Britain has long had a reputation as rigidly divided by class, with little opportunity for people to move higher up the socio-economic ladder.

No more. There is now more upward mobility for students at British schools than in the United States, according to a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

New figures from the U.S. Census Bureau today show that the middle class received the smallest share of the nation’s income since these data were first reported. The middle 60 percent of households received only 45.7 percent of the nation’s income in 2011, down from the historical peak of 53.2 percent in 1968. But writers David Madland and Nick Bunker at the Center for American Progress Action Fund say:

By advancing the interests of the middle class in the workplace and in our democracy, unions help build and strengthen the middle class.

Right-wing economic policies have failed working families. New U.S. Census Bureau figures show the share of income going to middle- and lower-middle-income households fell, while the share of income going to the top 5 percent went up 4.9 percent. The census report confirms the trend that the Economic Policy Institute shows in The State of Working America, 2012—falling incomes and growing inequality. Instead of coddling the richest 1%, America needs to return to the principles of “prosperity economics” that have historically enabled economic security for all and a growing middle class. 

The vast majority of America's workers have largely been shut out of the nation’s economic growth over the past three decades, reports the 12th edition of The State of Working America from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Released today and available online, the report finds that the typical American family has added hundreds of extra hours of work each year, while also earning better education credentials, yet is still struggling to keep up.

The U.S. auto industry is in the midst of its strongest growth period since 1996, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said today at the Ford Motor Co.'s Flat Rock assembly plant in Michigan. Ford just announced it will be adding 1,200 new workers to the Detroit-area plant in expectation that the revamped Fusion sedan will see an increase in sales this fall. Working together, the plant workers, who are members of the UAW, and the company have increased productivity and brought jobs back to the United States. 

Many people can no longer attain the American Dream—and high-level decisions over the past few decades have led our nation to this point.

Join us on Thursday, Sept. 13, when Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter Hedrick Smith will discuss his new book, Who Stole the
American Dream? Can We Get It Back? In his latest look into the deepest layers of Washington politics, Smith deploys his formidable investigative skills to trace how we got here—and whether we can undo the damage. (RSVP here.)

The unemployment rate declined from 8.3 percent in July to 8.1 percent in August, with 96,000 jobs added last month, according to data out this morning from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The improvement in the unemployment rate was due to workers dropping out of the labor force, not to an increase in employed workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 

Young workers in the euro zone have been among the hardest hit by the global economic crisis, and now even those in regions like East Asia, where economies have remained strong through the recession, are struggling to get jobs, a new International Labor Organization (ILO) report shows (click chart to enlarge).

Nearly one-quarter of America’s workers are in bad jobs—and the number is climbing, according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). “Bad Jobs on the Rise” defines a bad job as one that pays less than $37,000 a year—the inflation-adjusted earnings of a typical male worker in 1979—and offers no health insurance or retirement plan (click on chart to enlarge).

Last week, we discussed that the Republican Party platform is a road map to dismantle workers’ rights. Steven Greenhouse of The New York Times says the Republican platform “calls for numerous steps that could significantly weaken America’s labor unions” and, for the first time in years, doesn’t even acknowledge the right to form unions.

The New York Times reports, when doing a side-by-side comparison of the platforms, the two visions are “poles apart in their view of the nation.”

Let’s take a look at some of the major differences: