Relative to any of the most common benchmarks – the cost of living, the wages of the average worker, or average productivity levels – the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is well below its historical value. These usual reference points, however, understate the true erosion in...

A series of earlier CEPR reports documented a substantial decline over the last three decades in the share of “good jobs” in the U.S. economy. This fall-off in job quality took place despite a large increase in the educational attainment and age of the workforce, as well as the productivity...

In this report, we review the most recent data available to examine the impact of unionization on the wages and benefits paid to black workers. These data show that even after controlling for factors such as age and education level, unionization has a significant positive impact on black...

Over the past three decades, the “human capital” of the employed black workforce has increased enormously. In 1979, only one-in-ten (10.4 percent) black workers had a four-year college degree or more. By 2011, more than one in four (26.2 percent) had a college education or more. Over the...

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and...

The decline in the economy’s ability to create good jobs is related to deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale. The restructuring of the U.S. labor market – including the decline in the inflation-adjusted value of the...

There is a growing chorus of policy analysts and pundits telling the country that we could have millions more jobs in manufacturing, if only we had qualified workers. This claim has the interesting feature that it places responsibility for the lack of jobs on workers, not on the people who get...

By most measures, the educational attainment of blacks is currently at the highest it has ever been. After decades of stagnation, high school completion rates for blacks have increased rapidly since 2000. This issue brief will focus on the high school status completion rates of blacks ages 20 to...