Research suggests union membership by default could help reduce income inequality and its associated social ills.
Governments have made a difference to inequality in the past, as Roosevelt’s New Deal did in the 1930s, and could do so again if citizens acted to ensure their voices are heard.
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Governments' lack of response to rising inequality is not a problem of knowledge or public support. The problem is that those whose needs are being ignored must find a way to make themselves heard.
Children in suburbs with low levels of education and employment and high rates of poverty and crime are also missing out on the experiences that help make upwards social mobility possible.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Children growing up in the most disadvantaged suburbs also lack the social opportunities to develop skills and aspirations that would improve their prospects in life.
The cash machine doesn’t work for everyone.
Elena Rostunova/Shutterstock
The largest cities in Australia and the US are both the richest and the most likely to push out low-income earners. Having cities of all sizes will increase people's choices of where to live and work.
The city’s poorest residents, living on the most marginal land, experience higher exposure to flooding and poorer-quality water.
Bagus Indahono/AAP
While it is true that the poorest residents of the city are not connected to the piped water network, neither are the richest. Then what causes water inequalities?
Chris Sellers, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)
Five years after Superstorm Sandy, we see how disadvantaged social groups suffered more from the storm before and after – much as we're seeing in Hurricanes Harvey and Maria.
Women carry goods across a makeshift bridge in the Ilaje slum in Lagos. Widening inequality is fuelling tensions across Nigeria.
Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly
Protests are raising tensions in Africa's most populous country, with agitators and federal troops clashing on the streets. But is Nigeria on the brink of another civil war?
Thousands of copper nails representing thousands of Indigenous children who died in Canada’s residential schools were hammered into the Reconciliation Pole before its raising at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., on April 1, 2017.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
Many Canadian teachers worry about how to incorporate Indigenous content into the classroom. For one sociology professor, finding Indigenous mentorship was richly rewarding.
While state investment decreases on average with distance from the CBD, Melbourne’s neediest suburbs aren’t forgotten.
ymgerman from www.shutterstock.com
The neediest suburbs get a much poorer deal in Sydney than in Melbourne. A new study provides a suburb-by-suburb breakdown of state investment, including what facilities and services have been funded.
A synthesis centre in Africa would get an African perspective on global socio-environmental challenges.
Author supplied
Elite exam schools are some of the least diverse public schools in the US. Here's how colleges like Harvard could teach high schools like Stuyvesant to improve their admissions process.
The Flint water crisis was one of the few cases of environment-related social injustices that reached national attention in recent years.
AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Addressing social and health inequalities from pollution is no longer a priority at the EPA. What did the Office of Environmental Justice do and what will happen if it's shut down?
If a second airport creates another centre of activity in western Sydney, then it won’t just be air travellers who benefit.
Stilgherrian/flickr
Our big cities increase incomes faster than population growth, but most residents miss out on the extra income growth. Creating multiple centres of activity may help make bigger better for everyone.
A professor takes us back more than 20 years, to when struggling white working-class voters in Oregon were convinced that a conservative social agenda would help bring back timber jobs.
South Africa’s student protests are raising difficult issues, some of which are not being debated openly.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
Demands being made by protesting students in South Africa purport to support the poor. But the most marginalised young people in the country will not benefit from free higher education.
South Africa isn’t the “rainbow nation” some claim it to be.
Thomas Mukoya/Reuters
Professor of Comparative Political Science and Democracy Research at the Humboldt University Berlin; Associate of the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney; Director of Research Unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.