Experience
- U.S. Department of Labor
- Groundwork Collaborative
- Center for American Progress
Expertise
- Employment and the labor market
- Economic impacts on communities of color
Education
- University of Maryland, J.D.
- George Washington University, B.A.
Recent Coverage
AUG 31, 2023
Wall Street Journal | Your Student Loan Repayments Are Due Again. Here’s How to Prepare.
Under the SAVE plan, individual borrowers making $32,800 or less a year—roughly $15 dollars an hour or less—and families of four making $67,500 or less will have a minimum payment of zero. Those enrolled in the SAVE plan who make monthly payments on time will see another benefit: Their loan balances won’t grow due to unpaid interest. “The thing I think that is really good about this is that it helps the people who are harmed the most by being thrown back into repayment,” said Angela Hanks, a former Labor Department official now at Demos, a racial-justice think tank.
Paying loans again after such a long pause may feel destabilizing, said Hanks, whose team at Demos researched the impact that student loans have on people of different backgrounds and incomes. “I think people are right to be nervous as we move back into repayment, because it’s been three years,” she said.
AUG 4, 2023
The Guardian | US economy adds 187,000 July jobs in sign labor market is cooling
Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos and former acting assistant secretary at the Department of Labor, said the figures showed the job market remained resilient overall. “We saw in June that wages were finally beginning to outpace inflation, and this month’s report shows that trend continues. Which means that people are actually getting to feel those wage gains,” she said. But she said there was Black unemployment rate was still troubling. “It remains nearly double the white unemployment rate, and above the historic lows it hit earlier this year. There’s still room to improve on this front, and this remains the number to watch in subsequent reports.”
JUN 23, 2023
Vox | Can Joe Biden convince Americans the economy is actually good?
“This is the left’s supply-side argument,” said Angela Hanks, chief of programs at Demos, a progressive think tank, and a former official at the Department of Labor. “What does it look like to have a supply-side policy where you invest in building things and doing things and pay attention to whether you’re creating the conditions for people who have been left out to get a job? It feels, frankly, like something that in the past folks have been hesitant to try.”
Interested in speaking with Angela Hanks?
About Angela
Angela Hanks is Chief of Programs at Demos, a movement-oriented think tank committed to racial and economic justice, where she leads the organization’s programmatic work to shift law and policy closer toward a just, inclusive, multiracial economy and democracy.
Prior to joining Demos, Angela served in the Biden-Harris Administration as Acting Assistant Secretary of the Employment and Training Administration in the U.S. Department of Labor, where she worked to advance worker-centered policies that lead to quality jobs for all workers, particularly those who are marginalized.
Her work has been cited in various publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic and was previously a regular contributor to Forbes.com.
Prior to joining the Administration, Angela was Deputy Executive Director at the Groundwork Collaborative, where she worked to advance an equitable, people-centered vision for the economy. She has also held roles at think tanks and policy organizations where she has written extensively about how to make the labor market more inclusive of marginalized workers.
Angela began her career on Capitol Hill as a legislative assistant to the Honorable Elijah E. Cummings, and later became a counsel on the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. Angela earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from George Washington University and her law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law.
