Campaign contributions by high-frequency trading firms have skyrocketed 673 percent since 2008, according to a new report focusing on 48 companies. These traders contributed $16.1 million during the 2012 election cycle, up from just $2.1 million in 2008. That’s not including the 93 percent spike in funds spent on lobbying Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since the recession.

The biggest single-year jump in spending occurred between 2009 and 2010, as traders attempted to kill the beefed up regulations in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. While the law cracked down on risky trading by banks, it only mentioned high-frequency trading once, and left hedge funds and trading firms largely unregulated.

The report details how high-speed traders successfully ducked the bulk of Dodd-Frank’s regulations after the financial crisis:

“Unsurprisingly, high frequency traders upped their campaign contributions and lobbying spending at the same time Congress was debating a new law to crack down on the excesses of Wall Street,” said CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan. “Despite all of the new regulations put forth in Dodd-Frank, these firms managed to come away unscathed. If lobbying and campaign contributions don’t directly buy influence in Washington, they certainly don’t hurt.”

Unregulated high-speed trading, which prioritizes quick profits without the burden of investment, renders the market extremely volatile and subject to major fluctuations. So-called “flash crashes,” like the Dow’s 1,000-point plunge in 2010 caused by an automated high-speed trading program, expose the risk these trades pose to the entire economy. Despite the lack of greater economic benefit, high-frequency trading has come to dominate the stock market since the financial crisis.

In response to the 2010 flash crash, the SEC approved a plan to limit high-speed trading in the event of major price swings. The agency is planning to further tighten regulations on the industry, while lawmakers may also consider a financial transactions tax to make such trades more costly.

A new report says the number of wage-and-hour lawsuits filed against U.S. employers in federal court has increased 10 percent this year. It’s the fifth year in a row that the suits have increased, according to law firm Seyfarth Shaw.

The report notes that this is a fairly recent trend:

The first major spike in cases occurred in 2003, when the number of such suits nearly doubled from 2,035 to 4,055. They shot up again in 2007, to 6,786 suits.

Though the number of actions dropped off the following year, to 5,302 in 2008, they have been climbing steadily ever since.

The climb can be seen in this graphic:

These are cases alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and typically fall under three categories: salaried employees claiming they are owed overtime pay, hourly workers who claim they weren’t paid for all of their hours, and restaurant workers who claim they weren’t given additional pay to make up for when tips didn’t bring their overall pay to the minimum wage.

Violations of wage and hour laws have become widespread in today’s economy. Sixty-eight percent of low-wage workers interviewed for a report in 2009 said they had experienced a pay violation in the previous work week, including 26 percent who were paid under the minimum wage and 76 percent who didn’t receive overtime pay.

Suits have similarly risen, jumping 400 percent in the last decade. And they’ve seen a surge during the recession in particular as employers cut corners looking to cut costs.

As sequestration went into effect in March, some lawmakers argued that the impact of the cuts would not be as immediate as had been claimed, as they would take place over a matter of years. But there are some areas that felt the impact immediately. One of those is schools on military bases or Native American reservations. Because schools on or near federal lands don’t collect as much in property and sales tax revenues as other public schools, Impact Aid from the federal government helps close that gap. Yet sequestration will reduce the $1.2 billion the government sends to these communities by more than $60 million.

Different schools have different funding structures, but some are dealing with the impact of reduced spending right now, according to the latest report from the Center for American Progress:

This past month we discussed sequestration’s effect on schoolchildren living on Naval Air Station Lemoore in California. Schools in that district rely on Impact Aid for 30 percent of their entire budget. As Heiko Sweeney, principal of the base’s Akers Elementary School, explained, “For us, Impact Aid is critical.” The students and staff of Akers Elementary School are not alone in this regard: Federal Impact Aid accounts for more than half the budget for the Dulce Independent School District in New Mexico. In Mascoutah, Illinois, Superintendent Todd Koehl is expecting a 20 percent reduction in Impact Aid this year. “State and federal dollars are some of our biggest revenues,” said Koehl. And according to Dawn Kirby, vice president of the Travis Unified School District in California, Impact Aid provides them with “a lot of money. … That money has to come from somewhere. A lot of our students come from military families.”

While some school systems might be able to rely on reserves to make up some of the shortfall resulting from Impact Aid cuts, others such as the Tomah School District in Wisconsin are not as fortunate. “The only thing left is to reduce salaries and benefits or eliminate programs,” said Greg Gaarder, the district’s business manager. “There are no tools left in the toolbox.”

On the Wind River Indian Reservation in Ethete, Wyoming, a loss of $1.7 million in Impact Aid to School District 14 means a cut of 11 percent of the district’s overall budget. Such a drastic cut in Impact Aid will only serve to make a bad situation worse on reservations across the country. Native Americans have the lowest educational attainment of any racial or ethnic group in the United States. “We are at the mercy of the federal government,” said an unnamed District 14 school official. According to Michelle Hoffman, superintendent of District 14, Impact Aid is critical in addressing a host of problems: “Poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse.” She continued, “We have two full-time nurses in our district, which the state model does not cover. We pay for that through Impact Aid.”

The U.S. already ranked 44th in the world in the percentage of GDP spent on education in 2009. Sequestration will reduce that amount even further.

This is not the only way that it will impact spending on education and children, however. Low-income children are already being kicked out of Head Start programs. In total, 70,000 are expected to lose access to Head Start, while 1.2 million disadvantaged students will see funds eliminated for their schools. Special education programs will lose $633 million and $157 million will be cut from federal student financial aid. Low-income families will also lose $115 million in child care subsidies.

Congress acted swiftly to undo cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration that resulted in flight delays but has not moved to undo these cuts to education programs. While some lawmakers have proposed giving agencies flexibility in implementing the cuts, most agencies don’t have the reserves or funds to blunt the impact.

College graduates have fared better than workers without degrees during the economic recovery, as their unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent according to data released in May. That’s far lower than the 7.5 percent overall unemployment rate.

For recent college graduates, though, the unemployment rate doesn’t tell the full story. According to a new report from McKinsey & Company, nearly half of America’s recent graduates say they are working in a job that does not require a college degree. Instead, they are working as waiters, salespeople, or in other low-wage jobs, the survey found:

[T]he most striking finding from our survey may be the extent to which recent graduates find themselves in jobs that they say do not require a college degree. Overall, nearly half say this is the case, though graduates of public universities are 11 percent more likely to feel overqualified than those who attended private universities. [...]

For example, assuming that our sample is broadly representative of the nation’s 1.7 million college graduates last year, roughly 120,000 Americans who would rather work elsewhere took jobs as waiters, salespeople, cashiers, and the like. That’s one every five minutes.

The survey echoes recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed college graduates are increasingly turning to low-wage jobs when they finish school. 284,000 college graduates are working minimum wage jobs according to the BLS, more than double the number that worked such jobs before the Great Recession.

That’s largely because low-wage sectors have dominated the economic recovery, accounting for a majority of the jobs added since the recession’s end even though they made up just 21 percent of jobs lost during the downturn. Mid-wage jobs that generally go to recent college graduates, by contrast, made up 60 percent of recession losses but just 21 percent of gains since it ended.

That has broad implications for the American economy, as recent graduates working in low-income jobs are less able to contribute to economic growth through the purchase of houses and other goods, particularly as they remain overburdened by student loan debt. Worse, those low-wage jobs are less likely to provide substantial retirement or health benefits, and working for low wages immediately out of college leaves workers behind for the rest of their lives, meaning they will lag older generations in income, savings, and wealth accumulation for years to come. (HT Huffington Post)

The fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas that killed 15, injured hundreds, and caused property damages that could reach $100 million has some talking about the need for increased workplace safety regulations to prevent future disasters. The facility hadn’t been inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration since 1985 and slipped by six other regulatory agencies.

But as the New York Times reported, lawmakers in Texas worry that new regulations would be too costly and endanger the state’s high ratings for a business friendly environment:

Asked about the disaster, [Gov. Rick] Perry responded that more government intervention and increased spending on safety inspections would not have prevented what has become one of the nation’s worst industrial accidents in decades.

“Through their elected officials,” he said, Texans “clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight.” […]

Even in West, last month’s devastating blast did little to shake local skepticism of government regulations. Tommy Muska, the mayor, echoed Governor Perry in the view that tougher zoning or fire safety rules would not have saved his town. “Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said. […]

Texas has always prided itself on its free-market posture. It is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.

Meanwhile, Texas ranks at the top of the country for the number of workplace fatalities, experiencing more than 400 every year over the last decade. It also has a high rate of fires and explosions: over 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have caught fire or exploded.

These accidents come with a huge cost: the fires and explosions at Texas’s chemical and industrial plants cost as much in property damage as those in all other states combined from 2007 to 2012. Texas experiences more than three times the number of accidents and four times the number of injuries and deaths as the second-ranking state in the country, Illinois, resulting in 300 times the property damage costs.

The cost of workplace accidents doesn’t just impact Texas, though. They cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year. A study conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that between 1992 and 2002, 64,333 workers died from workplace injuries, which cost society a total of $53 billion, or an average of $831,000 per death. Another study by J. Paul Leigh for the Milbank Quarterly found that in just 2007 alone, there were 5,600 fatal workplace injuries and 8,559,000 nonfatal ones, while there were 53,000 fatal illnesses and 427,000 nonfatal illnesses. These cost society a total sum of $250 billion due to medical and indirect expenses.

The lack of safety regulations can also cost businesses directly. They spend $170 billion a year on costs associated with injuries and illnesses sustained on the job, including more than $40 billion a year in worker’s compensation benefits. A report from the American Society of Safety Engineers found that having inadequate safety, health, and environmental protocols can cost a company in benefit claims, liability damages, litigation expenses, and the potential to lose bids and government contracts. It also notes that “having a solid safety and health management program with senior management commitment will improve productivity and employee morale.”

The Dallas Morning News has reported that West Fertilizer Co. only had $1 million in liability insurance, and Texas doesn’t require such facilities to have insurance that could cover the potential damage they might cause. That could mean that the costs of this disaster will be borne by those whose property was damaged, as they can expect little from the company itself. President Obama has also authorized federal aid to help the community recover. The costs of the explosion are already affecting more than the company itself.

After the death toll from the factory collapse in Bangladesh soared past 1,100, H&M announced today that it has signed a fire and building safety agreement in the country, Reuters reports. The agreement was initiated by IndustryALL and UNI Global Union. The company said in a statement that it hopes for “a broad coalition of signatures in order for the agreement to work effectively on the ground.” The company didn’t use any of the suppliers that were operating out of the collapsed factory.

In the wake of the tragedy, the country has also announced that it plans to raise the minimum wage for garment workers, the Associated Press reports:

A new minimum wage board will issue recommendations for pay raises within three months, Textiles Minister Abdul Latif Siddiky said Sunday. The Cabinet will then decide whether to accept those proposals.

The wage board will include representatives of factory owners, workers and the government, he said.

The garment industry’s minimum wage was last raised in 2010 by 80 percent following protests from workers, rising to 3,000 takas, or $38, a month.

Working conditions in the country have long been dismal thanks to the corruption of government officials, a failure to commit to higher standards from companies in the industry, and a glut of workers desperate to work. After a fire that killed 112 workers in November, major retailers refused to implement a union-proposed safety plan, citing costs. That may now change following the leadership of H&M.

American demand for cheap clothing has also fueled the garment industry boom in Bangladesh without ensuring better working conditions. As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Americans last year devoted just 3% of their annual spending to clothing and footwear, compared with around 7% in 1970 and about 13% in 1945, according to Commerce Department data.” Spending has decreased in part because clothing prices have fallen over the last two decades after rising from the 1950s to the 1970s. Prices for clothing have risen just 10 percent since 1889, while food prices, in contrast, have gone up more than 80 percent.

But the cost of safety may not even be noticeable to many consumers. The price tag for safety upgrades in the country’s factories, if passed on entirely to the consumer, could cost as little as 10 cents per garment. Companies may also be able to absorb a minimum wage increase as they did when cotton prices rose in 2011.