Acton Institute Powerblog Archives

Post Tagged 'Employment compensation'

5 Ways Obama’s New Overtime Rule Will Harm Workers

In announcing the Obama administration’s new overtime rule (for more on this news, see this explainer), Vice President Joe Biden says companies will “face a choice” to either pay their workers for the overtime that they work, or cap the hours that their salaried workers making below $47,500 at 40 hours each work week. Continue Reading...

Explainer: Obama’s New Overtime Rule

What just happened? On May 18, the Obama administration announced the publication of a new Department of Labor rule updating and expanding overtime regulations. Why did the overtime rule change? Since the 1930s some white collar jobs (i.e., Continue Reading...

A Policy Solution to Fix Inequality and Boost GDP

Andrew Biggs of AEI has a piece up today at Forbes addressing the gender pay gap and provides a neat solution: “forbid women from staying at home with their children.” As Biggs points out, such a policy would address perhaps the greatest root cause of gender pay inequality: varied work experience attributable to choices women make. Continue Reading...

10 Things You Should Know About the Minimum Wage Debate

Since 1938, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first federal minimum wage in the U.S., a debate has raged about whether wage floors help or hurt workers. But thanks to a radical economic experiment in California, we may be only a few years away from having a definitive answer. Continue Reading...

Why Minimum Wages Increases Don’t Target Poverty

If you ask most people why they support raising the minimum wage they’ll says it’s because it helps the poor. But as David Neumark, a scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco notes, numerous studies have shown that there is no statistically significant relationship between raising the minimum wage and reducing poverty. Continue Reading...