 fight against poverty sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute and our partners at the Center for Community Change. We welcome you all of you in the room and those of you who are also watching the live webcast. We'll get into some logistics on how those of you who are watching remotely can join the conversation this morning. But this event is part of EPI's initiative, this year-long initiative that we've been waging raising pay, raising America's pay. Looking at wages as a key way to deal with reversing the decline in stagnation in outcomes for working people and today we'll explore specifically how wages relate to the fight against poverty. Everyone's followed the news we know yesterday in Los Angeles we have the minimum wage being raised to $15 an hour over the course of the next several years and it was also referenced that this is a key thing that states can do that localities can do to actually fight poverty not waiting for Washington to act but creating and finding the nexus between wages and actually improving people's outcomes and that's something that we're going to explore today with research as well as commentary on politics as well as a lay of the organizing land and how wages is a key tool to improve the lives of working Americans. So for those of you who are in the room here in Washington DC now that we've started the event if you have to get up and use the restroom I'd ask that you please use the rear door of the room and you'll find the restrooms down the hall to your right. For those of you who are watching from somewhere else when we get to the question and answer portion of the program you can participate by sending your questions or your comments to the hashtag raise pay that's R-A-I-S-E pay. Our agenda for today will feature a presentation by Dr. Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute who will present the findings from her new paper that speaks just to this question of how wages can actually improve outcomes for people in poverty. After Elise speaks we will have a discussion moderated by Elizabeth Stoker Brunig of the New Republic that will include Dr. Gould as well as Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota, Deepak Bhargava the executive director for the Center for Community Change and Dan McGrath who is the executive director of an organization fighting on the front lines to organize people in these efforts. Dan McGrath from Take Action Minnesota. At this time I'd like to introduce Elise Gould who will get our program started today. Elise has been with EPI since 2003 and among her many areas of expertise are wages and poverty. She's been a co-author of EPI's seminal publication the State of Working America and her work on a variety of topics including economic mobility, health coverage have been published in a variety of journals both wonky and popular for public consumption. Elise earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She's got a master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA degree from Wesleyan University. So to get us started please welcome Dr. Elise Gould. Thanks Christian. We're here to talk about how income inequality and specifically wage inequality is the main reason we haven't seen falling poverty over the last generation and the pursuit of policies that target wage growth can and will significantly reduce poverty. Let's start by looking at what's happened with income inequality. In this figure you can see that the top of the income distribution has seen the vast majority of the gains of a growing economy over the last three and a half decades. Between 1979 and 2007 the last business cycle peak incomes of the top 1% grew 245% about 10 times the growth of the middle income 5th. Before 1979 poverty fell as the economy grew. You can see that in the period where they are moving together. That's actual poverty and the simulated poverty rate. If poverty had continued to fall as the economy grew in the last 30 years we could have eradicated poverty in the US by now. Government programs clearly matter for poverty reduction and they are very important and we should do everything we can to bolster them but so do wages. Wages make up over half of incomes of the bottom fifth of households. What little wage increases the bottom fifth has seen over the last 30 years has been driven primarily by increasing hours of work and not increasing hourly pay. Adding the benefits like health insurance and pensions increases the share of income from wages and increases the trend slightly over the last 30 years. Adding in government transfers tied to work such as the EITC illustrates the extent to which the bottom fifth of American households rely on work and work related income to make ends meet. In 2007 these sources made up more than two thirds of their total incomes and as a source of income they increased 10 percentage points over the last three decades. At the same time it's clear that government transfers like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and TANF have made up a smaller and smaller share of incomes. You see that with the downward sloping line here. Government programs matter. Here I've added in-kind benefits like SNAP, food stamps, and Medicaid. Government programs from the tax and transfer system reduced market-based poverty by 7.4 percentage points in 2013 but wages also matter and they matter to an increasing degree. Poor people don't depend on government programs alone. This figure illustrates the poverty rate graphed in the dark blue and in the light blue is the 10th percentile wage. You can think of the 10th percentile wage this way. If we were to line up all the workers in the economy, let's say there are 100 workers in the economy, the worker, the 10th worker, 10th from the bottom, their wages will represent the 10th percentile wage and you see that the 10th percentile wage and the poverty rate mirror each other. Higher wages at the bottom of the wage distribution are correlated with lower rates of poverty and that's true because many poor people work. About two-thirds of the non-elderly poor are disabled, retired, or in school. Therefore, they can be deemed as not currently employable. If we expand out the employable population into the red graph we have on the right here, you can see that almost two-thirds of the employable poor people work and over 40% of them are working full-time. Now let's move to the meat of our presentation. These wage simulations and what would have happened to poverty if wages had increased to a greater degree. Let's start with the market-based poverty rate. If we look at market-based poverty and that's simply the poverty rate if you look at wages and other sorts of income that don't include government programs. So taking out transfers and taxes from the government the market-based poverty rate was 19.5% in 2013. And each of these are going to represent bars of the simulations that we're going to do that you'll see in the next few minutes. Let's start with what's happened with wages. Here's an illustration of growing wage inequality. The bottom line is the bottom 90%. It's not the bottom 10%, not the bottom 20%, or even the bottom half of the wage distribution. The bottom 90% of the wage distribution grew only 15.2% over the last three and a half decades as the bottom, as the top 1% grew nearly 10 times faster. And if this graph had shares within the top 1%, you'd see just how unequal growth is. And all wages could have grown at the same rate. That's possible. Here I've added in the line of the average rate. It's about 32%. If the wage distribution today was unequal as it was 30 years ago and rising wage inequality had not occurred, then all groups would have grown at the average rate. Note just how high the average is being pulled up by wages at the top. The average is higher than that bottom 90%. If we take the population's 1979 wages and grow them all by the average wage growth between 1979 and 2013, we would hold the distribution of wages the same as it was in 1979. Essentially be able to see what wages could have looked like if they had grown equally. If they have workers across the distribution could have shared more evenly in the returns to a growing economy. So let's say wages, let's say that happened. Let's say wages did grow more equally. What would have happened to the poverty rate? If all wages had grown at the same rate as average wages since 1979, the market based non-elderly poverty rate would be 8.6% lower. Here I'm showing it as 1.7% less today and 4.5 million fewer people would be poor today. Next we're going to take a look at a simulation, what would happen to poverty had wages grown with the faster rate of productivity growth. This should be a familiar graph if you've seen anything from EPI. Since 1979, hourly pay for the vast majority of American workers has not only lagged behind growth in the very top of the wage distribution and therefore average wages, but it's also diverged from economy-wide productivity. From 1948 to 1979, the combination of high-pressure labor markets and institutional supports for workers bargaining power meant that wages grew with productivity. What you can see here is that wages between 1948 and 79 hourly compensation was up 93%, almost as high as productivity grew in that period, 108%. However, between 1979 and 2013, there was a marked decoupling of productivity and typical workers' compensation. Over this time period, productivity grew almost 64%, while hourly compensation of production and non-supervisory workers grew just 7.7%. Productivity thus grew eight times faster than typical worker compensation, which means that the prosperity created over that time period did not show up in broad-based wage gains for workers, and it could have. While many have claimed that the accumulation of overall wage growth at the top of the distribution in recent decades is simply reflecting a rising return to human capital, it is important to notice that workers across the wage distribution have contributed to this increased productivity as well. For instance, this figure shows that low-wage workers have far more education now than in 1979, and therefore have a higher capacity for production. So the next simulation examines what would have happened to low-income families if they had shared more of the gains in productivity via hourly wage growth. And here I've added in that third bar here. If all wages had grown at the same rate as productivity since 1979, thus gains in the economy had been more widely shared with low and moderate wage workers, the market-based non-elderly poverty rate would be 13.5% lower or 2.6 percentage points as I'm showing today, and 7.1 million fewer people would be in poverty. Next, we're going to talk about a simulation where we target full employment economy. A full employment economy can disproportionately benefit those at the bottom, thereby not surprisingly reducing poverty. This figure shows how wages at the low end are most sensitive to a strong or conversely weak labor market. It shows estimates of the impact on real wage growth of a 1 percentage point decline in the unemployment rate based on looking at data, again, from 1979 to 2007, across the wage distribution. So from the bottom of the wage distribution, the 10th percentile all the way up to the top at the 90th percentile here. Note the downward staircase. It's a steep downward staircase. As the percent change in wages falls for nearly every consecutive wage percentile up the scale, particularly notably for men in the darker blue here. According to these results, wage gains from lower unemployment are roughly twice as high for the lowest wage male workers than they are for middle and higher wage workers. Because of this, targeting low unemployment is disproportionately important for those with low wages. Poor people experience disproportionate boosts in work hours and wages when there is strong economic growth and full employment and see disproportionate declines when unemployment is high. It's very clear from this picture. For the purpose of our analysis, we simulate a healthy labor market by increasing work hours to match the levels that were found in the most recent period of full employment, the year 2000. And we combine this with the wage growth equal to productivity growth for the entire wage distribution. So we're putting two pieces together, the wage growth simulation from growing wages of productivity and this full employment story. So if our economy combining those together, we see that the full employment plus that increasing wages by productivity generally would reduce the non-elderly market-based poverty rate by 21.4 percent or 4.2 percentage points, as you can see in the figure here. This wage growth will bring 11.2 million people out of poverty. And the overall results mask important differences for different subpopulations. With this type of wage growth, women's poverty rate falls more than men's. The poverty rate for black and Hispanic individuals aged 1864 would be 5.4 percentage points and 6.7 percentage points less respectively, bringing 1.3 million African-Americans and 2.2 million Latinos out of poverty. The child poverty rate would be 5.9 percentage points less with marked differences for children of color, as you can see. Overall, 4.4 million fewer children to be in poverty. The final bar on this graph represents the poverty rate, including the entire tax and transfer system. As you can see, these safety net programs lower poverty by 7.4 percentage points. These are an important and vital support system for those who fall on hard times. However, it's also important to note that supporting policies that prioritize full employment that is using monetary policy to fight against excessive unemployment and strengthening labor standards, such as ones that increase the bargaining power of workers, raising the minimum wage, raising the overtime threshold, and enforcing wage theft among a whole other toolbox of things we should be doing, can be powerful policy tools to reduce poverty. Using these policy tools to spur broad-based wage growth are at least half as important in the fight against poverty as the entire range of our anti-poverty programs. And you can see that by looking at the differences from 19.5 down to 15.3 compared to the difference that 7.4 percentage point difference between 19.5 and 12.1. Yes, the government programs are very important, but we need to have all use all of the tools that we can to lower poverty. Targeting wage growth and full employment reduce the safety net burden by 7.6% in its ultimate goal of closing the poverty gap and raising the entire impoverished population above the poverty line. The fact is that increasing inequality continues as increasing inequality continues to go unchecked. The tax and transfer has to work harder every year to simply overcome increasing wage inequalities. Thank you. Thank you, Elise. We will now move into our moderated panel, including all of our speakers, and we are fortunate that Dan McGrath, coming to us from Minnesota, has been able to join us right on time. All of our speakers are in fact quite accomplished. So in an effort to speed this along, we're not going to read their very extensive bios. We passed out, as you came in, a packet that includes their detailed biographies. But to introduce you again to them, to the left of Elise is Congressman Keith Ellison, who represents Minnesota's fifth district and is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. To his left is the executive director of the Center for Community Change, Mr. Deepak Bargava, an organization that is devoted to developing the capacity of low income people to develop and exercise power to improve their circumstances. And then we have Dan McGrath, who is an on the ground organizer in the state of Minnesota, with an organization called Take Back, Take Action, Minnesota. And their conversation will be moderated by Elizabeth Stoker Brunig, who is a staff writer at the New Republic. Elizabeth's writings have appeared in a variety of publications. She is a prolific writer on issues relating to Christian ethics, poverty, liberalism, and we're very excited that she could join us today. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you all so much for being with us today. Thank you, Elise, for that fantastic presentation of a very interesting and very moving report. So I think we're going to open with a discussion of the news. And I think that the first question should go perhaps to Dr. Bagara. Today, my colleague at the New Republic, Danny Vinnick, published an article saying that we were all wrong about the fight for 15. In fact, a lot of people in the DC media seem to have that wrong. And Danny's mea culpa is much appreciated. And he is reflecting on the raise of the minimum wage to $15 per hour in Los Angeles. We've also seen some sort of seemingly unprompted raises in wages in particular companies like Walmart to $9 an hour. So what has been going on with these bumps in wages? What is the source of that movement? What is the role of a labor movement in moving towards raising wages overall? Yeah, well, thank you. And I really want to thank Elise and EPI for this work. I was really excited about the idea of the research. I was even more excited to read it. I think it's really very, very important. And here's why it's important. It relates to your question is I think the debate about poverty in this country has been stuck in a really bad paradigm for a long, long time. And the paradigm is conservatives say personal responsibility, family formation, the centrists and many liberals say, Well, we just need to do more government programs, which I believe in by the way, Elise was great in emphasizing the importance of tax and transfer. But what's been lost is the share of the country's wealth and growth and productivity going to workers as a dimension of the poverty issue in the country. So I actually think the country recognizes the centrality of the wage question to inequality and to poverty, in a way more than the conventional wisdom in Washington does. And so what I think you saw with the spark that was lit by the fast food workers who took enormous risks and have exhibited enormous courage, the reason for the residents of that demand for 15 is obviously that it will make a huge difference in people's lives. But also I think it spoke to this deep truth in Elise's paper, people understand that the underlying cause here has to do with the distribution set of policies that have resulted in in the distribution of the labor market of these gains in a totally unfair way and that we can choose to do it differently. So whether it's fast food workers or Walmart workers or minimum wage campaigns or paid sick day campaigns or efforts around scheduling the huge momentum in the country I really think speaks to the to this analysis and I'm hopeful that this analysis can help us break through to the kind of bold solutions that the country needs and really help lay an intellectual foundation for a different way at coming at this profound moral crisis of poverty we have in the country. Thank you so much. And to follow up on this sort of paradigm that you mentioned the discussion of poverty being sort of delimited by either purely personal responsibility approaches or purely government based approaches. I do think it is an interesting question how the disparity in wage growth has affected communities. And maybe this is a good question for Congressman Ellison in situations in the United States where we're seeing a great deal of unrest right now Ferguson and Baltimore. What do you think the role of stagnant wages especially in working class jobs is well just think about Eric Garner for a minute. Are you going to sell Lucy cigarettes on the street if you have a livable wage job. Think about Mike Brown. Now that here's the thing. We talk about is it the black fall of the white copper the black kid or the black kid of white copper we are this endless loop thing. And I'm not trying to say that Darren Wilson acted properly improperly I think he acted improperly for the record. But I will say that when you look at the fact that poverty leaped in Ferguson that unemployment went way up over the course of 10 years that St. Louis in general has been hit. But with offshoring jobs as hard as any community. What happens in situations like that is that you start having people who were who you got more people hanging out because they're not working. And then the people who still have jobs have a tendency well you know get those people off the corner officer. And then you got some good officers who will be professional you got some others who won't be. And you just got a clash waiting to happen. All you need is somebody with a bad attitude and a happy trigger finger. And you got a catastrophe. As many Darren Wilson's you got you might have some decent cops who want to police justly. But the bottom line is they're still there present patrolling the neighborhood patrolling the poor. Move that I mean you know and it just sort of radiates I mean that I am convinced that a more why don't we have police brutality in the rich part of town. We never talk you know the police are not using excessive fourth on Capitol Hill and there's plenty of cops there. They're not beating up members of Congress and there's cops all over the place. Why not. Well obviously where we the police use heavy handed tactics on the economic castaways. And that's just part of the reality. And so I definitely feel like a key to restoration is raising wages. And yes we've got to have body cams and we have got to have more police civilian review boards and yes we've got to have you know grand jury reform and we've got to train police better. But at the end of the day if our answer to the economically left out is prison and police you're going to have these catastrophic Baltimore type situations over and over and over again. Thank you very much. Another question that I would pose to the whole panel and see who has a thought on it has to do with marriage differentials. So one of the claims that has come out of those interested in the falling especially age of first marriage and marriage rates in general in the United States is that wages have stagnated among lower class men and working class men and these have in fact been one of the groups hardest hit by the recession and they haven't experienced the same kind of bounce back that other groups have following the recovery. So I would be interested in a discussion of how raising wages in especially working class jobs could change the landscape of marriage in America. You know I can jump in with a with a story of one of our members and I have to say as a fellow Minnesotan to Keith and appreciate this conversation in the Paul Wellstone conference room. That's right. So you just had some context right. Minnesota is healthier wealthier. We are better educated than virtually every other state. We also have we also are last or next to last in racial disparities and we have the worst racial disparities in the country. When you look at how low wage work correlates who is in low wage work. Right. It's important to note how much this impacts communities of color first and foremost. And I think I mean the I think the research paints that picture eloquently. It's also true that there are there are a lot of white folks that are collateral damage. There are a lot of men that are collateral damage of that or in fact central to it. So I think of Matt McIntyre who's a member of ours. He's 35 years old. His father was a mechanic. His mom worked in the home. He had to delay college for several years when his father got cancer. He eventually went back and finished. But his mother after his father passed was settled with 10 years of medical debt which he continues to pay. Matt eventually landed a job in I.T. That was the field in which he got a degree. And he survived the beginning of the recession but eventually was laid off in about 2010. And since then has never been able to find a job at half of the salary that he was making. So he has worked a series of part time minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs for the last several years. He's now a father. His daughter was born premature. And it's all to say that when you think about you think about the grind on anyone who's working a low wage job add to that being a new father. And you consider the sort of strain that then places on the family. And it's all to say that you know oftentimes conversations such as this can revolve around how do we raise minimum wages which is critically important and something that we've been very focused on. But it's also to say that you need to look at the entirety of what one's work life is like in order to consider how someone what it actually takes for someone to prosper and thrive. So wages as a means to bring some stability to the family unit is critically important. So is earned sick and safe time. Paid sick days is what's often called the particular policy we're moving in Minnesota is not only paid sick days but also a time off if you're experiencing domestic violence. It's all to say that I think the question is not just about minimum wages but also about what it takes for an individual to actually live sort of a whole and fulfilling life. And what are the sort of markers we need to put in place for that. And how is that the aim of our policy rather than just minimums. Absolutely. And you know a lot of turn of the century Catholic movements used terms like family wage or an existence minimum. And I think that those are really really important concepts to return to as opposed to just a minimum sort of subsistence wage a wage that looks at flourishing. I would like to ask the audience now if you have index cards you can begin submitting your questions and to move us along while you get your questions together. A couple of wonky objections to raising the minimum wage perhaps Elise can tackle these. I know recently Paul Ryan who might be looking at a presidential bid said that they are inflationary. That it will knock off important jobs at the very bottom for people who are trying to get started or enter the labor market. Walmart after a month of having their nine dollar minimum wage has said that it reduced their earnings by two cents per share. That they did lose profits on that. Stop everything we're doing. Absolutely. I mean I know that this distresses us all quite a bit but I can see it entering into the election as we move into 2016. The idea that raising wages would harm business or harm low income workers is probably going to be a prominent objection. So can you respond to those. Sure. Sure. And I want to talk a little bit about follow up on some of the comments that Dan made also. I think that it's a great move. I think the framing for the mayor talking about how important raising the minimum wage is for reducing poverty. We couldn't have sort of planted that better in the news stories today for our event. And I think it's absolutely important. I think that even when you see estimates of what raising the minimum wage will do it is substantially important to workers at the bottom and their ability to make ends meet. Even in LA when we look at we use our basic family budgets and we look at how how well people are doing even at $15 an hour there's going to be many people that are not able to get the health care that they need to be able to pay for the child care that their family needs. So for some families it's it will still be insufficient. But I think the move that's that how it's being done and it's going to be done a little bit at a time. It's not like it's going to be $15 an hour today. I think that the research out there will show that this is going to be a positive boom for families for working families and we will not see any disappointment effects. These fears about profits profits are still at an all time high in the U. S. The labor share of corporate sector income has still not rebounded in this recovery. It's still at very low point here. There's still plenty of room for the labor share to improve without thinking about even raising prices in the economy. So I think that those are all over boned and I think it's absolutely positive move for LA to be making this. And then just to follow up just quickly you were talking about single single mom families or marriage. And I think that oftentimes it's absolutely true that single parent families as you've said they're they're struggling and they are far more likely to be in poverty. In fact half of families headed by a single mom are actually in poverty. But the fact is that that hasn't changed significantly over time. And when we look at what factors have driven the poverty rate it is far more important as a determinant of poverty the growing income inequality that we've seen this country. The growing income inequality has risen poverty by 7.1 percentage points when you decompose poverty into all the different economic and socioeconomic factors. Whereas family structure has only increased poverty by 1.6 percentage points. So it dwarfs the growth of income inequality dwarfs things like the racial composition of the of the workforce and family structure in terms of what are the determinants of poverty. Thank you very much. And another objection. Economy focusing on wages is going to be a bad move because a lot of jobs are going to in fact be done by machines. And so there will have to be some other way of routing income to people who previously fulfilled that work. Do you think that moving into the future. You know when when we we've always had mechanization and technology entering into the economy and we have more people and we've had more and more people entering into the economy. So I don't I don't really buy that. You know when we went from mechanized shoes from you know the shoemaker in the town little to in the town shoemaking shop. I mean that I'm sure there are people who couldn't make shoes the way they used to but they did other things. The reality is is that I'm open to the conversation about guarantee down income. I don't think it's a bad discussion to have. But when you think about the trillions of dollars of maintenance that are needed on our highways and roadways and bridges and I mean Dan and I come from a place where the bridge fell into the river. The other day if we'd have fixed the Amtrak up the proper way we probably wouldn't have had that catastrophe. I mean I guess my point is before we say we've got to go to guaranteed income let's fix up the country and we could put a whole lot of people to work that way. And going back to your question about single family households and all that I mean in Europe you can be a single parent and not be relegated to poverty. In Europe you can be a single because you have a decent pay but you also have public wealth that sustains you and your family. So if you're going to try to tell American women that the only way you can avoid poverty is to marry somebody. I mean that's kind of a sad commentary. I mean hopefully people will be married because they want to be as opposed to I'd leave you if I could. I just need you economically you know. Right absolutely and that argument also is peculiar that forms of public wealth forms of public assistance will discourage marriage because they'll provide women with income. It's peculiar in that it's also an argument against raising wages for women because that would be another way to discourage marriage and in fact an argument against education for women and all sorts of other things that allow women to provide for themselves. So a very specious argument that one but one that gets more traction than maybe is comfortable to think about. So we have a question from our audience. Is there a modern example of a nation implementing a living wage and maybe we can speak to the difference between a living wage and a broad-bath wage growth and what the relationship between the two might be. Well you know look I'm not the economist right but it strikes me that in Germany you can go to college for free you don't have to have you don't have to get sad over the lifelong debt burden. It strikes me that we there are workers on the corporate board who can help guide the company forward when it makes decisions. It's a highly unionized country and we have that has far less inequality than we have. I mean when you think when I think of America I think of the idea of possibility and intergenerational mobility. The truth today is that there's a bunch of countries where a poor kid can climb into the middle class much easier than we can in ours. I mean the bottom line is there's a whole lot of great ideas we think of American ideas that are actually imports like our interstate highway system. We need to start adopting some American ideas that come from other places like worker inclusion the right to organize debt free college. This would improve us quite a bit and I think northern Europe in particular is not a bad place to start. One other example to that point that I really think speaks to Elise's paper is Brazil has had the experience of bringing 40 million people out of poverty. There's a lot of attention that's been given to the conditional cash grant that people get. What's not as well understood and probably a bigger factor in that is the substantial increase in wages through a mix of worker organization and bargaining and through government policy that has produced substantial gains in that country. And as Congressman Ellison said the poverty rate in countries in northern Europe and Scandinavia is close to zero. So we have examples of countries that by raising wages having a strong safety net and this theme that Elise lifted up about a commitment to full employment which has got to be an anchor to any serious strategy to deal with this that these are solvable problems and there are examples in other parts of the world that show us this does not have to be the way that we organize our society or economy. Absolutely. And while I have you so focusing on wages as well as in conjunction with programs that deal with specific portions of the American poor disabled people students and children but focusing on wages for the working poor. Do you think that would do something to rehabilitate the role of business in society or the way that Americans conceptualize the role of business to communities. Well I think there's a pretty dark story underneath the graphs that were in the E.P.I. report that Elise did. And that story is I think most Americans understand that these these trends did not happen by accident. They happened by design the sense that the game is rigged that the political process and policy choices are being driven by the one percent by corporate actions the deliberate effort to undermine the labor movement which provided such an important anchor in making sure that the fruits of people's labor that they enjoyed those fruits of their labor and shared in the wealth that they were creating. So I think there is a good case to be made that it is in the long term interest of this country as a whole and of the business community as well as working people to have a higher floor. The the other thing I'd say about it is that you know when you don't have a higher floor you were essentially rewarding the lowest road employers. You make it much more challenging for high road employers to succeed. So it is in a sense picking winners and losers to enable low road behavior. And it's not just minimum wage standards as Dan said it's the fact that for millions of American workers the minimum wage is essentially unenforced doesn't exist the billions of dollars that are stolen in wage theft. So to the extent that we take the floor seriously we are setting a level playing field at a different level that will benefit significant portions of the business class. The last thing I'll say is it's been interesting to me to see the level of support from small business owners or increasing wages. Something that if you believe the conservative propaganda on this topic you would think would be impossible. Why is that? Who are the customers of neighborhood small business? They are in fact people who tend to earn the minimum wage or somewhat higher. So there are feedback effects for the economy as a whole from lifting the floor that are important to note as well. Can I just tag on that for just a second? Just to say that in essence what we're talking about is how do we change who benefits in this economy? And I think it's important to then ask ourselves the only way we're going to change who benefits in our economy is if we also change who decides in our democracy. So I think Deepak is exactly right. Like in fact there is an argument, a strong argument how raising wages and business interests and that was the experience we had in recently raising the minimum wage in Minnesota and indexing it to inflation. As proud as I am of that victory again that is not a living wage that we established in our state as our wage floor, right? So what we have done is raised the floor but nevertheless still not broken through any sort of layer of poverty. And I'd argue that if you know what stands in our way is that there are people who profit from inequality and who profit from poverty. And so in considering the policy solutions we also have to ask ourselves then how do we wage campaigns which not only shift a larger public debate actually have a conversation about poverty which in and of itself is pretty rare. But also do so in a way where you begin to empower people. For example in the workplace. So this idea of which is being test driven or we are trying to test drive it in the city of Minneapolis we're still in the midst of shaping the policy is how can we equip workers and community organizations to actually investigate and file wage in our violation complaints, right? The idea of that instead of trying to create just an increased structure in the city which we do need and more investigators on the city payroll to do this. How can we actually equip workers with the tools to do this themselves so that we can actually prosecute these sorts of issues? So it's all to say, right? That's one small way of trying to empower workers in a way that changes things. Absolutely. Can I pick up on something Dan said? Dan talked about the nexus between the inequality in our economy and the inequality that then translates into our democracy. This is a thing that I've been spending a lot of time thinking about. And I just want to say that this has got to be part of the conversation. You know, I had some staffers dig up some stuff for me and what they found a few things that I found interesting. One is that in 2012, 80% of the people making 150,000 or more but voted. 80% of the people making 150,000 or more voted. But only 36% of those earning less than 50,000 voted. Despite the fact that people making less than 50,000 make up half the population of the whole country. Now $150,000 is not, you know, super get rich money. It's decent money. But that's $1.50 and up. So I found 99% of the wealthiest 1%, like all the wealthy 1%, they vote. In 2008, for midterm elections, the vote gap gets even bigger. And here's the thing. And Heather McGee and those guys at Demos are, to be appreciated for this, states which have more working class people voting have more egalitarian policies implemented. So closing the voting gap between the economic strata absolutely improves outcomes. And so for example, you know what I mean? Just think about, you know, well anyway, my only point is that this has got to be part of the conversation as we move forward. It's part of the solution. You know, it should be kind of interesting to all of us that, you know, in all these states, all these states where you have red states, people are voting to increase minimum wage and push forward a lot of policies. One of the things we've got to do is get some people who are willing to carry those policies as a bundle, not just, you know, measure by measure. Anyway, just thought I'd throw that in there. Thank you very much. There's an excellent new book out, The Tumbleweed Society by Allison Pugh on the insecurity of work that increasingly Americans are dislocated from families and the areas they've grown up in by insecure jobs having to follow the work. So someone in our audience wonders, how do we address low wages and the lack of benefits in the ever-increasing gig economy where fewer and fewer people have one employer for many years as they have in the past and must take work on a contract basis? How do we organize in that situation and how do we address wages and wage theft in those situations? Well, I would say, and this comes out, I think, in the report, that there is a substantial number of people for whom a big driver in poverty is that they cannot get enough work. Yes. So that is people who are underemployed, who are discouraged out of the labor market. It's also people who are struggling with part-time arrangements that are intensely destructive of family well-being. That's right. You get called on the phone, got to show up at work, canceled, your childcare falls apart. And that is a deep, profound reality for low-wage workers in this country. So I think there are some pioneering efforts being pushed by community organizations, by the labor movement to try to get at some of that. Things like fair scheduling, the fair scheduling ordinance in applying to big-box stores in San Francisco, which tries to give workers, to Dan's point, more control, more predictability, more stability. I also think we do need to ask ourselves whether we need to create some policies that encourage full-time employment for those who want it. And the destruction of the job, as we know it, into its component parts in a way that works well for those who employ, but not those who rely on work. We have moved to a situation where we have, in a sense, incentivized that. What are the set of policies that might do that? The last thing I'd say is how important worker organization is, how important unions are, not just for the people who are members of them, but for other workers who rely on the standards that get set for entire industries, regardless of whether you're part of a union. So a piece of the solution has to do with making the power of workers, to this point about democracy, kind of leveling the playing field, having the ability of workers to bargain for standards, not just about wages, but about all the other terms and conditions of work, which make for a family-sustaining good job. Absolutely. I use that, too. Excuse me. Can I add to that? Yes, please, please do. So, I mean, I think that one thing to keep in mind is that poor people are not a static group, right? There's all of us and there's all of them. It's not true at all. In fact, if you look over a two-year period, 30% of Americans will become poor for at least one month in a two-year period. And we've seen in the Great Recession that's probably been exacerbated. So why are poor people not working, you know, or why it's such a large share of them not working? Well, a lot of people, would-be workers, are poor because they couldn't find a job, right? So it's not this population that isn't working or because they're, you know, for various reasons. It's because many of them want to be working and they were middle-class maybe just a couple of years ago and now because of the Great Recession or because of 30 years of lacking wage growth, they're having a hard time making ends meet and now they're becoming poor. In fact, over 3 million, 3.3 million of people in poverty are unemployed. So they're actively trying to find jobs and they cannot find them. So absolutely all the solutions that we're hearing today, ways of getting people to work and getting the hours that they need and the regular hours. I think the regular employment is absolutely vital, particularly when you think about working parents and the childcare needs that they have. It is vital for them to have more steady hours to be able to care for themselves, for their family, to provide for their families. Can I dive in a little bit? So I think that it's important too to, I mean, just I think Deepak certainly alluded to this idea that we have got to very enthusiastically embrace organizing social organization. I think that's gotta be one of the ways back. One of the reasons in Minnesota that I believe we're making some decent progress against some of the disparities that Dan mentioned is because of groups like Take Action Minnesota, neighbors organizing for change, but then nationally, you know, the work that Deepak is doing with community change and EPI, we've got to do more of that. Now, our online organizing groups that I admire, like, you know, DFA, DCCC, all, there's a bunch of them, I don't wanna only single out a few, they can be helpful to people who have to move because it's kinda one of the things, it's hard to organize if you're working with a group of people in one neighborhood, that job goes out and now you gotta move to another town, what are you gonna do? Well, our online groups can be a benefit there, but we have got to really lift up organizing because that is how you can support an agenda, you can find out how to get involved in the local politics there, and it's gotta be a key part of what we're doing and the road back to reorganize this economy in a way that benefits everybody. Absolutely, and to follow up on that, someone in our audience wonders, how do we get the public to care about the growing disparities between wages of the high income and the low income and working class? They care, the question is, what to do, how to do? So as you are running to your third job, maybe in a whole another city, tumbleweed, right? What you hear about politics is that then people do not care about you, and even though most people you know want increase in wages, your particular congressman or state legislator doesn't care about those issues. I mean, people care, the real question is, how can we organize people in a way to do something about it, to fight back on the cynicism? But I can tell you, when we're passing increases in the minimum wage in places like Arkansas, you know what I mean, people care, but we've got to talk to those people, we've got to engage those people, and I think we've got some tools to do it. If I may just say one thing, we've got to prioritize turnout in elections. I'm telling you, and I know I'm gonna get myself in trouble with somebody for saying this, but most politicians, democratic or Republican, don't care if three people vote in a congressional election long as they get two of them. We have got to prioritize turnout and the raw numbers actually matter, we've got to drive them way up too. We got to get people to go from 60% TV and 40% field to 60% field and 40% TV or lower. Three, we've got to engage our state and local partners. Four, we've got to engage our state and local partners to push greater voter access, same day voter registration, vote by mail. Anyway, that's all I've got to say. Yeah, can I add in that? Now you know why we love Keith Ellison in Minnesota, so there you go. So I think that's exactly right. People do care intensely about income inequality, and I think that's why you've seen some of the mass mobilizations around we are the 99% pop up. I think the question in some respects is how does that give any staying power? I think a mistake we often make and I won't just blame people in Washington DC, I will blame people also in Minnesota and other places, we tend to treat issues that deal with income inequality as sort of discreet microcosms of themselves. So often what we fail to communicate is that a campaign about healthcare reform is actually about income inequality, right? We tend to treat an issue like organizing home care workers in the state of Minnesota, right? Who are written out of minimum wage provisions, right? Historically, which goes back to the days of both slavery and is both embedded sexism and racism. Somehow it's okay for home care workers not to earn a minimum wage. We tend not to talk about organizing those workers is actually a strategy to lift up all people who are gonna rely on care and rely on those workers. So my point is I think oftentimes what we tend to do is just talk about issues as a one-off campaign to win this or that and instead what we need to do is start to talk about, and I'll actually give credit where it's due, I think Center for Community Change does this wonderfully and it's why we are such an appreciative partner of them. The idea of connecting poverty and the fight against mass incarceration as two sides of the same coin is exactly right, right? What a criminal record means is that you're doomed to a life of poverty. That's what a criminal record means, you get out but you never stop paying. So what are then strategies to confront criminal justice reform which in and of itself is the morally and necessary thing to do but also connected to a larger economic narrative that in fact we cannot keep building a permanent underclass in our country and expect the country to ever get ahead economically, so. One of the narratives that has emerged to me today listening to your conversation has to do with voting differentials, has to do with the concentration of political power along with the concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few as incomes have split with most people winding up on the bottom. So one question that occurs to me is how are we going to mobilize those who have the influence and power to control political messaging to care themselves enough about wage growth to put these issues on the national agenda? I have a couple thoughts. I mean, it seems to me very important that we ally with and work with the champions we have like Congressman Ellison and there are a number of others at the local and the national level. But I think change on these issues is gonna be driven from the ground up not from the top down. So 2016, there will be ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage in states around the country in Ohio and Maine to $12 an hour which is a big deal in those places. There will be campaigns that groups like Take Action and other groups in Minnesota around the country that will be doing to drive these issues into the public conversation on childcare, on home care, on a clean energy economy, at a minimum wage, et cetera. So I think the psychology has to change from we are just driving people out to vote for candidates to we are driving people out to vote for their agenda. Right. That agenda, so there has to be a continuity between, we showed up at city council and this bill got passed and it's part of the same continuum. It's not a separate isolated act once every two years. You show up at the ballot box but it's part of a continuum of civic engagement to work on the issues, get involved in your community, turn out of the election, and go right back at it and work on the issues. That is a psychology that organizations are critical for, community organizations, unions, because they keep people connected between the election and keep them engaged and give them a vehicle. So I think the key is you're voting for an agenda, not just for a candidate. So as we look at people who are going to be organizing for an agenda, including a broad wage growth, I think that's going to require thinking in multi-dimensional ways about the people who are affected by the disparity in wage growth. So at least this question is you. At the international level, it's for you. There is a wide discussion on poverty from a multi-dimensional approach and are we looking into in your report and in your thought about wages, different ways of measuring poverty beyond income. I suspect this has to do with forms of housing and security, healthcare and equality and so on. Sure, when we think about poverty, we think about officially poverty is measured by the Census Bureau looking at some forms of income, not all forms of income. What we're doing here is looking at market-based poverty without all of the taxes and transfers. And I guess I need you to reframe the question. It was framed to me. Okay. It was from the audience. It came from the audience. It's somebody in the audience to reframe the question. Oh, there we go, right there, thank you. Sure, should be great. That's a great question. I think that if we look at it just too singularly and say, oh, in this month, did you have sufficient income to get by, to somehow meet your needs? It's not sufficient. I think it speaks to the stability of incomes. Are we like the sort of scheduling issues and are people getting the full-time hours that they need? Are they gonna be building a system? But it's also about whether or not we're creating neighborhoods where people can flourish. And that is absolutely missing, I think, from the agenda generally, from the conversation generally in this country. And I think we should be adding all those different elements. One of the things that was mentioned earlier was the extent to which poor people can get ahead in society in income inequality in this country. The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots have absolutely made it more difficult for poor people to enter the middle class. And because of the accumulated, all those accumulated dimensions of access to all the other services and everything else. And I think that when we think about multi-generational families and poverty, all of those things absolutely speak to that. The stability or the lack of stability and the stress that families are under to be able to put food on the table or make ends meet, I think that that's absolutely important. And stable housing is one of those issues. So I think we should be looking at those more. So why do we have wages? Why do we care about wages at all? To get stuff. Well, wages might mean you have a nice car, but what if you had an awesome public transit system? That might be as good as or better than having a car or a good place to live or clean water to drink. Wages are sort of a surrogate to get things. So obviously we can't exclude wages from the dialogue. That's a key part, particularly in this country, but actually in any country, but also in any country, public wealth. I threw that term out before, is all the stuff that we have own sort of in common, but actually represents pay in a way, and kind of makes up for the money that you may not have all on your own. And let me tell you, that concept is fiercely debated and fought over as the wages are. They don't want us to have any public wealth. They don't want us to have a park. They want to meter that park. They want to privately own that park and the road and everything and the water. And the commons is a fierce battle and as much as we're arguing wages, we're arguing about the other stuff too. Can I just give a real quick real life example of what the congressman is speaking to? So our legislative session wrapped up on Monday in Minnesota. I won't relay all the gory details, but one big issue that was up was transportation investment in transportation funding, both roads and bridges and public infrastructure report that we with several allies, Isaiah, which is a strong faith-based group, neighborhoods organizing for change, a very strong group, put together a report that looked at the time that people of color spend on public transportation getting from here to there versus white drivers driving alone in their car. On average, people of color spend a month in transit more than people of color in their cars. A month from getting from here to there. So think for a second about the impact on our economy in the state of Minnesota. If we simply had a transit system that cut that in half, cut that to a fourth of what it is, what is the sort of, yes, there are economic drivers to it, but I gotta say, as someone who rides transit every once in a while, it's not just about getting me to and from work more efficiently, just the amount of time that I'm gonna be able to spend with my family and everyone else in that care about in the world. So it's an example of how our disinvestment in the public good has profound costs to all of us and why that needs to be examined as a part of this. Last thing I'd say, I think one of the reasons this intervention is so important to me, the intervention of this report, and I think it's so important to the work we all do, is that in the U.S. context, poverty has been treated mainly as a problem of fixing people who are poor. Something's wrong with them. Having badly, they're not married, and even on the liberal side, if we only had the better job training program, which I support a lot of job training programs, I'm not trying to attack that, right? But what this report says is, there is something finally broken in the structure that is producing large numbers of poverty and that this labor market discussion and this poverty discussion have to be joined. They're not like two worlds. So that's why I think contextually, even though it's not the only issue, it is a crucial issue and has been really largely missing, certainly on the conservative side, but even on some parts, the liberal side, people don't connect it as a driver of poverty. So that's why I appreciate the work so much. Thank you very much. At least one of the questions that comes to my mind is, has to do with working from a broken system towards a solution and how there are certain perils attached to having a really troubling baseline. So for instance, as we work towards raising wages, are we going to work towards raising wages with reducing hours in mind without causing those workers to be in the same situation they were before hustling backwards as it were? So I think there have been a lot of articles recently there was a great piece in the Pacific Standard about 24-hour daycare. So are we going to give workers an increase that would make them only need 12 hours of daycare, or are we going to look at the sort of eight hours of work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what we will type standard when we think about where wages should be? I think it's a great question. And one of the things I mentioned in my presentation was that what has happened with the bottom fifth of households, the only reason they've seen any gains in their annual earnings, or the big reason why they've seen gains in their annual earnings at all in the last three decades, is because they have increased hours of work. And so that comes at a cost, as you say, in terms of childcare needs and everything else. The ability for families to put in more hours is increasingly difficult if they have to pay for care for their children, for instance. So what's going to happen as we move forward? I think what we think about whether or not people should be able to, or should want to work more than 40 hours, I think the eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of what you will, I think that's a great standard. One of the reasons why we've seen, in fact, increasing wage gender inequality, particularly at the top of the wage distribution, is because of the disparities in work hours. And men, some men at the top of the wage distribution can work many more hours than women do because of their needs are less at home, perhaps. And so you could actually reduce some of the gender wage gap by reducing some of those hours of people at the very high end of the wage distribution. At the low end, we need to see more hours, the hours that people want to be able to work. And so I think there are different solutions for different parts of the distribution. But I think the goal really is to raise hourly pay. So for the work that everybody does to make sure that they're paid fairly and that there is a minimum floor so that people can really make ends meet on the hourly pay that they have and working 40 hours a week. And if they work more than that, they should get paid overtime for it. Absolutely. So as we approach the conclusion of our conversation to return us back to the beginning a bit in the news, the issue of the day is trade. And what sort of trade agreements will be made that will change the shape of jobs and wages in the United States? So to address this to the whole panel, what difference, if any, would it make if the trade agreement that's currently up for discussion went through? Would we see more jobs? Would they be at low wages? Would they be at high wages, potentially? So I'm just going to sneak this in there. Yesterday, we kicked the can down the road on the transportation bill. I just want to say as we're talking trade, other things that aren't getting the right attention, that transportation bill, I was really upset about not investing long-term in transportation. Okay, so back to your question. Now, look, this fight on trade is a huge thing. And I believe the reason I am against FastTrack and against the Trans-Pacific Partnership is I believe, and I see no reason to believe otherwise, that it will lower wages, it will offshore more jobs, but in addition, it may open our country up to lawsuits from multinationals at local units of government who are trying to promote health and safety rules. It may, it'll make it difficult and lengthen the time that people have to wait to get access to life-saving drugs as the intellectual property extends out. We just learned the other day that going back to this issue of the investor-state problem that under NAFTA, NAFTA, the old one that they say is the bad one and we shouldn't think about that because that was then and this is now. Some Canadian business interests want to challenge the Volcker rule under NAFTA, think about that. This is the thing that our president told us, don't worry about that. And Elizabeth Warren's wrong turns out, as soon as Elizabeth Warren says maybe NAFTA will be used to attack our Dodd-Frank and Obama says no, it won't be, Canada says, oh yeah, we're thinking about suing y'all over that under NAFTA. So my point is the battle couldn't be fierce, sir. Anybody who's listening to this show, if you care about workers, if you care about wages, if you care about better quality of life for Americans, please vocalize your opposition to FastTrack and the TPP. It is the worst trade deal you ever heard of. Now the president is going around saying things like, it's the most progressive trade deal ever. But let me tell you, there was a story of the news the other day where Sandy Levin, who was a ranking member on Ways and Means, awesome guy, he's no anti-trade person, but he's concerned about what this could mean. We have a hearing on Vietnam and what comes out of the meeting? Vietnam, where is it illegal to have a labor union where if you are a trade unionist in Vietnam, if you're lucky you go to jail, if you're not, you might get a hole right behind your ear. You understand what I'm saying? He comes out of there saying, I didn't hear anything that made me feel more confident about how another people's loss of human rights might result in them having to work for less, which means we're gonna have to work for less to try to keep competitive. And even under NAFTA, which they're saying is the old thing and we haven't worked out our trade problems with Guatemala or Mexico. And so now we're going into this thing. My thing is, I'm not for it. I think Elizabeth Warren is right. I think Robert Reich is right. I think Larry Michelle is right. I think that Joseph Stiglitz is right. I think that Paul Krugman is right. And those are all economists who I have a lot of confidence in and put their collective wisdom together and they say this is not the right thing for America. I think I trust that. It's a very compelling case. Well, sorry, I feel passionately about it as you might have guessed. So to close with sort of a survey of our thoughts at the end of this conversation, perhaps each panelist would give me just a concluding remark on policies that might stimulate wage growth or eliminate wage theft or any of the other solutions we've talked about going forward and I'll start with you, Elise. I think one of the things that's really key in this conversation is that we didn't get to where we are today by accident, right? So policies made it the way we are today in terms of the wage inequality, in terms of still having tremendous numbers of people in poverty today. And therefore policies, as you say correctly so, poverty policies can change this. Policies can reduce the wage inequality. Policies can reduce poverty. And we should absolutely strengthen the social safety net as much as possible. And we're behind all of those tax and transfers programs that can help reduce poverty in this country. But we need to raise wages. And I think that we've named a few of them already today, raising the minimum wage and raising the overtime threshold, reducing wage theft. But all of those things are under the rubric of really increasing workers' bargaining power. So we need to do what we can to strengthen workers in their relationship vis-à-vis their employers in getting better wages, getting better benefits and getting better work hours. Thank you so much. So in a study of all 50 states over a 30-year timeline, researchers found that when the poor vote more, inequality decreases. I agree 100% with Deepak. It's not about a candidate or just one election. It's about everything else. I believe that the candidates should be the people who hold a banner up of our agenda, not some personality-driven thing about good looks, charm, and stuff like that. But we have got to have a renaissance of civic engagement. We have got a prioritized voter turnout, which means knocking on people's doors, including them in their democracy. We have got to de-emphasize all these ads that we put money into and re-emphasize human contact, feel face-to-face. And we have got to engage up and down local to federal with the primary driver of this whole thing being community groups like the one Dan and Deepak represent. I'm willing to take orders from you guys, no problem. That's the way it's supposed to be. I'm a public servant. And I just want to tell you guys that the way back is to reach out and we can turn this thing all the way around. I'll just shut up right now and say this. It is not an accident that the organized right has identified shrinking the electorate and voter suppression as a key way for them to have power. And if they want to shrink it, we need to expand it. Thank you. Well, that's what real leadership looks like. Your case, it is about the candidate, Congressman, but in general, it's about the agenda. Just an accident. I did want to say that we spent most of the time on the panel talking about what I would call the universal kind of standards that need to be built across the board. But there also are some targeted things within that on raising wages that I think need to be part of the equation. So as we raise the minimum wage, we need to eliminate the tipped minimum, which is a terrible policy that has a disproportionate effect on women and the whole sector of our economy. As we think about enforcing labor law, that is pretty hard to do for workers who fear that they are going to be picked up and deported. We need immigration reform and a path to citizenship, not just for those workers, but for the other workers whose wages are driven down by having this second tier labor market. We need reform and criminal justice because it is an economic issue. It is a jobs issue, both for people who are coming out and for their family members. It is a huge drain of wealth and resources. So I just wanted to say that in addition to the universal, we also need to pay attention to the ways that this plays out with respect to women in different communities of color because there are some nuances that are particularly important to make sure we get the big story right. And I would just add to that. So in particular, in terms of criminal justice, ending collateral sanctions and consequences for anyone with a criminal record would be a profound step in the right direction. Passing paid sick days or earned sick and safe time, which just in the state of Minnesota, a million working people really stayed at 5.3 million people. A million people don't have access to any time off if they're sick or loved when they get sick. Universal healthcare that is affordable and accessible for all in repealing photo ID statutes and expanding voting rights, right? We can do all that. The bottom line is wages are power, right? And so at the end of the day, how people have more money in their pocket does a lot to empower people to make, to live the lives that they want to live. Absolutely. Bringing the people who have really lost out on growth and our economy back into full communion with the rest of society means bringing about a society that can flourish. And that sounds like the sum of our agenda today. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much.