Recent Coverage

DEC 3, 2023

Business Insider | The forever labor shortage is pitting parents and their childfree coworkers against each other  

“Understaffing is one of the ways that corporations and businesses exercise their power over workers,” Kitty Richards, acting executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, told Business Insider. Over the past 20 or 30 years, workers have been getting “short-changed” by their employers to pad bottom lines in every way possible, Richards said. That includes firms cutting labor costs — which can include cutting benefits, and ensuring that there’s any slack in staffing schedules, “and then making it the problem of the employees to figure out how they’re going to cover shifts.” 

“It really is just another way of employers cutting their costs and pushing the consequences of that onto their workers,” Richards said.

NOV 30, 2023

The Hill | GDP, corporate profits soar as Biden calls out companies for ‘price gouging’

“Pandemic-era supply chain disruptions enabled corporations to hike prices and juice profit margins to highs not seen in more than 60 years,” Kitty Richards, acting director of Groundwork Collaborative, an economic research and advocacy group, wrote in an analysis. “Now supply chains have returned to normal, but corporations in many sectors are still charging inflated prices and extracting exorbitant profit margins,” Richards said.

NOV 16, 2023

MarketWatch | Investors are thrilled inflation is down. Consumers aren’t so happy. Here’s why. 

“Headline inflation numbers can really obscure important parts of what is really driving the cost of living for families in this country,” said Kitty Richards, acting executive director at Groundwork Collaborative. “If you are a parent who… is making a little bit more in your paycheck, but you couldn’t afford child care before the pandemic and now it’s 30% more expensive, it’s cold comfort to see that prices overall are rising at a much slower rate than they were last year.”

OCT 10, 2023

States Newsroom | Jobs report surprises as employers add 336,000 jobs in September

Kitty Richards, acting executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington, D.C. think tank, said the growth in federal investments in different industries, such as manufacturing, has spilled over to other parts of the labor market, which is why there is job growth in some of these other sectors.

“These kinds of front line service jobs are places where the strength of the overall economy matters a lot and also where, for many years, we had really terrible wages,” she said. “I think that the wage growth that has been supported overall by these investments in workers and manufacturing and the clean energy transition has driven up wages and spilled over, creating a much more attractive labor market, which is drawing people into the labor force. I think that the specific sectors in this month’s jobs report are more indicative of just a strong economy with growing incomes and wages overall than sort of specific investments.”

SEP 13, 2023

The Hill | What to know about the August inflation spike