Media clips
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We start the hour talking with ProPublica’s JESSE EISINGER, an author on “The Secret IRS Files” report, about what they found, how the rich avoid paying their fair share, and what it reveals about inequities in our tax code. Then, we examine the uneven economic recovery and the pandemic’s impact on income inequality and the racial wealth gap. Our guest is VALERIE WILSON from the Economic Policy Institute.
WHYY June 10, 2021 -
Walsh can continue his overtures to Republicans to minimize adversarial exchanges, but Democratic members losing patience with GOP opposition to Biden’s jobs and social-policy agenda want the secretary to make a difference in the policy arena—even if that means abandoning the niceties.
“I would hope that the Education and Labor Committee pushes for a proactive agenda that the secretary is committed to and political capital is spent around accomplishing,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute. “Because as we emerge from the pandemic, if changes aren’t made to our workplace system of rights, then we know what type of recovery we will have—an unequal recovery where workers will pay a price.”
Bloomberg Law June 10, 2021 -
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute highlighted another factor that’s driving wages up: More tipping at restaurants and bars, as customers return.
If that’s a large contributor to wage increases, then pressures should ease once restaurants reach full capacity, according to Josh Bivens, EPI’s director of research.
“So long as the industries that are seeing the really rapid wage growth are also the ones seeing really rapid employment growth, that actually doesn’t strike me as a shortage,” he said. “That strikes me as how economies adjust to a big increase in demand.”
Bloomberg June 10, 2021 -
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the data in conjunction with jobs numbers that have already been released for May “are telling a pretty similar story that there’s pick-up in demand and the supply of workers are increasing to meet that demand.
“It’s going to take a little while, but things are moving in the right direction.”
Financial Times June 10, 2021 -
Average hourly wages across all industries last month increased by 2 percent, and leisure and hospitality was a leader for wage growth last month. But even the wage increases merely put the sector back to its pre-pandemic trend line rather than in inflation territory suggesting some massive labor shortage crisis, Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, noted on Twitter.
“In leisure and hospitality, earnings have grown enough to suggest a sector-specific shortage, but that may be largely the result of customers — and their tips — returning,” Shierholz tweeted.
Skift June 10, 2021 -
“Postal workers look like America, but with a higher proportion of Black workers and veterans,” writes Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, in an enlightening report titled “The War Against the Postal Service” released this past December. It notes that postal work pays better than private sector jobs that do not require a college degree. Only 9 percent of postal workers make less than $15 an hour, compared to more than 28 percent in the private sector overall.
The Progressive June 10, 2021 -
Instead, tips likely account for the pay increase as restaurants and bars return to pre-Covid customer capacity, according to Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“Since December 2020, the rise in tip income, not an increase in base wages, can likely entirely explain the acceleration of wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in restaurants and bars,” he wrote Friday.
CNBC June 10, 2021 -
“The labor market is on the right track, but there is still millions of workers yet to be absorbed in the economic recovery,” Economic Policy Institute’s senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
Al Jazeera June 10, 2021 -
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, noted the economy is still down 7.6 million jobs since early 2020 and said the real shortfall is more like 8.6 to 10.7 million when taking into account lost growth.
Courthouse News Service June 10, 2021 -
“Weekly wages for typical workers in leisure and hospitality translate to annual earnings of $20,714, far (far) lower than in other sectors, even with the recent acceleration. Those increases are not going to create broad wage pressure,” tweeted Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. She added that measured wages included tips, which had fallen off substantially when dining was banned or limited.
“Recent wage growth in restaurants may not be largely from employers raising pay to attract workers, but from workers’ hourly tips—which plummeted during the downturn—normalizing as customers return,” she added.
The Hill June 10, 2021 -
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Elise Gould, one of our best analysts on employment data, sees the report as a “promising sign that the recovery is on track.” But she also notes that the “jobs shortfall” compared to pre-pandemic trends is “in the range of 8.6-10.7 million” additional jobs. If this trend keeps up, Gould says the unemployment rate could hit 4% “by mid-2022” with full recovery before that year ends.
Forbes June 10, 2021 -
As white-collar workplaces debate the future of hybrid work with more than half of U.S. adults fully vaccinated, a new analysis provides a reminder that access to remote work during the pandemic has been a privilege for a lucky few, not the norm.
Just one in five U.S. workers are able to work remotely due to the pandemic, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from May 2020 to April of this year.
Of course, the ability to telework once COVID-19 hit was not created equally — and disparities, falling along demographic dimensions like education and race, have endured over the course of the pandemic.
About six in 10 workers with at least a bachelor’s degree were able to work remotely toward the start of the pandemic, compared to just 12% of workers with a high-school diploma or less. While the overall share of people teleworking declined over the ensuing months, a sizable gap between the two groups remains (34% versus 5%, respectively).
MarketWatch June 4, 2021 -
Since the jobs report is so important and such a recurring feature of the news cycle, it’s probably time that you understood what the heck it is. We reached out to Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an avid reader of the monthly jobs report, for some answers.
HowStuffWorks June 4, 2021 -
Over the past four years, temporary worker programs have increased, while opportunities for permanent residency have declined, a shift that was accelerated by the Trump administration during the coronavirus pandemic. The shift has allowed for greater economic opportunities for migrants while also increasing instances of corporate exploitation of migrant labor, according to the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today June 4, 2021 -
“Nearly all the states cutting [unemployment insurance] still have significantly fewer jobs than before the pandemic,” David Cooper of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute noted in a blog post. “The country is simply not at a place yet where states should be cutting off supports to unemployed workers.”
CBS Moneywatch June 4, 2021 -
For tipped workers like servers, base pay in Kentucky is $2.13 an hour and has been since 1991.
Dave Cooper, senior analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, says that is the real problem.
“Kentucky is one of only about 20 states that still use the federal standard for minimum wages,” said Cooper. “So if you’re a server in California, you’re making $14 an hour out of your paycheck, plus tips on top of that, whereas someone in Lexington, might only be making $2.13 an hour, and hopefully tips are getting up, getting them up to at least 7.25 but, you know in a lot of cases even that doesn’t.”
Cooper says the argument that prices may increase is valid- but could be worth it in the long run.
“There’s a lot of research that shows that when you raise wages, businesses, see some savings from lower turnover workers stay on the job longer, maybe they get better at their jobs,” said Cooper.
LEX-TV June 4, 2021 -
Somehow, we are all supposed to forget that the Obama era was defined by one of the largest drops in workers’ share of corporate income in the modern history of the United States, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute:
That decline was punctuated by huge Democratic electoral losses — which strongly suggests not coincidence but causation. It suggests that the Obama-led Democratic Party kicking the working class in the face while enriching finance billionaires prompted a political backlash that ended up (misguidedly) benefiting the GOP.
Jacobin June 4, 2021 -
At the start of the pandemic, some CEOs announced, to much fanfare, that they’d give up their salaries in order to protect their companies from layoffs or closures. But those gestures did little to curb the trend of soaring CEO earnings (because salary is often just one component of CEO compensation). In 2020, what CEOs took home rose nearly 16%, according to preliminary data, while the average worker’s compensation rose just 1.8%.
Those figures come from a preliminary report from the Economic Policy Institute, which each year reports on CEO compensation trends based on data from the 350 largest firms. That annual report uses information these firms file by June, but 281 of those 350 firms have already reported their CEO compensation for 2020, so Lawrence Mishel, distinguished fellow at and former president of the EPI, decided to put out some analysis early. “We think this is a proper early look at what we can expect,” he says. And what he’s expecting is fast CEO compensation growth: “We would estimate that CEO compensation will hit, by far, its historic peak in 2020.”
Fast Company June 4, 2021 -
Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, calculated that wages in leisure and hospitality increased at an annualized rate of nearly 18% in the past three months. But she said that mostly just made up for declines in the earlier part of the recession.
“We’ve had a big acceleration in recent months, but in no way are wages out of whack,” she said. “They’re roughly what you would expect if COVID hadn’t happened. They are still extremely low. It’s the lowest wage sector by far in our economy.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune June 4, 2021 -
This much is clear: A California family’s infant care costs average about $17,400 a year, the third highest cost in the nation. The price of child care for a 4-year-old averages about $11,475 annually, according to data from the White House and the Economic Policy Institute, which compiles statistics from several sources.
Fresno Bee June 4, 2021 -
Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor and the current senior economist and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute think tank, pointed to a caregiving crisis, lingering health fears and low wages as contributing to the restaurant industry’s staffing issues. She added, however, that the sector’s “isolated” labor shortage is “not driving things economy-wide.”
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Some restaurant workers may also still be shell-shocked from the economic and health toll the pandemic took on the industry and its workers seemingly overnight, as their sector bore the brunt of initial job losses while many of their office-working peers had the privilege of continuing work remotely. Finally, wages in leisure and hospitality remain “extraordinarily low, even with the recent acceleration,” Shierholz added, which might not be seen as enough for worker’s to risk their health or pay for alternative childcare.
Shierholz slammed the decisions of some Republican governors to cut back jobless aid because of the labor shortage in the restaurant industry, lamenting how quickly people shifted from calling workers heroes to calling them lazy.
“It’s like we went from, ‘These are essential workers, they’re keeping us going,’” she said. “And now there’s a ‘We are going to make sure that you are so desperate that you have no choice but to take a job, even if it’s dangerous for you, even if wages are very suppressed, even if that means you have an enormous amount of stress and strain added to your life because of trying to cobble together fragmented too-expensive childcare.’”
ABC News June 4, 2021 -
It is unclear how successful cutting off the extra benefits will be at getting people back to work, says Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “These have become a lot less desirable jobs because of the pandemic,” says Bivens. “If someone has to show up in a pretty crowded restaurant, they might not feel great about that still, and I think that’s pretty rational.”
Financial Times June 4, 2021 -
Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, thanks to new research from the Economic Policy Institute, neither is its price tag nor its cause. There’s never been a study quite like this — one which places specific, real dollar amounts on every trickle-down policy American politicians have embraced. The study’s authors, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens, explain how their work reveals that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers.
Pitchfork Economics June 4, 2021 -
So what are Republican leaders talking about when they complain about the labor shortage? First, it’s important to understand that they’re not using it as a technical economic term. “There’s no index of labor shortages that [the US Bureau of Labor Statistics] puts out,” Heidi Shierholz, the senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, explained in the latest episode of “Pitchfork Economics.”
“The key footprint of a labor shortage in the data is very fast wage growth,” Shierholz explained. “The idea behind that is really straightforward: If an employer can’t attract the workers they need, they will raise wages to poach workers from other employers, who will in turn raise wages to retain their workers, and on and on.”
So is there a labor shortage in our economy? And, if so, should we panic? “While we are not, right now, seeing widespread labor shortages, I do think that the data are indeed flashing labor shortages in very isolated sectors,” Shierholz said. In particular, “it’s pretty much just leisure and hospitality – the sector that has restaurants in it. It’s the lowest-wage major sector in our economy, and that’s where we are seeing some evidence of labor shortages.”
Business Insider June 4, 2021 -
“When employers say they can’t find the workers that they need, always add the phrase, ‘at the wages I want to pay,’” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “We know how to attract workers: give them better jobs, better pay, better working conditions. It’s not rocket science; that’s how you do it.”
New York Times June 4, 2021 -
But progressives are pushing back, questioning the long-held belief that high debts will shift the economy into a lower gear.
The left-leaning Economic Policy institute said the budget “shows what true ‘fiscal responsibility’ means” by making investments to tackle inequality and level the playing field in the labor market.
The Hill June 4, 2021 -
Meanwhile, both the steel and lumber industries are strongly urging Biden to keep the tariffs in place. Removing them could prove to be politically unpopular, especially among steel workers in battleground Rust Belt states.
“Why would you kneecap the domestic steel industry when you want to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure?” asked Rob Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. “It would be like taking a sledgehammer to kill a flea.”
Scott argued the steel tariffs effectively supported the industry and that removing them, along with quotas limiting imports, would lead to both a “hemorrhaging of jobs” and importing steel that is in many cases worse for the environment than what is made in America.
CNN Business June 4, 2021 -
“There is nothing sacrosanct, or even formal or legitimate, about the current lottery allocation process,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. “There was no regulation and no transparency or public comment to inform the process.”
Costa expressed skepticism that the Biden administration would implement a measure devised by the Trump administration, but thought the changes would help improve the H-1B program.
According to Costa’s research, outsourcing IT staffing firms continue to get the majority of the 85,000 visas available in the lottery, petitioning for workers receiving a level one or two wage that are marked at the 17th and 33rd percentile wages of a specific job and region, and below the median pay.
Bloomberg Law June 4, 2021 -
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calls on prosecutors and state lawmakers to seek criminal punishment of employers for workplace and labor-law violations that are currently addressed through less serious legal sanctions. There are good reasons to be wary of this advice.
EPI’s new report persistently lumps together different kinds of workplace infractions. At one end of the spectrum are offenses that have long been illegal, such as forced labor or theft of premiums intended for unemployment or injury funds. Everyone agrees that a crooked construction boss who skips town without paying his crew’s wages has committed a crime. There is little controversy over the law coming down hard on offenses like these.
High on EPI’s new prosecutorial agenda, however, are legal infractions at the other end of the spectrum. These include so-called employee misclassification, in which workers are designated as independent contractors or supervisors when a court, state labor agency or similar authority thinks they shouldn’t be. Another EPI priority is the sidestepping of prevailing-wage laws, which set public contractors’ wages well above market value. Also on the list are miscalculations by restaurant managers about when and how the law allows them to engage in tip pooling and conduct that an employee considers retaliation for a workplace complaint.
The Wall Street Journal June 4, 2021 -
Many CEOS, at the start of the pandemic, vowed to not take a salary last year to keep layoffs to a minimum. But new preliminary data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the average CEO’s compensation still jumped 16% last year.
Average worker compensation was up just 1.8%.
“The offer by CEOs to forgo salary increases during the pandemic was largely symbolic,” the EPI said in a blog post. “Salaries were stable, but many CEOs pocketed a windfall by cashing in stock options and obtaining vested stock awards, compounding income inequalities laid bare during the past year.”
Fortune June 4, 2021