In a recent article on TomDispatch.com, Andy Kroll documents some real changes that have resulted from the OccupyUSA movement. To begin with, the Occupy movement has changed the political discourse. Research by Politico shows that “Mentions of the phrase ‘income inequality’ in print publications, web stories, and broadcast transcripts spiked from 91 times a week in early September to nearly 500 in late October.”

But the effects have not been limited to discourse. As Kroll argues, based on his own journalistic research in Ohio, the OWS movement was instrumental in generating support for the referendum that voted down governor John Kasich’s anti-union law, which would have severely limited the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers.

The anti-union bill had been reframed in terms of the language of the 99%. According to many organizers Kroll spoke with, the heightened sensitivity to income inequality and the energy of the Occupy movement were critical for building support to defeat the bill. Read Kroll’s article here.

Sociologist Annette Bernhardt recently published a short article on Alternet describing how the Faux Economic Recovery is Primarily Low-Paying Jobs.

“In this article she describes how “During the Great Recession, the jobs we lost were concentrated in mid-wage occupations like paralegals, health technicians, administrative assistants and bus drivers, making $15 to $20 an hour.  But so far in this weak recovery, employment growth has largely come from low-wage occupations like retail workers, office and stock clerks, restaurant staff and child care aids.”

Annette has been at the forefront of empirical research on low-wage work in America. She and her colleagues have made critical contributions to our understanding of low-wage work, including Low-Wage America, which she co-edited, and Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market, which she co-wrote. In Divergent Paths, she and her colleagues compare a cohort entering the labour market in the mid-1960s with one entering in the early 1980s,. They find that low-wage careers have doubled from the earlier cohort to the more recent one, from 12.2 per cent of workers to 27.6 per cent.