The pandemic did not change rising economic inequality in the United States—go figure. We’ve seen again and again how existing inequalities instead were exacerbated as people who could work remotely did so and stayed relatively safe while others had to put their health and safety on the line to keep scraping by, as women have been forced out of the workforce, as racial inequalities were heightened both in the economy and in the question of who was likeliest to get sick and to die.

And the pandemic did not disrupt the growing gulf between CEO pay and average worker pay, a preliminary analysis by the Economic Policy Institute finds. According to early data from 281 firms, “The offer by CEOs to forgo salary increases during the pandemic was largely symbolic. Salaries were stable, but many CEOs pocketed a windfall by cashing in stock options and obtaining vested stock awards, compounding income inequalities laid bare during the past year,” Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra report. “CEO compensation, including realized stock options and vested stock awards, rose 15.9% from 2019 to 2020 among early reporting firms. Growth in CEO compensation was slightly faster than last year’s strong growth—14.0% between 2018 and 2019—while the annual compensation of the average worker increased just 1.8% in 2020.”

● How many strikes are there in the U.S.?

Researchers from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations have created the ILR Labor Action Tracker to fill this gap.

● Workers at Darigold milk processing plants in Washington State voted to authorize a strike with their contract on the brink of expiration.

● More than 50 Cambridge, Massachusetts, teachers are refusing to proctor the state’s high-stakes MCAS test:

The punchline is that the letter quoted was written by 18 urban school superintendents. 

● When these workers unionized, their cafe was put up for sale—so they bought it.

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