EPI in the news

• Big companies raising wages could boost pay for workers at nearby businesses

  “If a bunch of large employers in the labor market raise pay, other employers are going to be compelled to raise pay a little bit too in order to make sure that they can recruit and retain their workforce,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Insider in March.

  Small businesses in those areas will probably feel those spillover effects, and will likely feel compelled to respond, Zipperer said.

  Business Insider | April 16, 2021
• Moms are struggling to break back into the U.S. workforce

  And employers have more discretion when there’s a huge pool of unemployed workers, according to Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

  Bloomberg | April 16, 2021
• Opinion: Government policies segregated America, and we could harness that same force to reverse the damage

  Richard Rothstein, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow, emeritus, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), gave this opening statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs’ hearing on the “Legacy of Racial Discrimination in Housing,” on behalf of himself and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the LDF. Here is a link to the full testimony.

  MarketWatch | April 16, 2021
• Planes, trains, and working women

  The challenge would be to collapse the distinction, and recent economic research backed them up. Federal investments in care yielded twice as many jobs as similar investments in infrastructure, according to a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute, and it would also free up women to participate in the economy, leading to even greater employment. If the workers were being paid fairly, that would spur a number of “respending” jobs, the sorts of jobs that get created when people have money to spend. This was all the more important given that care is expected to be the fastest-growing segment of the economy over the next decade, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics. The jobs would be there anyway—they might as well be good. “I was getting to the point where I had to say, ‘Care job creation is vastly superior, but physical infrastructure is still good, also,’” says Josh Bivens, the EPI economist who worked on the study, recalling conversations with colleagues. On the day the campaign launched the caregiving proposal, Bivens, at the behest of Biden advisers, published a blog post asserting the campaign’s plan would, in fact, support 3 million new jobs.

  Mother Jones | April 16, 2021
• Unemployment is high. Why are businesses struggling to hire?

  “As we move toward herd immunity, those issues around care infrastructure will get better,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “These structural things related to public health, we may not know the magnitude of how many people they’re keeping out of the labor force, but with the vaccine we can come at this with optimism that it will improve.”

  New York Times | April 16, 2021
• Whitmer: Michigan will vet labor, environmental compliance of firms bidding on state jobs

  Whitmer cited a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to ensuring fair pay, health care, and retirement security, that said payroll fraud cost workers $429 million in wages and overtime between 2013 and 2015. And an MSU study that said employee misclassification costs Michigan $107 million a year in evaded taxes.

  Detroit Free Press | April 16, 2021
• Good reviews buoy odds Biden keeps US steel, aluminum tariffs set by Trump

  Producers have urged Biden to keep the steel tariff, and they found a new point of argument in a recent study. Left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute found in a March 24 analysis that the steel tariffs delivered benefits in the near term, including drastic cuts to steel imports. The study was promoted after its release by the American Iron and Steel Institute, a nonprofit that represents U.S. steelmakers and iron producers.

  The Section 232 actions had “no meaningful real-world impact” on the prices of steel-consuming products such as cars, and exclusions to the actions such as those instituted under Trump “mitigate positive economic impact,” according to the study. After the measures were implemented in 2018 and prior to the widespread downturn in 2020, steel producers in the U.S. outlined plans to invest more than $15.76 billion in new or upgraded steel facilities and to create more than 3,200 new jobs in the country.

  There is “no doubt” the trade actions boosted profitability in the U.S. steel sector, increased long-term investment within the space and led to some form of a recovery, according to Robert Scott, an economist who worked on the study. However, the tariffs alone were unable to stop the issue of excess steel production abroad.

  “Until we get that problem under control, I don’t think the need for the tariffs is going to go away,” Scott said in an interview. “Other countries aren’t going to be willing to make concessions without really tough international bargaining.”

  S&P Global | April 16, 2021

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