“three-year pilot of Sam Altman’s that provided $1,000 a month to 1,000 people in Texas and Illinois and compared that group to a control group of 2,000 people who got $50 a month. Every participant was between the ages of 21 and 40.”
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“”saturation” pilots where entire communities receive basic income instead of only individuals spread across a large area. When basic income is provided to people here and there, local economies aren’t stimulated by the spending of the money and new jobs aren’t created by employers needing to hire more employees to meet higher demand. It’s one thing to provide money to an entrepreneur. It’s another to do that and also provide their business lots of customers with money to spend.”
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“Employment can increase or decrease along two measures: the binary state of working a job or not and the number of hours worked. On average, those who got basic income were two percentage points less likely to be employed and worked about 1.3 fewer hours per week.”
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“The employment of both groups greatly increased.”
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“A weekly drop of 1.3 hours works out to about 15 minutes a workday. That’s an extra break or a slightly longer lunch. On an annual basis, it’s equivalent to 8 days a year. That’s a week-long paid vacation.”
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“there were no significant decreases in employment status and hours worked among childless adults or those over age 30.”
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“”Recipients who were single parents at the time of enrollment were about 3.9 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked an average of 2.8 hours less per week than single parent control participants. For recipients who were not single parents at enrollment, we do not find statistically significant effects on employment or hours worked.””
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“The reason that parents respond differently should be obvious. They aren’t working less. They are switching from paid work to unpaid work. They’re putting their kids first.”
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“”There was no statistically significant effect on employment or hours worked for recipients over 30. In contrast, recipients under 30 were roughly 4 percentage points less likely to be employed and worked an average of 1.8 fewer hours per week compared to control participants. We also observe larger effects on formal education among those in this age group, suggesting younger adults may be more likely to use the money to enroll in post-secondary education and work fewer hours while in school, though this alone would not account for the observed differences in employment.””
“By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind.
Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021.”
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“a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment.
Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1.”
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“Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits.
But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.””
“The rankings suggest that occupational licensing doesn’t follow common assumptions that red states are market-friendly and blue states are not. That may apply when it comes to taxes and other regulations, but licensing restrictions and reforms seem to cross partisan boundaries.”
“Many supporters of weakening child labor standards argue that they’re simply making it easier for kids looking for work to land jobs. They also argue that current child labor laws create too many obstacles for employers to hire workers.
But by proposing to expand the types of industries kids can work in or to eliminate the youth minimum wage — which the federal government and many states already set as lower than the standard minimum wage — it’s clear that states curtailing child labor protections are, at least in part, engaging in an effort to make cheap labor more available for businesses at a time when a tight labor market is driving wages up, including for young workers. It’s not a coincidence that so many industry groups have lobbied for rolling back basic child labor protections.
These changes in standards have coincided with a rise in child labor violations by companies across the United States. In a New York Times exposé last year, the journalist Hannah Dreier uncovered the various ways migrant children have been exploited in brutal working conditions that all too often lead to serious injuries. And she found at least 12 cases of migrant children being killed on the job.
“The deaths include a 14-year-old food delivery worker who was hit by a car while on his bike at a Brooklyn intersection; a 16-year-old who was crushed under a 35-ton tractor-scraper outside Atlanta; and a 15-year-old who fell 50 feet from a roof in Alabama where he was laying down shingles,” Dreier wrote.
There’s a stark contrast between the often privileged kids who take a job scooping ice cream or lifeguarding the neighborhood pool for a few months and the migrant and often poor kids working dangerous jobs or ungodly hours. And the weakening of child labor laws has little, if anything, to do with encouraging the former.
“There’s often a disconnect, especially when in states where these lawmakers are proposing rollbacks, where they sort of describe this workforce as if it’s like teens who just want to earn a little bit of extra pocket change and work in movie theaters. Those are the same youth they bring to the hearings to talk about how meaningful and fun it is to work in these jobs,” said Nina Mast, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute who focuses on child labor standards. “They’re always ignoring the reality that a lot of the most dangerous and difficult jobs are being done by migrant youth or other marginalized young people who are not being represented in these conversations.”
That means that lower-income and marginalized kids who might work to supplement their families’ incomes are entering a labor force with eroding standards.
That could eventually lead to even more disparities: Teens who work more than 20 hours a week tend to perform worse academically than kids who don’t have jobs, in part because they have less time to dedicate to schoolwork, which ultimately impacts their educational trajectory and prospects for higher-paying jobs later in life.
The effort to weaken child labor protections, in other words, helps to “create this permanent underclass of workers,” Mast said.”
“We know how dangerous heat can be, and we know that danger is likely to amplify with each summer, yet there’s no federal protection for workers against heat.
But that might change soon.
In 2021, after years of worker activism on the issue, OSHA began the process of developing a ruling on a heat workplace standard, with the aim to reduce heat-related injuries and death on the job. This standard would create a set of obligations that employers must comply with to protect their workers from heat. It generally takes about seven years for OSHA to publish a final ruling. On Tuesday morning, the Biden administration made its proposal for a heat standard public — but it won’t be final until 2026, at the very least.
OSHA might face some resistance, though. Historically, some employers and business groups have been opposed to a mandatory heat standard and have lobbied against it in the past. And if Donald Trump wins the presidency, it would likely upend the standard entirely.
Time will tell what a final ruling for a workplace heat standard will be, and how well it will align with the needs of workers.”
“Since 1975, politicians have built huge portions of the American safety net — like the child tax credit (CTC) — around the idea that excluding the poorest Americans from government assistance will motivate them to climb out of deep poverty on their own and get a job.
This long-standing bipartisan consensus is manifest in the twin ideas of work and income requirements. Work requirements are simple: You either have a job or you don’t, and that binary is what determines whether you’re eligible for a handful of welfare programs.
Income requirements are a little wonkier. They stipulate that anyone without any income will receive no benefits. Only after earned income surpasses a specified level do benefits begin kicking in — which is where we get another dry name: “phase-ins.””
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“The consensus excluding the poorest Americans from some forms of government assistance through phase-ins held until President Joe Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan. Its anti-poverty centerpiece was to cut phase-ins from the existing CTC and crank up the payment, creating what’s known as the expanded CTC.
The results were historic. Over the course of 2021, child poverty was cut nearly in half, and the long-running fear at the heart of the American welfare system — that unconditional aid would discourage work — never came to pass.
Then, to the dismay of advocates and recipients alike, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blocked the Democratic Party’s effort to make the expansion permanent, fearing, among other familiar concerns like the cost, that recipients would just buy drugs (the data shows that recipients spent the money on food, clothes, utilities, rent, and education). Come 2022, phase-ins returned to the CTC, approximately 3.7 million children were immediately thrust back into poverty in January, and the rest of the year saw the sharpest rise in the history of recorded child poverty rates.”
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“Now that we have real-world evidence from a nationwide, year-long experiment, the expanded CTC’s success should ignite efforts to roll back phase-ins across the board. That also means cutting them from the CTC’s sister program, the earned income tax credit (EITC), which phases in as a supplement to wages for low-income Americans and helps about 31 million Americans.
The expanded CTC is estimated to have reduced child poverty rates anywhere from 29 percent to 43 percent, with the vast majority of that drop attributable to removing phase-ins. Extending that success to include the EITC would cut child poverty by an estimated 64 percent.”
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“Winship was unsurprised that his fears of parents choosing to work less didn’t show up during the expanded CTC. It only lasted for one year and was recognized all the while as a temporary program. “These kinds of behavioral effects take time to set in,” he writes. In the long-term, after a decade or a generation of the program being in place, that’s when he would expect to see, as Oren Cass, executive director of the conservative think-tank American Compass, put it, “communities in which labor-force dropout is widespread and widely accepted.””
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“Long-term speculation, however, can go both ways. The generational impacts of unconditional transfers could just as well lead to long-term investments in education and skills training, support entrepreneurship, and actually raise productivity and economic activity in the long run, all of which would boost, instead of wipe out, poverty reduction.
In 2018, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis estimated that childhood poverty costs the US $1.03 trillion per year, or 5.4 percent of the GDP. They found that every dollar spent on reducing child poverty would save the public 7 dollars from the economic costs of poverty.
Results from basic income pilots across the US also stand in contrast to Winship’s concern. “Our moms get the guaranteed income and not only do they continue to work, they level up their work,” Nyandoro, who runs the nation’s longest-running guaranteed income program, told me. “They’re able to move from jobs to careers. They’re able to go back to school. They’re able to get out of debt.”
The most recent evidence in favor of phase-ins Winship cites is a 2021 paper by a group of economists from the University of Chicago, led by Kevin Corinth and Bruce Meyer. It predicted that making the CTC expansion permanent would spark a 1.5-million-person exodus from the labor force. As analysts were quick to point out, however, the paper is based on a model that already assumes unconditional cash reduces work. Predicting work disincentives using a model that already assumes them tells us nothing about whether the assumption itself is tethered to reality.
Corinth and Meyer have since responded to criticism of their work disincentive assumptions, arguing that they fall well within the range used in other studies. These academic debates will continue, but in the meantime, where should the burden of proof lie?
Eliminating phase-ins from the CTC was a massive anti-poverty success and had no short-term negative employment effects. Recipients spent the extra few hundred bucks on necessities, from food and clothing to shelter and utilities. Even small businesses voiced their support on the grounds that it would boost spending and entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, a minority of skeptics retain speculative concerns that a few generations down the line, newfound consequences might overshadow these benefits.”
“Temperatures also don’t have to be very high for strenuous work to become deadly. The lack of heat acclimatization all too frequently kills workers; the majority of workers who die from heat do so in the first few days at work. “A lot of workers will actually end up in heatstroke during the first week on the job,” says Brenda Jacklitsch, a health scientist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
Extreme heat is also affecting productivity. According to a 2022 study by The Lancet, which is tracking the relationship between climate change and public health, about 470 billion hours of labor were lost in 2021 due to extreme heat. The US alone lost 2.5 billion hours, mostly in the construction, manufacturing, service, and agriculture sectors.”
“The laws surrounding affirmative action in employment haven’t changed.
Federal contractors have been required to take affirmative action, steps to ensure applicants are treated fairly, since 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines on voluntary affirmative action, employers are encouraged to take voluntary steps to “correct the effects of past discrimination and to prevent present and future discrimination” such as expanding their applicant pools to ensure a diverse body of applicants for any given position.
As the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission noted in a statement after the decision, the cases do not “address employer efforts to foster diverse and inclusive workforces or to engage the talents of all qualified workers, regardless of their background,” clarifying that it is still legal for “employers to implement diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs that seek to ensure workers of all backgrounds are afforded equal opportunity in the workplace.”
Still, legal threats from right-wing organizations that have already spent years trying to get organizations, including Starbucks and McDonald’s, to end their DEI programs could increase.
The Supreme Court’s decision to ban race-conscious measures in college admissions is likely to encourage more lawsuits against race-conscious policies in employment, said Pauline Kim, an employment law expert at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law.”