News & Stories

Reform: I can remember when that word encompassed a lot of hopes and dreams for bending the arc of justice. It was less threatening than revolution, more encompassing of all of us together. So what does it mean now? How has the media changed its meaning? “Reform” is a word we have lost and conservatives […]

As the director of Working Families program at Rutgers University’s Center for Women and Work, Karen White has been an unabashed supporter of New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program in both philosophical and policy-wonkish ways. But it was White’s mother who let her understand what the state’s policy really meant. “My mother was diagnosed with […]

Walt Disney World and Darden Restaurants (which owns restaurant chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster) both have happy-looking public faces regarding the health of the people they employ. But behind the scenes, they’re doing everything they can to deny people working in Florida the right to earn basic benefits like paid sick days on […]

Last summer, a respected policy expert from the Brookings Institution spoke at a large meeting. He introduced himself, saying that he works with a lot of brilliant economists who can’t understand why the recovery is so slow. Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has an explanation, “…corporations use their growing monopoly power to raise prices without passing the […]

A few short months ago, my good friend Aubrey Davis passed away. He wasn’t only a founder of the Economic Opportunity Institute, he was also a mentor to me and many others. He taught me many lessons in the years I knew him – not least of which is how to die with grace and […]

In an effort to further restrict the proliferation of high-interest, short-term loans, federal regulators have proposed new rules governing banks that want to offer payday loans. The proposed rules – written by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. – are common sense: they require […]

In the wake of the 2008-09 Wall Street crash that led to the Great Recession, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. That law was supposed to prevent “Too Big To Fail” from happening again and provide myriad consumer protections, but lobbying by big banks has prevented many of the rules from being written, even […]

On Saturday May 18th we will gather together to celebrate the wonderful and full and productive and loving life of Aubrey Davis. Aubrey was a friend, one of EOI’s founding board members, and a mentor to us all in the pursuit of social progress. Aubrey’s memorial will be held Saturday May 18th in downtown Seattle […]

A recent AARP poll of Americans found 84% of voters over 50 years old – across party lines – oppose cutting Social Security in order to reduce the deficit. Just 16% were in favor or didn’t know. To put that in perspective: another poll from this April found 21% of Americans think a UFO crashed in […]

Lindsay Sharma, MPH candidate and current EOI intern, presented at Ignite Seattle, a TED talk-eqsue forum in which presenters have 5 minutes to tell the audience about a topic. Lindsay chose to talk about paid family leave. Watch her presentation here: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIgyVdlDd-0]

In a recent policy paper, researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis examined how much cash corporations were sitting on, and why. They found big companies are piling up record amounts of cash – essentially taking money out of circulation. So why is this a problem? Well, when corporations pile up large amounts of […]

While they haven’t been at the forefront of the predatory payday lending industry, big banks are trying to get a slice of the short-term, high-interest pie, too. Because payday lending is most often utilized by people living paycheck to paycheck, it can easily lead to a lifetime of debt for those forced to  borrow at high […]

What rhymes with going, going, gone? How about Boeing, Boeing, bawn? That doesn’t make sense in English, but it sure hits the nail on the head with the once loyal, Washington-state born, bred and based Boeing Company. Every sign points toward Boeing’s departure from our state. I never thought I would see this day. When […]

It hasn’t been a good week for working families in the Washington State Legislature. On Monday, the Senate passed an amended version of SB 5903, which will repeal the Family Leave Insurance system if a funding mechanism is not identified in 2014. The bill will create a taskforce of eight legislators to fund the system. If no […]

Ready for a fresh take on Social Security? Check out a new report that bypasses the binary “to cut benefits or not to cut benefits” debate. Instead, the authors of “Expanded Social Security” argue that the current levels of retirement insecurity in America make a good case for expanding Social Security and increasing benefits. There’s […]

A new report from AARP  shows that the majority of boomers (age 45-64) in Washington state are worried about their future finances in retirement. In the report, over half of respondents reported anxiety when thinking about their future finances, with women (64%) reporting a significantly higher level of anxiety than men (48%). Many of the […]

Via Washington Work and Family Coalition: Washington’s legislature is moving into its final phase focused on reconciling 3 different versions of the 2013-2015 budget before the April 28 adjournment date. And there’s still a threat that the Senate majority will try to cram repeal of family and medical leave insurance into the take home deal. […]

It’s clear the National Restaurant Association is opposed to the minimum wage in principle. But would they go so far as to mislead the U.S. Senate about the effect of minimum wage policies? You decide: Melvin “Mel” Sickler, a representative of the National Restaurant Association, recently told a U.S. Senate committee to put the brakes on […]

A new report from Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) illustrates how profitable Fortune 500 companies in a range of sectors of the U.S. economy have been remarkably successful in manipulating the tax system to avoid paying even a dime of tax on billions of dollars in profits. As a group, the ten companies paid no […]

Despite have the best minimum wage in the county at $9.19/hour in 2013, Washington’s minimum wage still falls short of what many people need to meet basic needs. A recent report from the Alliance for a Just Society titled The Job Gap Report finds that many minimum wage workers are struggling just to make ends meet. […]

At a poker table, the Washington Roundtable’s latest education report would amount to a bold bluff. Our elected representatives in Olympia should call them on it. The leaders of Washington’s biggest corporations say they want more graduates from the state’s colleges and universities to employ — but they’re hoping no one notices the billions of […]

Washington’s working families are again under attack from Republicans in the Washington state Senate, who have introduced a second bill to repeal family and medical leave insurance, and scheduled it for a hearing this afternoon. Earlier in the legislative session, Senators Braun, Holmquist-Newbry, Tom, and others introduced an identical bill, which failed to pass out of […]

President’s Obama’s budget – expected to be released later this week – will likely include a cut to Social Security known as the Chained CPI. The Chained CPI would change the way inflation in calculated for Social Security benefits, reducing cost of living adjustments by about 3% per decade. For the average Washingtonian who receives […]

New research by the National Partnership for Women and Families puts Seattle at the top of the list for the widest gender wage gap among the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. That means Seattle women working full-time, year-round make a smaller proportion of men’s earnings than in any other metropolitan area in the country – […]