive them to vote though? And that's the question. And so I think that we need to have, I think that there's definitely some innovations around new local and state policies that they can lift up in terms of a viable platform around the women's economic agenda, paid sick days, minimum wage, the fair work week. And I think that what we'll see is that if they're presenting solutions to these workers' most pressing problems, I think we're going to see a rise in civic engagement. And I think that it'll help drive the conversation and help fuel more progressive policy change at least on the municipal level for sure. I mean, I'm hopeful that's the case. I'm perhaps slightly more cynical. The first thing I would say is that before we get to the 2016 presidential election, we have the 2014 elections. We've got governors up for re-election, we've got senators, we've got the entire House. I have a chance to make real change there as the Secretary mentioned his remarks. A lot of the most important innovation, the best policy that's coming up in terms of protecting workers' rights and raising wages isn't happening at the federal level, it's happening in the states. And so we ignore statewide elections at our own peril. And that's a lesson that many of us here learned in 2010 and would do well to avoid in 2014. In terms of the 2016 presidential election, I'm intensely hopeful that workers' issues will play a major role in it. I think your previous question was about a tipping point and I think we are situation. Circumstances are getting harder and harder for most families. And I can't see this any way that that won't be the main focus of the next election. Do you think that that means that you're gonna see a specific push to have a specific and broad agenda, particularly on the Democratic primary side among any serious contender on these types of issues? I mean, could this be the sort of driving force in a primary that Iraq was in the 2008? I have no idea. Well, man, this is Washington. We pay people to pretend like they have ideas on things that they don't know. And I'm from the UK, so everyone thinks that my ideas are great, even if they're completely nonsense. I hope so, of course. I hope that workers' issues play a major, major role in the campaign. From the present tone of the coverage, it looks like there's scant chance of that and it's mostly gonna be sexist and gendered comments about what Hillary Clinton is wearing on a given day. I live in hope. Mary, any thoughts? I would just say that I think part of the answer to your question resides with people in this room and people who, many of our organizations are working with across the country. The strategy that I mentioned earlier, trying to achieve some breakthrough victories, both in places that are perhaps more predictable like Seattle and New York and other places, but also in politically contested territory over the next couple of years, I think will help set some of that up. And then I think it really is, it's kind of up to us to organize and to find ways to work together to make these issues front and center. Because I don't think it's gonna happen without an organized push and I don't think any one organization or even sector is going to be able to do it. But I think it's got to come from the kind of coalition that's represented here today, as well as with partners at the local level. But politicians would do well to note the success of Senator Warren of Mayor de Blasio and then Bruce Braley's running a fantastic populist campaign in Iowa. The minimum wage isn't just popular among registered Democrats and bleeding heart liberals. Raise the minimum wage is popular among all Americans. It's popular, a majority of registered Republicans in this country want to raise the minimum wage. We can get an election fought on these issues if we find candidates who are smart enough to realize that this is what people want to hear about. So the last question that I would ask is about a particular issue that is still hot now in Washington and probably will be through 2016, which is immigration. So far what we've heard about immigration reform today is the idea that it will help with raising wages by bringing people into documented status and raising their wage. But a huge argument against legalizing millions of people is that you increase the labor force with unskilled workers which exerts downward pressure on wages. This sometimes seems to even be a fight within the Democratic coalition. Some labor groups feel this way. So how do you all think that immigration as an issue plays into the wage discussion? Having millions of people without the same rights as the rest of this country depresses wages. And so I think if you bring them into the full economy and create ways for them to participate fully, I think we'll see the floor lift not fall. On the wall of my office, I have one of my very favorite possessions. It's a poster that I bought in Paris from the May 1968 student uprising. And apparently Larry was there. And the students of the 1968 movement produced a number of posters. My very favorite one is a worker on either side. And once there's Français, and once there's Emigre, French and immigrant, and a man in a boss's hat trying to push them apart. I completely reject the narrative that immigration is going to have a downward effect on anyone's wages or on working conditions. It's just never been borne out by reality, among other things. It's just another way, I think, that we are distracted from building solidarity with other workers, building power in our workplaces, building power in our communities. That's the answer. I could go on and on, because this is an issue that our organization has been deeply involved in for the last 15 years. I would say that I agree very much with what Kerry and Mikey have already said. Beyond that, I would just say, I think there is the devils in the details. What kind of immigration reform we get matters a lot. And that's still very much up in the air, even as I think it is possible that we could see some movement this year. And then the one thing I would, I think I would push back on a little bit, Jim, is that I think there's, while in the past, there's been quite a lot of differences among various unions. There's been a really marked coming together in this period around a common agenda across the labor movement. And that has been a significant shift that we've seen over the last couple of years. All right, well, thank you all so much. Thanks to our wonderful panel. You've been fantastic. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's really fun. Well, thank you very much, Jim, and the panel. And for all of you, I have something special for those of you who are remaining. We've had a great, great data to launch EPI Signature Initiative. This is just the first of what will be a series of research events and other activities that EPI will pursue over the coming years to expose the details of the issues raised today. We talked throughout the morning about ways that we can involve the business community in these efforts to realize that it is in their best interest to do the right thing. Well, not that we here at EPI are into the practice of endorsing particular companies, but there is a burger company, a fast food company. It's called Shake Shack. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But Shake Shack has made some news because unlike many other fast food industries, they pay their workers starting wage of 9.50 an hour. That's in base hourly wage. But in addition, they provide 70% of an employee's health benefits, they also provide a 401K match. They're kind of different. And they've been on a very big growth curve over the last few years. So clearly the narrative that you can't do this and be profitable and grow is not exactly the reality in the case of this institution. Again, this is not an endorsement. We don't know all of Shake Shack's practices, but they are a curious example. And when they found out about what we were doing today, they wanted to be a part of it. And the way that we figured out they could do that is to provide each and every attendee with a coupon for a free custard, which is I guess something that they offer. So we have this available for you to pick up on the way out. And we would again like to thank our panels. We'd like to thank Secretary of Labor. We'd like to thank Larry Cohen and even our EPI economists for making this day very special. And thank you all for coming.