July 10, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

We lost a tremendous friend of workers and Inequality.org with the passing earlier this week of Jane McAlevey.  

I first met Jane years ago when we were both in our 20s. Back then, she had already become a sparkplug of a campaigner on environmental justice issues. But Jane would go on to make her most lasting mark in the labor movement — as an apostle of “deep organizing,” going beyond superficial “mobilization campaigns” with a commitment to more meaningful relationship building.

Jane liked to talk about “whole worker organizing,” transcending the focus on wages and benefits to look at affordable housing and other broader workplace and community issues facing working people. Jane always had tenacity and a twinkle in her eye. We miss her already. For more, check this appreciation.

A quick housekeeping note: We'll be taking a break the next two weeks — July 17 and 24 — so please don’t panic if you don’t find us in your inbox. We wish everyone a restful summer, and we’ll be back with more inequality insights and inspiration at the end of the month. 

Chuck Collins
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

A Champion of the Global Wealth Tax Our World So Desperately Needs

This week’s frontline face: Gabriel Zucman, a French economist and the founding director of the EU Tax Observatory.

What he’s doing to help create a more equal world: Zucman recently authored a report that advocates for a two percent minimum wealth tax on the world’s “ultra-high-net-worth individuals.” 

Brazil, the current president of the G20, requested the report and will push the plan with finance ministers from these 20 countries in Rio de Janeiro later this month. The tax could generate as much as $250 billion annually from a mere 3,000 billionaires. 

What makes this fight so important to him: In a speech to G20 finance ministers back in February, Zucman argued that progressive taxation remains a “key pillar of democratic societies” that “strengthens social cohesion and trust in governments.” 

“A progressive tax system is critical to fund the public goods — education, healthcare, infrastructure — that are engines of economic growth,” Zucman would go on to add.  

For more information about the feasibility and logistics of this bold proposal, check out an analysis from Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati.

The Time Has Come To End Forced Prison Labor Nationwide

California may be on the verge of taking an important step toward ending carceral slavery. The state’s constitution — and those of 15 other states — allows the practice of involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, but the state’s legislature has recently passed a bill that takes the issue of whether to end the practice of forced prison labor to the voting booth. 

Prisoners have none of the protections that workplace safety regulations and other labor laws offer. They often must labor amid dangerous conditions. In California, for instance, incarcerated workers are fighting the state’s worsening wildfires. Prison labor can also be incredibly profitable for private companies. But the workers who do this labor can make less than $1 an hour — or nothing at all.  

In November, California voters will have the choice to amend their state’s constitution to remove the “slavery exception.” Other states, ranging from Alabama and Oregon to Tennessee and Vermont, are beginning to take up the prison labor issue as well. But the fight to eradicate the last vestiges of slavery in American society figures to be a long one.

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The biggest winners? Count Wall Street banks as among them. Two of the country’s top four banks, Citigroup and Bank of America, paid just a 4 percent effective tax rate during the first four years after the tax cut. These global mega-banks have access to a wide array of tax avoidance strategies, including subsidiaries in notorious tax havens such as the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands. For an interactive version of this chart and more analysis, check out Sarah Anderson’s recent Senate Budget Committee testimony. 

To Best Understand Inequality, Think Class, Not Generation

How much does the generation we belong to define the comfort of the lives we lead? Just about nothing impacts our comfort, suggests a recent spate of major media news analyses, more than our generation. Demographers typically define millennials as those Americans born between 1980 and 1994. Gen Z covers the cohort that came on the scene between 1995 and 2012. The millions of Americans in both these generations, the standard analysis goes, enjoy precious little of the good life that has blessed America’s baby boomers.

But millions of boomers today are not doing well economically, and significant numbers of millennials and Gen Z’ers are annually raking in millions. We’re not suffering through a generational war. We’re continuing to live through a clash of economic classes. Sam Pizzigati has more below.

Prison Contracting’s Simple Math: More Inmates, More Profits

This week’s dour deep pocket: Damon Hininger, the long-time CEO of the Tennessee-based CoreCivic, one of the world’s largest corporations that specialize in operating prisons for local, state, and national governments.

What has Hininger sour: The ongoing revelations that a rash of new “tough on crime” state sentencing laws is paying off big for CoreCivic and other corporate prison contractors. The latest of these laws, notes a just-published Lever analysis, would end the use of “sentence reduction credits” that let people imprisoned in Tennessee “serve shorter sentences as a reward for a clean record in prison.”

Higher occupancy rates in CoreCivic-managed prisons, Huninger gushed earlier this year in an earnings call with investors, have set the stage for “strong financial results” — and enabled CoreCivic to buy back as many of its shares in 2024’s first quarter as the company bought back all last year. Huninger has personally pocketed nearly $11 million in compensation over the past two years.

The last word: “The expansive use of incarceration as a solution to social failures,” notes Bianca Tylek of Worth Rises, an advocacy group that focuses on prison profiteers, “is driven by greed.”

More Perfect Union, This Billionaire Family is Suffocating Rural America. Just four companies control almost all the fertilizer in America. Fertilizer prices have tripled since 1980, farmers are struggling, and it could get even worse.

The Valley Labor Report, The Failed Southern Economic Model and How We Can Fix It. Chandra Childers from the Economic Policy Institute joins the hosts for a discussion of how to fix economics in the South.

Did you know that Inequality.org is a nonprofit project, part of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Program on Inequality? We depend on donations and paid subscriptions to keep this project free and available to all readers. Small monthly gifts are a huge part of that, whether you can donate $3 or $300 a month. If you’re ready to become a paid subscriber, sign up today.