Business & Workplace

Despite large and persistent gaps between blacks and whites on virtually every indicator of economic well-being, about half of all whites say the average black person is about as well off financially or doing better than the average white person, according to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center.

Five decades after Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., a new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot more” remains to be done.

Much has changed for African-Americans since the 1963 March on Washington (which, recall, was a march for "Jobs and Freedom"), but one thing hasn't: The unemployment rate among blacks is still about double that among whites, as it has been for most of the past six decades.

Proposals to raise the minimum wage face stiff opposition in Congress from Republicans, particularly in the House. But within the GOP base, there are sharp educational and income differences over the issue.

Nearly nine-in-ten Americans now say having a secure job is essential to being in the middle-class; in 1991, it was homeownership.

Unemployment continues to be lower among whites than other groups, but job growth is slower compared with blacks and Hispanics -- one reason, perhaps, why whites are the most pessimistic about the economy.

In 2012, 36% of the nation’s young adults ages 18 to 31—the so-called Millennial generation—were living in their parents’ home, the highest share in at least four decades. The number of young adults doing so has risen by 3 million since the start of the start of the recession in 2007, an increase driven by a combination of economic, educational and cultural factors.

Last week, San Francisco Bay area television station KTVU broadcast fake names for the pilots of the Asiana Airline flight that crashed on July 6. The error involved ethnic stereotyping, leading the Asian American Journalists Association to assert that these kinds of mistakes “underscored the importance of newsroom diversity” at America’s media outlets. A similar […]

More than three-quarters of Americans continue to believe that members of the military contribute “a lot” to society’s well-being. By contrast, only 37% say clergy make a big contribution to society, and journalists have dropped the most in public esteem since 2009.