Advocacy
Above all, theory divorced from action is irrelevant. Through advocacy, Busted Cubicle serves American workers by creating detailed, research-backed guides on how to become involved in the most pressing issues of our time, including universal basic income (UBI), single-payer healthcare, ending U.S. poverty, promoting a “negative income tax,” protecting the environment, and other initiatives which can reshape our future.
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Call to Action: Strengthening Employee Benefits
Employee benefits refer to tangible or intangible compensation employers provide. The most common include salary, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, paid holidays, paid sick leave, and retirement accounts. Other perks which may lure potential employees to the workplace include free cafeterias and on-site gyms, daycares, and medical care. However, despite these job perks, the US must catch up to other developed nations in basic employee benefits.
Call to Action: Affordable Child Care in the U.S.
Many studies demonstrate the wide-reaching benefits of early childhood care and education for children and parents but also for employers and society at large. Yet, affordable child care remains out of reach for many American families.
Call to Action: Shortened Workweek
There’s a perverse American pride in working long hours. Part of that is because of the country’s inherited Protestant work ethic, but Stockholm syndrome might play into it, too. Because despite all the long hours, worker productivity isn’t increasing at nearly the level it should be, considering technological innovations.
Call to Action: Combatting Sexual Harassment
No company gets it perfect in the fight against sexual harassment. Not yet, at least. But there are some best practices that, if taken together, can make strides towards a safer, more equitable corporate environment.
Call to Action: Data Privacy
While many of the world’s other advanced economies have made great strides towards governing the flow of personal data, American legislation is years behind where it should be.
Call to Action: Saving for Retirement
To save for retirement doesn’t mean depositing into a savings account—and it doesn’t mean gambling it all on the stock market, either. It means finding ways to have your nest egg grow on its own in a sustainable way.
Call to Action: Immigration Reform
Emotions rarely make good arguments, but numbers do, and the benefits of immigration can and should be seen by their economic impact. The findings of such a perspective are stark: immigrants don’t take jobs, but create them; immigrants don’t burden a society, but revitalize it.
Call to Action: Social Security
When ranking the social security benefits of the OECD, a group of wealthy nations, the US is in the bottom third. To worsen matters, American seniors work longer, and harder, than their European counterparts, who receive better benefits. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Call to Action: Free College
To most Americans, it’s a given that education should be free from kindergarten through high school. But why should it stop there? Unless serious educational reforms are made soon, the US is going to end up looking like a high school student in a world full of college graduates.
Call to Action: Protecting Whistleblowers
If the consequences of doing the right thing are losing your job, then what is the average person incentivized to do? If America wants to cultivate a culture of doing the right thing, rather than the opposite, whistleblower protections need to be made a priority, not an afterthought.
Call to Action: Voting Rights
The history of voting rights in the United States can be viewed as an arm-wrestling match between two forces: one which wishes to make voting more difficult and one which wishes to make it more simple.
Call to Action: Student Debt
While the most progressive response to the student debt crisis would be to lower the cost of higher education, that does little to assuage the $1.5 trillion in student debt that already exists. To tackle the current swamp of student debt requires a radical new approach to how that debt is issued, structured, repaid, and managed.
Call to Action: Net Neutrality
Net neutrality is supported by the computer science community, consumer advocates, human rights organizations, content providers, and 82 percent of the American population. That sentiment runs across party lines, too: 86 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans support net neutrality.
Call to Action: Regulating Business
If winning is the only rule and profits the only scoreboard, then a small number of businesses can reach a point of critical mass where they’re capable—and incentivized—to muscle out the competition, squander public resources, shun innovation, and pass along costs to the consumer.
Call to Action: Gender and Racial Pay Gaps
Gender and racial pay disparities are not new but remain far more prevalent and excessive than one might realize. And cited salary is only part of the problem. Research suggests that women and people of color are much less likely to get call-backs on submitted job resumes, and efforts to negotiate better earnings are viewed far less favorably than for their white and male colleagues.
Call to Action: Collective Bargaining
Experts from Cornell University and the London School of Economics and Political Science suggest that the inability of unions to negotiate for better pay or working conditions has historically lead to a degeneration of all workers’ rights, unionized or not.
Call to Action: U.S. Environmental Policy
Failing to protect the environment bodes poorly for American health, safety, and overall quality of life. It will also play a key role in our economic competitiveness as outdated manufacturing and sustainability practices lose ground to those of more forward-thinking countries.
Call to Action: Negative Income Tax
Most introductory economics classes teach that giving cash is better than supplying benefits and many studies across the world show that cash has more utility and a more positive impact than like-kind benefits, which cost more than if those citizens were to purchase them outright.
Call to Action: Ending U.S. Poverty
According to the United States Census Bureau, more than 45 million Americans still live in poverty and the country's most recent approach to fixing this problem has been to cut spending for social protections and allow the free market do the fighting on its own.
Call to Action: Affordable Higher Education
According to recent data from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, more than 44 million Americans are paying off student loans. Collectively, these borrowers hold nearly $1.5 trillion in student debt. The average student loan borrower graduates with $37,172 in educational debt—a $20,000 rise in the last 13 years.
Call to Action: Single-Payer Healthcare
Healthcare is perhaps one of the most politically charged issues affecting the United States. It is also probably one of the most misunderstood. In some political circles, terms like “universal” or “single-payer” medicine are rejected. However, the Pew Research Center found that more than 50 percent of Americans support single-payer care—the highest share in more than a decade.
Call to Action: Strengthening Public Education
Public education is vital to a healthy economy and, more broadly, a thriving democracy. In 1785, John Adams wrote that citizens should not just “educate the whole people,” but “be willing to bear the expense of it.” In practical terms, an uneducated workforce is limited in what it can achieve—a failing that affects everyone.
Call to Action: Universal Basic Income
Founding Father Thomas Paine and English radical Thomas Spence first introduced the economic theory where all citizens are guaranteed a basic income for living expenses. Since then, the theory has been forgotten, reintroduced, and embraced—or at least considered—by certain countries.
Call to Action: Strengthening Laws Against Workplace Discrimination
If a review of other nations’ practices can teach us anything, it is that the United States has a lot of room for workplace improvement. Employees could benefit from better regulated work hours, more paid vacation, and paid parental leave, but some of the lapses speak to even more basic rights, like freedom from discrimination and assurance the law will protect that freedom.
Call to Action: Paid Parental Leave in the U.S.
According to an analysis of 151 nations conducted by the U.N.’s International Labor Organization, the U.S. and New Guinea were the only two without paid parental leave mandates. The Family Medical Leave Act entitles parents working for U.S. companies with at least 51 employees to just six to eight weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn—a period experts attest is woefully inadequate.