Wages are one of the biggest issues in the US. The data from Economic Policy Institute shows that while productivity has grown by 62.5% in the US during 1979-2021, wages in comparison have only grown by 16%. This linear growth in wages relative to exponential productivity growth can be explained in part by the fact that the percentage of unions has halved in the country in the past 40 years, as noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Insider Monkey
December 16, 2022
While everyone defines “rich” differently, being part of “the 1%” has become synonymous with being wealthy in the U.S. The top 1% of earners in the U.S. earned median annual wages of $823,763 in 2020, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
December 16, 2022
Last year 94 per cent of US employers polled by Just Capital, a non-profit US research organisation, said their organisation had committed to greater workplace diversity, equity and inclusion. While this was happening, the average CEO in the top 350 US public companies by revenue earned 399 times more than a median employee, according to the Economic Policy Institute, whose calculations include estimates of the worth of granted shares when cashed in.
Financial Times
December 16, 2022
But the reduction in supply was met with increased demand as Americans started purchasing durable goods to replace the services they used prior to the pandemic, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “The pandemic put distortions on both the demand and supply side of the US economy,” Bivens said.
CNET
December 16, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute, workers in 21 states got a raise on New Year’s Day in 2022. Minimum wage increases ranged from $0.22 to $1.50 an hour, adding between $458 and $3,120 to the annual earnings of full-time minimum wage workers.
GoBanking Rates
December 16, 2022
Teachers are also working under a “pay penalty,” an economic concept meaning they earn lower weekly wages and receive lower overall compensation for their work than similar college-educated peers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That penalty reached a record high in 2021, with teachers earning 76.5 cents on the dollar compared with their peers.
Education Week
December 16, 2022
“If unions are able to negotiate higher pay and better working conditions, you know, employers are gonna have to compete with each other to have those same standards in order to attract workers. So even if you are not a unionized worker, the funding of the NLRB still matters,” said Margaret Poydock, a policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
Marketplace
December 16, 2022
Economic Policy Institute economist Monique Morrissey said she doesn’t doubt that the Biden buyout is the largest of its kind. But she said it is far less than the annual cost of tax benefits given to 401(k)-style retirement plans that generally benefit higher-income taxpayers.
Politifact
December 16, 2022
“Inflation can normalize without taking a hammer to the head of the economy,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said Tuesday.
Common Dreams
December 16, 2022
But industries that use the most H-2B visas have high incidences of wage theft and other labor violations, said Daniel Costa at the Economic Policy Institute. “There’s just really a lack of protections from retaliation when things go wrong on the job, which also includes not being able to change jobs,” said Costa.
Marketplace
December 16, 2022
Over the last 50 years, income inequality in America has grown substantially. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the growth in income from 1945 to 1973 was widely shared among the various income classes in the country. However, beginning in 1973 — notably, the year the United States fell into a 16-month recession, the longest at the time since the Great Depression — this trend of broad income growth reversed. From 1973 to 2007, more than half of all income growth was concentrated among the top 1% of families in the United States. Indeed, income inequality in America has now reached levels not seen since its historical peak in 1928, a time when the unregulated stock market fueled enormous gaps in income classes amid the so-called Roaring Twenties.
Forbes
December 16, 2022
But even as it gained cachet among this emerging class of centrist-minded visionaries, the third way drew skeptical appraisals from detractors both left and right, who justly assailed its ambiguity and lack of substance. The Economist derisively stated in 1998, “Trying to pin down an exact meaning is like wrestling an inflatable man. If you get a grip on one limb, all the hot air rushes to another.” Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute likewise noted that while “Clinton and Blair are two of the most articulate politicians of the age…their definitions of the third way leave the observer without a clue as to what it means.”
The Nation
December 16, 2022
Unions can barely keep themselves afloat, much less fund extensive advocacy outside their core functions. The Economic Policy Institute, long the most influential union-aligned think tank in the US, took only 14 percent of its funding from unions in 2021.
VOX
December 16, 2022
Some data argues teachers should be looking to remain in unions. An August paper published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says that as teachers’ stress levels rose due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the comfort of their unions were the best resource to alleviate them.
KATV
December 9, 2022
More than 90% of domestic workers are women, and about a third are foreign born, according to a recent report from the the Economic Policy Institute. In fact, domestic workers are “twice as likely” as other U.S. employees to come from another country, the EPI notes. Of the 2.2 million, the vast majority work as home health care aides. And more will be needed in the cities that will age the most by 2060.
24/7 Wall St.
December 9, 2022
Plus, hefty medical bills may be just the beginning, says Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.
“The poverty rate of people with disabilities is about two-and-a-half times as high as for others, and the share of those with disabilities who have medical debt is about five times as large as for others,” he tells CNBC Make It.
“There’s tons of uncertainty about the long-term health implications of Covid-19, but even a tiny bit of long-term illness/disability risk associated with Covid-19 will have big economic costs,” Bivens adds.
CNBC
December 9, 2022
A report last year by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated that the transition to electric vehicles could cost at least 75,000 U.S. auto industry jobs by 2030 if the government did not provide additional subsidies for domestic production, but could create 150,000 jobs if those subsidies were forthcoming.
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Josh Bivens, an author of the Economic Policy Institute report, said in an interview that he was pleasantly surprised that the administration managed to pass strong incentives for domestic production of electric vehicles. But whether the incentives will lead to good jobs, he added, is an open question.
“There’s no real explicit subsidy or incentive to make these unionized or even high-wage,” Mr. Bivens said.
The New York Times
December 9, 2022
Trevor Noah cites EPI research showing that wage theft robs workers of $15 billion per year—more than car thefts, burglaries, and other larcenies combined.
The Daily Show
December 9, 2022
The debt ceiling limits how much the federal government can borrow to make those payments — which makes no economic sense, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
December 9, 2022
If workers become more scarce, it “would give the workers that are in the labor market more bargaining power,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, told Insider, “because they’ll have other outside options and employers won’t have as many outside options to find workers to replace them.”
Business Insider
December 9, 2022
Some 90% are women, just over half (51.3%) are Black, Hispanic or Asian American and Pacific Islander women, and about a third are immigrants, more than twice the number of other U.S. workers, according to a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute and released last week. According to EPI, the median wage of a domestic worker is $13.79 per hour, much less than other workers (whose median wage is $21.76 per hour).
LA Progressive
December 9, 2022
Romaine Bostick & Katie Greifeld bring you the latest news and analysis leading up to the final minutes and seconds before and after the closing bell on Wall Street and tackles ISM manufacturing data, China’s Covid pivot and credit Guests Today: Maria Vassalou of Goldman Sachs, Heidi Shierholz of Economic Policy Institute, Greg Sharenow of PIMCO, Richard Ramsden of Goldman Sachs, Mark Howard of BNP Paribas Americas, Lori Heinel of State Street Global Advisors, Dr. Sara Vakhshouri of SVB Energy International
Bloomberg TV
December 9, 2022
“All the things that come from having a better job; being a white-collar worker; having more education; having a higher income — all the benefits are far more likely to accrue to you because employers are going to do more to try to attract and retain you because they have to,” said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Without policymakers trying to level the playing field there, those [same] inequalities are going to persist.”
Politico
December 9, 2022
Researchers from pro-union think tank the Economic Policy Institute found that high union density in an industry helps increase the floors for wages and benefits. Should companies in an industry raise their standards — such as by offering higher pay and making specific, demonstrated transparency efforts — these benefits will have a “‘spillover’ effect,” researchers said, to nonunion employers.
Polygon
December 9, 2022
The Economic Policy Institute says nearly 900,000 jobs were lost since the signing of NAFTA through 2002. Most of the jobs lost were in high-wage manufacturing, a majority disappearing within the rust belt.
Newsy
December 9, 2022
Part of the reason it’s cheaper is that contractors are not required to pay union wages or benefits, nor are they obligated to adhere to union rules. A 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute found that union construction workers earned on average 40 percent more than their non-union workers.
Documented NY
December 9, 2022
“What we’ve seen over the last couple of years is a pretty solid bounce back from the pandemic recession [in life sciences],” Elise Gould, Ph.D., senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told BioSpace. The EPI is a non-profit think tank.
Biospace
December 9, 2022
Bringing child care workers back, said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute, is economics, not rocket science.
“So pay is one thing, providing benefits, having better working conditions, having better hours, all of those things are going to entice more workers into that profession,” she said.
Marketplace
December 9, 2022
Along with Michigan, there are 12 other states that are raising their minimum wage in 2023, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
Click on Detroit
December 9, 2022