EPI in the news

• ‘My savings were gone’: millions who lost work during Covid faced benefit system chaos

  In the wake of the mass unemployment caused by the pandemic, several organizations, including the Economic Policy Institute and National Employment Law Project, created a report with unemployed workers outlining reforms needed to fix the widespread issues to unemployment insurance that were exposed by Covid-19.

  The Guardian | July 22, 2021
• Hourly Workers Are Demanding Better Pay and Benefits—and Getting Them

  From 1979 to 2019, wages for the lowest-paid decile of workers rose 3.3% when adjusted for inflation, while wages for the top 5% of workers rose 63.2%, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Over that time, as middle-class jobs were automated or sent overseas, and as more people vied for what was left in the wake of the 2001 and 2007–2009 recessions, employers had the upper hand. By one estimate, 53 million people—around 44% of U.S. workers— were low-wage before the pandemic, making an average of $10.22 an hour.

  …

  That’s the result of four decades of declining union power and a stagnant minimum wage. “The idea that any short-run shortages that do exist would undo 40 years of employers’ ability to suppress wages—it just does not ring true whatsoever,” says Heidi Shierholz, a former Obama Administration economist who works at the Economic Policy Institute.

  Time | July 22, 2021
• Jamie Dimon’s $50 mln award is sane in a mad world

  Meanwhile, bosses of other companies will use Dimon’s riches to argue that the market price for their own talent has just gone up. Chief executive pay already grew 16% in 2020, the Economic Policy Institute found in May. America’s corporate elite continues to pull itself up by the bootstraps.

  Reuters | July 22, 2021
• Woodstock votes yes on short-term rental moratorium

  Meanwhile, 2019 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank created to address the needs of low- and middle-income workers, recognized some economic benefits of Airbnbs but concluded that those benefits do not outweigh the costs to local jurisdictions in the form of tax revenue and potentially higher housing costs for local residents if enough properties for long-term housing were converted to short-term accommodations. The analysis also concluded that those benefiting from short-term rentals were disproportionately white and high-wealth households.

  Albany Times Union | July 22, 2021
• Daybreak July 21: Lawmakers look at revising ag disaster program

  By the way: Farmworkers continued to make less in 2020 than workers with even minimal education, the Economic Policy Institute says in an analysis of wage data. Ag workers made $14.62 per hour on average, and H-2A workers made less — $13.68 per hour, writes EPI’s director of Immigration Law and Policy Research, Daniel Costa.

   

  Agri-Pulse | July 22, 2021
• Low-Wage Workers Now Have Options, Which Could Mean a Raise

  Might this be just a flash in the pan? Heidi Shierholz, who was also a chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration and is now director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, is skeptical that the job market is breaking with its decades-long trend of wage stagnation at the bottom and lavish rewards at the top.

  “How much of what this captures is just a trampoline effect?” she wondered. “The jobs that come back tend to look like the jobs that were lost.” After the dust settles and the employment holes created by the pandemic in several industries fill up, the deal offered to workers might look much like it did before the pandemic.

  Ultimately, “we are stuck in a world where labor is very cheap and we don’t expect much from it,” Ms. Stevenson said. “I don’t see this pandemic fundamentally reshaping that.” Ms. Shierholz put it this way: “There has not been any fundamental restructuring of power in the economy.”

  New York Times | July 22, 2021
• Nikole Hannah-Jones: Cuba Is the ‘Most Equal’ Country in the Western Hemisphere

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, White American households earned an average of $76,057 in 2019, compared to $46,073 for Black American households. Racial discrepancies are not reported in Cuba’s official income statistics — inserting uncertainty into Hannah-Jones’ “economic inequality” argument — but its median annual salary of 242,400 pesos amounts to just $10,100 in the U.S.

  Townhall | July 22, 2021

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