A weekly newsletter from the Institute for Policy Studies |
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What a year we’ve had. The fight against inequality and injustice revved up and roared across the seasons from the very first day of 2023 — when a typical CEO of a large U.S. company had already brought home more in a few hours than typical workers would make for an entire year.
Auto workers, garment workers, actors, writers, delivery drivers, teachers, baristas, building cleaners, rail workers — you name them — all stood in solidarity to lay bare the cruelty of corporate structure and deliver historic new deals that are reverberating across industries. And millions more worldwide have marched and organized for justice: for a world free of poverty, racism, and fossil fuels, and, more urgently than ever, a world free from war.
While we work to spotlight these struggles from the bottom up, we also chronicle how America’s richest dodge taxes, divert donations, and distort democracy. We covered El Salvador's incarcerated water defenders and the greedy execs accountable for toxic spills and carbon bombs. We exposed the explosion of cushy top-hat retirement accounts and featured low wage workers rallying for fairer compensation.
All of us here at Inequality.org have been proud to run a platform dedicated to amplifying the voices of those leading movements for a more equitable future — and publishing original research that backs them up.
This New Year’s Eve, we’ll be raising a glass to the hardworking people behind the inequality-fighting victories our co-editor Sarah Anderson highlights below. And, of course, to all of you! Wishing you a wonderful end to the year — we’ll be reconvening with you in 2024. Chuck Collins and Bella DeVaan for the Institute for Policy Studies' Inequality.org team |
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INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS |
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The 10 Most Telling Victories for the Working Class in 2023
Every week here in Inequality.org we feature champions in the fight against inequality. For this year-end issue, our co-editor Sarah Anderson has pulled together 10 of the most inspiring stories we’ve covered in 2023.
In this past “Year of the Strike,” auto workers, writers and actors, and hotel and health care employees by the hundreds of thousands took to the picket lines and scored big bargaining table wins. For UPS drivers, the mere threat of a Teamsters strike turned out to be enough to secure historic gains in wages and safety.
Workers notched victories against greedy corporations in the policy arena as well. Minnesota lawmakers passed a blizzard of pro-worker reforms, and Michigan became the first state in six decades to roll back anti-union “right-to-work” laws. Meanwhile, with Congress gridlocked, the White House stepped up and used executive authority to build worker power and rein in executive excess.
Much more needs to be done, but 2023 saw many people-powered victories over inequality that deserve celebrating. Read Sarah Anderson’s full list below. |
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Lessons From One Unequal Society to Another
This past Sunday, Chileans voted once again on a new constitution. They rejected a highly conservative proposed new text, opting to stay — for the time being — with their nation’s dictatorship-era constitution. A constitutional saga that began amid immense hope has now devolved into a dismal disarray.
Even so, according to Freedom House, Chile has been getting more democratic since the current constitutional reform process began back in 2020. Chile’s 94 democracy rating overshadows the U.S.’ 83.
Starting in the mid-2000s, three cycles of protest in Chile changed everything. These mobilizations triggered major policy changes, everything from landmark education reforms to a national plebiscite. And each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder.
Before Sunday’s election, Inequality.org’s Liam Crisan spoke with two former regional student leaders — the psychologist Gustavo Ignacio Mancilla Andrade and the professor Jose Luis Escalona Muñoz — about the legacy the creative tactics of Chilean protestors have left.
“These movements served as an important cultural catalyst,” explains Escalona. “They made us realize that it was possible to protest and demand a better future.” |
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In Our Deeply Unequal World, the Garbage Rises Ever Higher
Between 1953, the year the climbers Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first conquered Mount Everest, and the late 1970s, no more than small handfuls of adventurous souls annually made the demanding trek to the Earth’s highest summit. Since then, the annual conqueror total has exploded, to well over 800. What has also exploded since the early 1980s: the world’s population of deep pockets. We now have oodles of thrill seekers who can handily afford all the bells and whistles less-than-world-class climbers need to make a climb up Everest. The consequences? Inequality.org’s Sam Pizzigati has more.
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK |
This Hedge Fund Manager Has Managed to Inflame an Entire Campus This week’s dour deep pocket: Billionaire hedge fund kingpin and Harvard grad William Ackman.
What has him sour: The 57-year-old Ackman earlier this fall became the public face of the drive to fire Claudine Gay, the university’s first Black president. Gay had failed to heed his call to disclose the names of students belonging to campus organizations that had signed a statement charging that “Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.”
Disclosing those names, said Ackman, would help “insure that none of us” CEOs “inadvertently hire any of their members.”
Ackman’s anger against Gay, a New York Times analysis noted last week, rests on “personal grievances that predate” the ongoing Israeli-Gaza uproar. Gay and the university, that analysis details, “have not heeded his advice on a variety of topics” ranging from where to invest Harvard’s assets to getting students back on campus during the Covid pandemic. The last word: “We can’t function as a university,” points out Harvard Law prof Ben Eidelson, “if we’re answerable to random rich guys and the mobs they mobilize on Twitter.” |
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This week on Inequality.org Kazmyn Ramos, In the World’s Wealthiest Country, Housing Should Be a Human Right and a Community Builder. The focus on zoning, commerce, and profit-maximization does a disservice to the rich sense of community affordable housing can create.
Bob Lord, The First Trillionaire: No Cause for Celebration. We’ll never, as a nation, take on the ultra-rich if millions of Americans identify with them. Revisit our website's most popular article of the year! Our Charity Reform Initiative, Say Hello to The Charity Reformer. Check out the first edition of a new Inequality.org newsletter focused on transforming philanthropy for our common good. Elsewhere on the Web
Alex Daniels, The $10 billion charity no one has head of, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Associated Press. A donor-advised fund devoted to supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals has grown stunningly large. Why? Our researcher Helen Flannery weighs in.
Steven Greenhouse, Elon Musk says letting workers unionize creates ‘lords and peasants’. What? Guardian. Musk is the world’s best accidental salesman for unions, even as his Tesla workers make 30 percent less than UAW automakers.
Jonathan Watts, One in four billionaire Cop28 delegates made fortunes from polluting industries, Guardian. An analysis of the billionaires gathered at the just-concluded UN climate summit raises concerns about the influence our global ultra rich continue to wield. Jennifer Rubin, The billionaire myth takes a beating, Washington Post. Financial success does not bestow wisdom — or any other admirable personal qualities.
Jessica Goodheart, Labor Leader Ai-jen Poo Confronts ‘the Biggest Driver of Economic Inequality that Nobody Talks About,’ Capital & Main. Care for children, the elderly, and the disabled rates among the lowest-paying industries. Rana Foroohar, Tax justice is yet to hit the richest ‘citizens of the world,’ Financial Times. The economic shift from manufacturing to information has made it ever easier for the rich to park wealth offshore. Factories will always be harder to hide than data.
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Eight Wall Street Mega Banks Have Teamed Up to Run Television Ads in a Bogus Scare Campaign, Wall Street on Parade. Obscenely paid banking CEOs are underwriting a massive effort to block banking industry regulations that would protect consumers.
Sonali Kolhatkar, Billionaires or Democracy, But Not Both, LA Progressive. Billionaires have no real need for the protections democracy offers, everything from Social Security to due process. They can always buy the best legal help when they get in trouble. Molly Redden, The Estate Tax Has Hit A Historic Low In America, Huffington Post. Policy changes are letting more and more of our mega rich keep their wealth in the family forever.
Martin Evans, CEO, worker wage gap is sophisticated form of wage theft, Boston Business Journal. An emeritus Canadian professor of management calls for an equal percentage-of-salary distribution of all corporate bonus compensation. Ben Bartenstein, World’s newest haven for billionaires is a skyscraper-studded emirate, Bloomberg. A new wealth hub — the skyscraper-studded emirate of Abu Dhabi — is becoming wildly popular with billionaires the world over. |
This Union Victory Could Transform the South, More Perfect Union. Workers in Georgia won one of the most improbable union victories in a generation. They unionized Blue Bird — the country’s largest electric school bus maker — in the anti-union South. What will it take to turn their victory into a wave?
We Found The Secret To Harvard's $51 Billion Endowment, More Perfect Union. Harvard's endowment is larger than the GDP of more than 120 nations — and all the money is tax free. Taxing the famed Ivy by just 1 percent could make community college free for everyone in Massachusetts. |
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U.S. private sector workers have highly unequal access to paid sick leave benefits. Among the 10 percent with the highest wages, 96 percent enjoy such benefits, according to Economic Policy Institute research. By contrast, just 39 percent of workers in the bottom 10 percent of earners have have access to paid sick days. Low-wage workers, EPI points out, remain the workers least able to absorb lost wages when they or their family members become sick. For an interactive version of this chart and other income inequality charts, check out the link below.
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Inequality.org runs on the loving labor of a small team of researchers, writers, and advocates. More than anything, all of us involved believe deeply in the power of everyday people to come together to accomplish something big! We’ve built this operation around our weekly newsletter, and our paid subscribers make this newsletter possible with monthly donations. Join the ranks of our paid subscribers: Start today. |
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Inequality.org | www.inequality.org | inequality@ips-dc.org Managing Editor: Isabella DeVaan Co-Editors: Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, and Sam Pizzigati
Production: Isabella DeVaan and Kufre McIver |
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