As we approach this Labor Day, the Pennsylvania economy is growing steadily. Working families are sharing in prosperity in a more sustained way than at any point since 1980--although many families still struggle to make ends meet and, in our polarized nation, a big partisan divide exists in perceptions of whether the economy is better than four…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented economic and policy challenges to the United States and other countries. Navigating out of the pandemic slowdown is another novel experience, which makes it more difficult to answer the question addressed each year in the "State of Working Pennsylvania": How is the Pennsylvania economy…

Empirical evidence on the effects of compensation reform is somewhat scarce. Most U.S. public school teachers are paid according to rigid schedules that determine pay based solely on seniority and academic credentials. In unionized school districts, these schedules are set by collective bargaining agreements. In 2011 when the Wisconsin state…

Wages below the living wage are poverty wages for many households. For decades, teachers have been clear about the damaging impact poverty has on childhood development in particular, as well as on individuals and communities as a whole. Teachers experience first-hand the impact that poverty has on children, how it leaves children more vulnerable…

"The State of Working Pennsylvania 2018," Keystone Research Center's 23rd annual review of the Pennsylvania economy and labor market finds that, nearly a decade into the current national economic expansion, many Pennsylvania workers are still waiting for a raise. The report points to three factors that help explain this. First, despite…

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, the United States was already deeply unequal. Before the pandemic, 140 million Americans were poor or near poor, living just one emergency above the poverty line. Inequality in the United States did not happen suddenly and cannot be explained as the consequence of individual failures; rather, decades of…

Slow job growth and a labor market still short of full employment have resulted in stagnant wages and little growth in income in Pennsylvania. In order for the majority of Pennsylvania families to see real income growth in the years ahead the state will need a combination of faster job growth and economic policies that actively seek to raise wages…

This article draws from the concept of precarious employment to better understand the working conditions of teachers of adult English as an additional language (EAL) learners in Canada. I examine previously published research on the employment situations of this group of educators, drawing from data that have been gathered using interviews and…

A landmark new study reported that upward mobility in the Keystone State since the late 1990s exceeded that in most parts of the United States. This report, focused on more recent trends, contains some bad economic news. It shows that Pennsylvania's economy has performed poorly from the perspective of typical working families since the end of…

This article compares key features of the labour markets for teachers across Botswana and South Africa in order to seek possible explanations for the apparently larger teacher shortages in South Africa. It is argued that South African teachers earn relatively lower wages when compared to professionals with comparable qualifications; they have also…

The economic boom of the 1990s veiled a grim reality: in addition to the growing gap between rich and poor, the gap between good and bad quality jobs was also expanding. The postwar prosperity of the mid-twentieth century had enabled millions of American workers to join the middle class, but as author Arne L. Kalleberg shows, by the 1970s this…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project evaluated strategies to promote employment stability among low-income workers. This practitioner brief examines the work, education, and training patterns of single parents in the ERA project. Three years after entering the study, only one in four single parents had advanced. Most of the…

Using a reduced form version of a theoretical expansion of Hoxby's (1996) education production model, we investigate whether bargaining teachers unions are a boon or a bust to the economy of the state. We anticipate teachers, being in the public sector veiled from competition, are less likely to be efficient. Yet, their product, education,…

The principle of decent work was first espoused in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since 1999 the International Labour Organisation has operated according to a Decent Work Agenda and in recent times the movement towards the provision of decent work as a means of improving the quality of life has gathered momentum. Decent work is…

This paper examines the reasons behind a historic shift in the language couching the wage demands of two North American labor movements during the last twenty years of the 19th century--the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. We trace how the once dominant imagery of "wage slavery" lost its connection to producerist labor…