July 31, 2015
The strength of the U.S. economy is inextricably
linked to the strength of the Hispanic workforce. With a population of roughly
24 million, Hispanics represented 16 percent of the U.S. labor force in 2013,
and that number is expected to grow to 19 percent by 2022. As of May 2015,
there were 5.4 million job openings in the U.S., yet 8.3 million people were
unemployed. Low-wage, entry-level jobs should be stepping stones to robust
career pathways into the middle class.
In January 2015, President Obama
announced Upskill America, an employer-led movement dedicated to
expanding economic opportunities for workers through education and workforce
development.
In February 2015, OCTAE released
the report Making Skills Everyone’s
Business: A Call to Transform Adult Learning in the United States, which
offers suggestions for how to establish convenient, effective, high-quality
learning opportunities for low-skilled youths and adults. As OCTAE continues
its efforts to transform adult learning in the U.S, it has partnered with
the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics (WHIEEA)
to highlight the opportunities, promising practices, and federal resources that
support this work in the Hispanic community. Jointly, with the WHIEEA and the
Department of Labor, OCTAE created the factsheet “Adult
Education and Workforce Training: Investing in the Skills Development of
Hispanics” to serve as a resource on this critical issue in order to
engage all sectors of adult education for Hispanics.
Among
the hot topics in United States policy discussions over the last several years
has been the issue of economic inequality between the highest and lowest
earners. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
(BLS) periodically looks at inequality from a variety of angles in its
“spotlight” reports. This column reviews
the recent BLS “Spotlight
on Statistics” report that puts some of the economic
inequality issues into perspective.
In
general, when policymakers talk about economic inequality, they are talking
about differences among a variety of indicators, for example, wealth, income,
and earnings. The comparison often is
between those people with the highest levels in one or more of these categories
and people with the lowest levels. Among
the questions addressed are: How big are
these differences? Have they grown over
time? What other ways do these groups
differ besides the economic differences?
This
particular BLS spotlight addresses measures of earnings and wages, including
how they have changed over time and how they differ, by geographic area,
industry, or occupation. It also
discusses how participation in employee benefit plans differs across wage
categories, and how people in different income or earnings categories spend
their time and money.
The
first comparison in the report concerns real (that is, inflation-adjusted)
earnings from 1979 to 2014 for the highest and lowest earners. In general, real earnings increased for the
highest earners since 1979, but have remained unchanged for the lowest
earners. In 2014, half of the full-time
wage and salary workers aged 16 and older earned more than $791 per week and
half earned less. In comparison, in 1979
the median weekly real earnings were $733.
Thus, in this 35-year time span, median weekly earnings increased about
8 percent. If, however, one looks at the
earnings for the lowest paid 10 percent of workers over this same time span,
their earnings remained basically unchanged.
In other words, using weekly earnings as the criterion of measurement,
the bottom 10 percent of wage earners were no better off in 2014 than they were
in 1979. This contrasts sharply with the gains made by those in the top 10
percent of workers, whose real median weekly earnings increased 33 percent over
the same 35-year time span, from $1,422 to $1,898.
This
is just one of the economic inequality highlights contained in the
spotlight. It also includes comparisons
of the earnings of college graduates and high school graduates; the
jurisdictions with the largest wag gaps between the highest and the lowest
earners (with D.C. having the largest wage gap); the industries with the
largest and the smallest gaps between the highest and lowest wage earners; and
other indicators.
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