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Over the last two decades, high -- and, in some countries, rising -- rates of low-wage work have emerged as a major political concern. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2009, about one-fourth of U.S. workers were in low-wage jobs, defined as earning less than two-thirds of the national median hourly wage. About one-fifth of workers in the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, and Germany were receiving low wages by the same definition. In all but a handful of the rich OECD countries, more than 10 percent of the workforce was in a low-wage job.

This report uses national data from 2004 to 2007 to show that unionization raises the wages of the typical Latino worker by 17.6 percent compared to their non-union peers. The study goes on to show that unionization also increases the likelihood that a Latino worker will have health insurance and a pension.

The official concept of "long-term unemployment," while useful, is incomplete and, in some cases, even potentially misleading. As tracked by government statistics, the long-term unemployed are only a relatively small part of the population facing extended, sometimes permanent, spells without work.

Researchers have offered several explanations for the decline in unionization. Many emphasize that "globalization" and the technological advances embodied in the "new economy" have made unions obsolete. However, if the decline in unionization is the inevitable response to the twin forces of globalization and technology, then we would expect unionization rates to follow a similar path in countries subjected to roughly similar levels of globalization and technology.This paper looks at union membership and coverage for 21 rich economies, including the United States, and finds over the last five decades a wide range of trends in union membership and collective bargaining. The national political environment, not globalization or technology, is the most important factor driving long-run changes in unionization rates in the United States.

In 1982, the United States experienced the highest annual unemployment rate since the Great Depression -- 9.7 percent. In principle, that rate is directly comparable to the 8.1 percent seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for February 2009, and suggests that current unemployment is still not as bad as it was in 1982.The official unemployment rate, however, masks two important differences between the unemployment rate in 1982 and today. The first difference is demographic. In 1982, the US population was substantially younger than it is today. Even in an otherwise identical economy, we would expect a younger population to have a higher unemployment rate than an older population would. The second difference is statistical. The main government survey used to measure the unemployment rate -- the Current Population Survey (CPS) reaches a smaller share of the population today than it did in 1982, and is especially likely to miss people who are not employed. As a result, the official unemployment rate understates the unemployment rate relative to 1982.

Contrary to popular perceptions, the United States has a much smaller small-business sector (as a share of total employment) than other countries at a comparable level of economic development, according to this new CEPR report. The authors observe that the undersized U.S. small business sector is consistent with the view that high health care costs discourage small business formation, since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded health care systems.

The strong rise in the U.S. stock market since the spring and the return to positive economic growth in the third quarter of this year have created a consensus among economists that the Great Recession is very likely over. Unfortunately, the end of the official recession will have little visible impact on U.S. labor markets until almost 2012. Within that time, this paper estimates that U.S. workers will have lost over $1 trillion in wages and salaries, $150 billion more than the 10-year costs of proposed health care reform legislation.

These are comments on Eileen Appelbaum's David Gordon Memorial Lecture.

One of the more controversial arguments of The Precariat is that this new class is entirely distinct from the traditional working class. The idea of the proletariat, Guy Standing says, suggests "workers in long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and mothers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features [are] familiar." These characteristics are almost completely absent from the employment experience of the precariat, and their absence so alters the work experience that these workers constitute a class of their own.

In September 2010, a full year before protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, Timothy Noah wrote a monumental ten-part series for Slate on the rise of economic inequality in the United States. The series earned Noah the 2011 Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism and has now been updated, expanded, and published in book form as The Great Divergence. The book has created buzz, including reviews in the New Yorker , the New York Review of Books , the New York Times (weekday and Sunday), the Nation , and the American Prospect .