On Tuesday, the U.S. Census Bureau issued its annual report on income and poverty in the United States. It revealed what has been obvious in the five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession; something is really broken in our country. Since 1980 we have seen a steady climb in the share of income going to the top 5% of American households, except the downturns of 2001 and 2008. During those downturns, financial bubbles burst and the top lost income share. In both cases, the Federal Reserve System acted aggressively to save the financial sector and stave off further contagion from the sector of finance and speculation into the sector of goods production and employment—the real economy. The restoration of the financial sector restored the incomes of the top 5%, and the recovery after 2001 and the current recovery restored the steady growth of inequality.

Nearly 2 million home care workers—the vast majority of whom are women—take care of the elderly and people with disabilities, often working 12-hour days and 60 to 70 hours a week. Now, for the first time since 1975, most of these workers will have the wage and overtime protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) under a new rule issued today by the Obama administration’s Department of Labor.   

Since they were exempted from the FLSA nearly four decades ago, home care workers seldom have been paid overtime and their net income is often less than the minimum wage, considering time spent in travel between the homes where they work in a single day and its cost. Unlike workers covered by federal labor laws, they have not been paid for all the hours they are on the clock.

The minimum wage has recently been in the news because of the fast-food workers’ strike for $15 an hour. Critics claim that would cause unemployment. There is a tipping point, but we don't really know where that is. The principal reason minimum wage increases have not led to disemployment effects is that the minimum has been so far below a market clearing wage. In the case of the fast-food industry increases, so long as they are below the tipping point, they are likely to lead to increases in employment because the fast-food industry is a labor monopsony. That is, they are the principal employers of minimum wage workers.

In the first of a new series of videos profiling minimum and low-wage workers, Raise the Wage New Jersey profiles Tayzia, a security guard for Edison. She is a single mother who explains why her wages, which are slightly above minimum wage, aren't enough to help her survive and raise her daughter.

California made history last night. With the support of California’s unions, the legislature voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10, the highest minimum wage in the country. The wage will be implemented in two steps: an increase to $9 per hour in July of next year, followed by another $1 increase to $10 in January of 2016. Gov. Jerry Brown has agreed to sign the bill, A.B. 10, authored by Assembly member Luis Alejo.

To many people, it is almost obscene that the CEO of McDonald’s, for instance, gets a compensation package worth $13.8 million a year; a giant raise from his 2011 pay of $4.1 million, a pay level that equals 915 full-time, full-year minimum wage workers at McDonald’s. If pay truly reflected the productivity of workers, then presumably if 915 McDonald’s workers went on strike, he would be able to fill in and do their work.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has released important research about the economy in the past few weeks. Here's a look at some of the key pieces it uncovered about the U.S. economy.

Dozens of women leaders from labor and community groups joined with state, county and local elected officials at the Statehouse today to support raising New Jersey’s minimum wage and to commemorate Women’s Equality Day—the day the 19th Amendment was certified, granting women the right to vote. Speakers explained how approving the minimum wage ballot question would advance the fight for women’s equality in New Jersey and help to close the opportunity gap for thousands of women in the state who struggle to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs. Out of all minimum wage workers in New Jersey, some 60% of them are women.

Meet Shenita Simon. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and three young daughters. She earns $8 an hour as a shift supervisor at a Brooklyn KFC.

“It’s not enough to support us,” says Simon, whose husband also works. “I work hard to provide for my family. In 2012, my overtime hours were routinely paid in the following week’s check as regular hours.”

We are all familiar with the standard textbook argument for why minimum wage is harmful to job creation. The standard view, which in political discourse has also come to be known as the conservative view, holds the minimum wage to be bad for all concerned. And yet, there is a conservative view to be made in favor of the minimum wage, and regular increases in the minimum wage, on the grounds that its neglected macroeconomic effects also would militate against another thing that conservatives hold to be equally as bad: redistribution.