For Mother’s Day this Sunday, businesses are once again honoring moms with special deals on everything from Godiva truffles to Kate Spade handbags. Business lobbyists, meanwhile, are working to prevent America’s moms from acquiring something a bit more valuable: national paid parental leave. 

The United States holds the dishonorable distinction of being the world’s only higher-income nation without paid leave for parents. Could this, perchance, have anything to do with who’s calling the shots in executive boardrooms and Congress? Men hold 89 percent of Fortune 500 CEO slots and another 72 percent of U.S. House and Senate seats.

Fortunately, at the state level, even in purple areas, things have been changing, The Family Values @ Work network has been beating back business and conservative political opposition and making real progress. The Pennsylvania House recently passed a bipartisan paid leave bill. If enacted into law, some 15 states, plus the District of Columbia, would have mandatory leave benefits. 

These state-level victories should boost momentum for the long overdue federal action we need. Among OECD nations, let’s remember, paid leave is averaging 18 weeks. Most new moms would choose that leave over a fancy purse any day. 

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies Inequality.org team

The Communities Sitting in the Shadow of the Data Center Boom

This week’s frontline face: Danny Caine, a former bookstore owner, author, and a content creator at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

What he’s doing to help create a more equal world: Over the next few weeks, the ILSR will be releasing a new podcast series hosted by Caine that explores the lived realities of the massive surge in data center construction. 

Caine has visited towns in Virginia and West Virginia where noise pollution has fundamentally reworked social dynamics. Centers have also threatened to worsen existing environmental catastrophes.

Caine’s biggest takeaway from his work on the series: Resistance to this new era of extraction is building and can win! 

What makes this fight so important: Vibrant and fearless coalitions are forming across the country, Caine notes in a new piece for Inequality.org, to resist the new wave of data center construction.

“People of all stripes, across the political spectrum,” Caine points out, “resent the idea of tech corporations feeling entitled to their local resources.” 

The App Has Become Boss — But It Doesn't Need to Be

Gig work has become an essential part of our economy. But laws and regulations haven’t kept up. That reality has left gig workers — often poorer workers of color — without the protections other workers take for granted. In that oversight vacuum, the app becomes the boss.

In a recent survey of gig work in New York, the Community Service Society of New York found that workers are incentivized to work longer and faster at the whims of an opaque rating system.

“Even access to work itself can disappear without warning,” the Society’s Rachel Swaner has found. “For workers relying on this income, even a short disruption can have immediate consequences.”

Swaner is proposing several steps to increase transparency. Among them: establishing minimum pay standards, shared governance, and due process rights. For more bold solutions, check the analysis below.

The U.S. tax system, the corporate-friendly Tax Foundation likes to claim, is working just as intended: High-income taxpayers pay the highest average tax rates and account for a large share of total income taxes paid.  

But this framing leaves out a critical part of the real tax story. The top 1 percent’s share of income has climbed substantially, from 11.3 percent in 1986 to 20.6 percent in 2023. But that elite’s average effective tax rate has actually declined over the same period, from 33.1 percent to 26.3 percent.

In other words, the increase in taxes paid by the rich largely reflects the larger slice of total income these rich are collecting, not the progressivity of our tax system. For an interactive version of this chart and further analysis, check the Inequality.org link below.

How Cruel: Denying an Aging Billionaire a U.S. Senate Seat 

This week’s dour deep pocket: Harold Hamm, the 80-year-old oil and gas tycoon who holds an $18 billion personal fortune — and a reputation as Donald Trump’s “energy whisperer.”

What has Hamm sour: Oklahoma this past March gained a U.S. Senate vacancy when Trump appointed one of the state’s current senators to a just-vacated cabinet slot. Hamm quickly phoned the Republican Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, a past recipient of Hamm’s campaign cash, and asked for the temporary appointment to the open Senate seat.

Governor Stitt would go on to appoint another Oklahoma fossil-fuel executive to the vacant seat, an exec with nowhere near Hamm’s hefty political clout. Why would the governor not pick Hamm, the close Trump buddy? A PBS report has surfaced one possibility: Not long before the appointment, Trump had fiercely “lashed out” at Stitt, the current chair of the National Governors Association, after a dispute between the two over the NGA annual meeting.

The last word: Hamm may now never ever get to sit in the Senate, but he can take comfort from the climate reality he has done so much to help create: Trump II climate reg rollbacks figure to add 7.6 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the next decade, notes a Princeton University study, the equivalent of what 150 million gas-powered cars will emit over the same period.

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