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According to the Economic Policy Institute, RTW laws aim to hamstring unions’ ability to help employees bargain with their employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Research shows that historically, wages for union workers average about 11% more than those of their non-union counterparts. Non-union workers in RTW states generally have fewer benefits as well.
The Tennessean October 11, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 30 of America’s 50 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted minimum wages that are higher than the federal standard. That leaves 20 where employers are still allowed to pay their workers as little as $7.25 an hour. Five of them — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — have no minimum wage at all. Two others — Georgia and Wyoming — still have their minimum wages set at $5.15 an hour. In all seven of those states, the federal threshold of $7.25 applies.
GO Banking Rates October 11, 2022 -
That’s according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Even as the country suffered through a pandemic, global supply chain disruptions and rising inflation, child poverty rates declined to the lowest on record. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded, much of this can be attributed to last year’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit.
To be sure, some states and localities have spent relief funds in ways that do not actually improve the lives of average Americans. At least 21 states used the money to replenish unemployment insurance funding, which — as the Economic Policy Institute notes — has little impact on economic growth and effectively amounts to a tax cut for corporations. Some local governments are even using funding to build and expand jails and prisons, rather than invest in education, affordable housing, job programs or other programs that address the root causes of crime.
Finger Lakes Times October 11, 2022 -
A new analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute looks at C-suite salaries
Pay for chief executive officers rose by just over 11% from 2020 to 2021, according to a new report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Compared with the typical worker’s pay, CEOs were paid 399 times as much in 2021, the highest multiple on record, EPI said. In 1965, CEOs were paid 20 times what the average worker made.
On average, CEOs were paid $27.8 million in 2021, the institute said.
And CEO pay has risen by 1,460% since 1978. CEO compensation rose 36% faster than the stock market during this period, the EPI noted, and “far eclipsed the slow 18.1% growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation” over that span, in 2021 dollars.
“Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at EPI and one of the report’s authors, said in a statement.
“We need to enact policy solutions that would both reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions and limit their ability to do so,” he added.
Dave Kamper, a senior state policy coordinator at EPI, wrote on Twitter TWTR, -1.35% : “CEO pay has gone up 1,460% since 1978. In our last report released before COVID started, in 2019, it had *only* gone up 940%. That is to say, ONE THIRD of the TOTAL jump in CEO pay since 1978 has come in the past three years.”
The EPI estimated the average CEO compensation of the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. companies. It used data from the S&P Compustat ExecuComp database for the years 1992 to 2021, and survey data published by the Wall Street Journal for selected years dating back to 1965.
Compensation figures included salary, bonuses and long-term incentive payouts, including stock awards and stock options.
The EPI also noted a shift in how CEOs were being paid: CEO compensation in this roundup had shifted away from the use of stock options and toward the use of stock awards.
MarketWatch October 7, 2022 -
American CEOs have seen their pay soar over the last four decades, far higher than the rate of pay raises for average workers.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1978 and 2022, CEO compensation at the 350 largest firms rose by an inflation-adjusted 1460%. Outstripping the 18% increase for typical workers.
The rise, according to researchers, is due mainly to rent-seeking, the ability to manipulate regulations to create monopolies.
News 4 San Antonio October 7, 2022 -
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 5, 2022) — CEO pay, including stock awards and options, is up 11.1% since 2020 and 1,460% since 1978, a new EPI analysis finds. This increase was not matched by increased pay for typical workers: The ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker pay soared to 399-to-1 under EPI’s realized measure of CEO pay, the highest ratio on record, up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a massive increase from 59-to-1 in 1989.
*RE-POSTED FULL PRESS RELEASE
The Stand October 7, 2022 -
The teacher shortage problem has been going on for 50 years. Why are so few entering the profession?
Average weekly wages for public schoolteachers have been stagnant for years, according to Economic Policy Institute analysis from this summer.
And it’s only gotten worse. Since the 1990s, what’s called the teacher pay penalty has been on a worsening trajectory, the Economic Policy Institute wrote. The penalty shows how much less teachers earn compared to those with college degrees. If, in comparison, teachers are earning more, it’s called the teacher pay premium.
By 2021, the pay penalty hit historic levels.
Male teachers, though, have always faced a pay penalty compared with their nonteaching counterparts. “The large wage penalty that men face in the teaching profession goes a long way toward explaining why the gender makeup of the profession has not changed much over the past few decades,” the EPI wrote.
Teachers often receive a larger share of their compensation as benefits, compared with other professions. But even when accounting for benefits, teachers still see a 14.2 percent penalty.
Grid News October 7, 2022 -
CEO pay continues to spike, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. In 2021, the average CEO earned $27.8 million.
A report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, found CEO pay was “exorbitant,” continuing a decades-long upward trend that has widened the income gap between the top 1% of the population and the bottom 90%. The authors, who looked at America’s 350 largest publicly owned companies, recommend policies that could discourage CEOs from seeking excessive pay, helping to redistribute wealth back to average employees.
In 2021, the average CEO earned $27.8 million, a figure that has increased 1,460% since 1978. (The EPI’s measurements are based on salary, bonuses, and stock benefits—importantly, the value of those stocks when cashed in, not when they were first granted.) But workers’ earnings did not trend similarly: CEOs made 399 times more than an average worker, up from 366 times in 2020 and 30 times in 1978.
The most glaring example of how stock rewards result in inordinate pay is Elon Musk, the richest CEO in the U.S., who exercised $23.5 billion of stock options in 2021. Because this represented an incomparable “extreme outlier,” the EPI chose to exclude Musk from the report (as it did with Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, after Facebook’s IPO). The authors admit that some stock options can make sense because they incentivize CEOs to make business decisions that generate shareholder returns. “But,” they wrote, “is it really necessary to give a CEO options on 16 million shares of stock to achieve this goal?”
Fast Company October 7, 2022 -
The most glaring example of how stock rewards result in inordinate pay is Elon Musk, the richest CEO in the U.S., who exercised $23.5 billion of stock options in 2021. Because this represented an incomparable “extreme outlier,” the EPI chose to exclude Musk from the report (as it did with Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, after Facebook’s IPO). The authors admit that some stock options can make sense because they incentivize CEOs to make business decisions that generate shareholder returns. “But,” they wrote, “is it really necessary to give a CEO options on 16 million shares of stock to achieve this goal?”
The Street October 7, 2022 -
While workers’ wages have stagnated in comparison to productivity over the past four decades, CEO pay in the U.S. has skyrocketed at a rate far outpacing the growth of the economy and productivity, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds.
According to research released by EPI on Tuesday, CEO pay has skyrocketed by a staggering 1,460 percent since 1978. This has far outpaced the growth of the economy and even the pay of the top 0.1 percent, EPI finds, with the S&P stock market growing by 1,063 percent in the same time and the earnings of the top 0.1 percent growing 385 percent between 1978 and 2020.
By contrast, worker pay has remained relatively unchanged since 1978, rising by a mere 18.1 percent over the past 43 years, EPI finds. As a result, the gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has grown significantly. While CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms had an estimated average pay of $27.8 million in 2021, the average worker at the same firms made $70,400, the report shows. This is a ratio of about 400 to 1 in 2021 — itself a major multiplication of 1965’s ratio of 20 to 1 and 1978’s ratio of about 30 to 1.
EPI’s data doesn’t even include the pay of CEO Elon Musk, who has been one of the pandemic’s biggest winners. Researchers specifically chose to exclude Musk and Tesla from their analysis because, if his realized salary, including stock sales, had been included, his pay would have been almost 1,000 times that of the average CEO of a large company. This would have boosted the average CEO pay increase between 2020 and 2021 by over 300 percent.
As EPI notes, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy,” EPI economists Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra write. “CEOs are getting ever-higher pay over time because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80 percent) is stock-related. They are not getting higher pay because they are becoming more productive or more skilled than other workers, or because of a shortage of excellent CEO candidates.”
EPI recommends that Congress implement policies to reign in CEO wealth, like setting a higher corporate tax rate for corporations with large CEO pay ratios and setting higher marginal tax rates for the richest Americans.
Truthout October 7, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the federal minimum wage in 2021 was worth 34% less than in 1968, when its purchasing power peaked.
Associated Press October 7, 2022 -
Heidi Shierholz: Raise the minimum wage
Some economists are claiming that in order to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve must engineer an extended period of elevated unemployment — throwing millions out of work so that consumption drops and wage growth slows.
The impact of that would be terrible. High inflation is causing great hardship, but a recession would be far worse. Elevated unemployment churns out misery, lost opportunities and inequality. In light of these consequences, it would seem absurd to call for an extended period of elevated unemployment in the name of curbing inflation if it is likely to come down on its own. But that is exactly what is happening.
Growth in the price of food is slowing, and the price of energy has recently been dropping. Wages grew 4.8% at an annualized rate over the last three months, down from 6.1% at the end of 2021. Supply chain pressures — which have been a key driver of inflation — are easing. And consumer spending patterns are now normalizing — which is important because pandemic spending patterns had been a key driver of inflation as consumers shifted their spending from services to goods.
To help people hardest hit by today’s high inflation, the government should raise the minimum wage. In the last two years alone, the federal minimum wage’s purchasing power has dropped 12.2% — a massive hit to the living standards of working people. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 over the next few years would be an important step toward a more equitable recovery, and it would contribute virtually nothing to inflation.
Thankfully, a return to more normal inflation appears likely to happen on its own. The costs of a Fed-engineered period of elevated unemployment would be far greater than any benefit that would come from reducing inflation somewhat faster than what is already occurring.
Heidi Shierholz is the president of the Economic Policy Institute and the former chief economist at the US Department of Labor during the Obama administration.
CNN October 7, 2022 -
There are fewer job openings in the U.S. That could be a sign that the Fed’s rate hikes are working.
The job openings part of the report was pretty significant, according to Elise Gould, with the Economic Policy Institute.
“It dropped from about 11.2 million to 10.1 million,” Gould said. “That kind of 10% drop, it’s very large in historical perspective.”
Marketplace October 7, 2022 -
These moves have increased the likelihood of a recession if we are not already in one, says the Economic Policy Institute. They tell us that a “common argument runs that inflation harms everybody in the economy, but only those who lose their job are harmed by recession. This is the opposite of truth. A recession directly reduces economy-wide incomes while inflation does not.”
Association of Mature American Citizens October 7, 2022 -
But it turns out those critics weren’t being critical enough. Now it’s time to revise their analysis. CEO pay no longer rises with the stock market; it rises well in excess of the stock market—more than one-third faster, according to a new report by Economic Policy Institute (EPI) research director Josh Bivens and research assistant Jori Kandra. It’s still true that a typical pay package for the CEO of a major corporation outperforms whatever company the CEO happens to run. But in addition to that, it outperforms the entire frigging stock market. You want to keep your retirement money safe? Sure, an index fund is a fine investment for now. But once we figure out how to corral America’s top CEOs into an initial public offering (IPO) and convert their collective persons into stock, pull your money out of that index fund and put it into CEOs, Inc. You won’t be sorry.
That isn’t the first time EPI has reported that capitalists out-earn capital. It’s found CEO pay exceeding stock market growth for several years now. But we’ve all become so inured to outrageous stories about CEO pay that this finding didn’t attract much attention. I didn’t notice it until this past week. The concept so astonished me that I checked EPI’s math. From 1978 to 2021 realized CEO compensation increased, EPI says, by 1,460.2 percent, adjusted for inflation. How does that compare to stock market performance? Well, from January 1978 to January 2021 the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose, adjusted for inflation (and assuming no dividend reinvestment) by 842.814 percent. The S&P 500 rose 904.378 percent. These rates of growth are impressive, but they are much slower than 1,460 percent.
Thomas Piketty shocked the world by suggesting that r > g, where r is capital accumulation and g is economic growth. EPI’s contribution is that c > r, where c is CEO compensation and r is capital accumulation. Capital good; capitalist better.
But EPI’s latest report demonstrates that CEOs make even this plutocratic 0.1 percent look like poseurs. As a group, CEOs get paid nearly seven times as much as the 0.1 percent, and their pay is rising at a rate that’s nearly four times as fast. As Bivens and Kandra point out, it’s a serious insult to the 0.1 percent to suggest that higher and faster-growing pay for CEOs is even vaguely meritocratic. You want to tell a guy earning $3 million bucks a year that he is mediocre compared to a CEO, be my guest.
“The growing pay differential between CEOs and top 0.1 percent earners,” Bivens and Kandra write,
does not reflect the greater productivity of executives but the specific power of CEOs to extract concessions—a power that stems from dysfunctional systems of corporate governance in the United States. Because so much of CEOs’ income constitutes economic rent, there would be no adverse impact on the economy’s output or on employment if CEOs earned less or were taxed more.”
New Republic October 7, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the federal minimum wage in 2021 was worth 34% less than in 1968, when its purchasing power peaked.
CBS October 7, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the corporate tax rate for most of the ‘50s and ‘60s leveled at about 52%.
The Business Journal October 7, 2022 -
A new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculates the gap between CEO pay and how much production and nonsupervisory workers make. Looking at the top 350 firms in America, and calculating pay based on how much their stock options are worth when they’re actually used, they found that CEOs made $27.8 million on average in 2021.
Business Insider October 7, 2022 -
“To the extent that employers already raised wages earlier this year, those higher wages are still working to attract workers,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “Wages aren’t falling, but they aren’t rising at the same rate.”
The Washington Post October 7, 2022 -
While teachers have long raised concerns about being underpaid and disrespected, the wage gap between teachers and other professions has grown worse over time. In 2021, teachers earned 23.5% less than college graduates with a comparable education level, a record high since 1996, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Time Magazine October 7, 2022 -
Nearly half of working-age families have nothing saved in retirement accounts, and the median working-age family had only $7,800 saved in 2016. About 10% have $320,000 or more, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Street October 7, 2022 -
“To be clear these changes are all pretty small and display general series volatility,” Elise Gould, senior economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, wrote in response to the August Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report.
CBS News October 7, 2022 -
Features Heidi discussing the latest JOLTS data.
Yahoo Finance October 7, 2022 -
But it turns out those critics weren’t being critical enough. Now it’s time to revise their analysis. CEO pay no longer rises with the stock market; it rises well in excess of the stock market—more than one-third faster, according to a new report by Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, research director Josh Bivens and research assistant Jori Kandra. It’s still true that a typical pay package for the CEO of a major corporation outperforms whatever company the CEO happens to run. But in addition to that, it outperforms the entire frigging stock market. You want to keep your retirement money safe? Sure, an index fund is a fine investment for now. But once we figure out how to corral America’s top CEOs into an initial public offering and convert their collective persons into stock, pull your money out of that index fund and put it into CEOs, Inc. You won’t be sorry
The New Republic October 7, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs were paid 351 times as much as typical workers in 2020. Between 1978 and 2020, CEO pay has grown by a staggering 1,322%; a world apart from the 18% wage growth workers saw during the same period.
Forbes October 7, 2022 -
Myriad terms have been thrown around about the current state of the economy and the job market. A recent All Things Considered piece centered on the word “dynamism.” As defined by Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz, it’s the change, advancement and restless entrepreneurial spirit of workers. Stacey Vanek Smith, the co-host of NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money, talked to a couple of job hoppers and economists to take a better look at what’s really happening. The piece includes a quick listen, written storytelling and interesting data that give the audience a new perspective on an issue that’s been the subject of much conversation. — Emily Barske
NPR October 7, 2022 -
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute found that the 2021 teacher total compensation penalty — the disparity between the wages and benefits of teachers and those of comparable college graduates — was 14.2% (a 23.5% wage penalty offset by a 9.3% benefits advantage). It’s a gap that has increased dramatically since 1993, when the total teacher compensation penalty was only 2.7%.
Lancaster Online October 7, 2022 -
Even a pandemic didn’t get paid sick days for most low-wage workers, this week in the war on workers
Just 38% of the bottom 10% of workers have paid sick days, while 96% of the top 10% have the benefit, the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould writes, highlighting recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And if you’re in the lowest-paid 10% of workers, you cannot afford to take unpaid time off work without serious sacrifice. Leisure and hospitality is the industry where the lowest percentage of workers—53%—have paid sick leave, even though many of those jobs are public-facing, bringing an increased risk of contracting COVID or any other virus, and an increased risk of passing it on.
Daily Kos October 7, 2022 -
The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metropolitan area ranks No. 14 nationwide in income inequality, according to a Economic Policy Institute Report. Florida ranks No. 2 of 50 states.
USA Today October 7, 2022 -
Yu, who called the distinction, “frankly just terrible,” also worries that it could disproportionately harm Black borrowers and particularly Black women. Due to labor market discrimination, Black women often need more education to compete in the job market, but those same forces mean they’re not compensated the same for earning those degrees as their white and male counterparts. Black women with advanced degrees were paid nearly $7 less than white men with only a bachelor’s degree in 2020, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a worker-focused think tank.
MarketWatch October 7, 2022