“While I think that the White House is right that their best move is to appoint good people and then have faith in their judgement, I don’t agree with Powell’s recent rate hikes, nor the reasoning behind them,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Hill
March 31, 2023
Terri Gerstein is a fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School and the Economic Policy Institute. She spent more than 17 years enforcing labor laws in New York State, working in the state attorney general’s office and as a deputy labor commissioner.
New York Times
March 31, 2023
Under Hochul’s proposal, the minimum wage would rise modestly to $16.40 downstate by 2026. The governor’s plan ties the minimum wage to the rate of inflation but caps the increase at 3% in any one year. For the average minimum wage-earning New Yorker working full time, that’s an extra $670 a year starting in 2026, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Gothamist
March 31, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, which advocates for fair pay for low- and middle-income workers, Texas public school teachers get paid 21.5% less than college graduates in other professions.
Newsbreak
March 31, 2023
Providers must balance running their business with what parents can afford to pay. The average annual cost of infant care in California is $1,412 a month, according to a 2020 estimate from the Economic Policy Institute. Over a year that’s more than in-state tuition at a 4-year college.
LAist
March 31, 2023
The average cost of infant care in Nevada is $951 a month, 8.7% less than the average rent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Care for a 4-year-old is $754 a month.
Nevada Current
March 31, 2023
Seventeen years ago, Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker outlined a proposal he’d come up with for an agenda that the Economic Policy Institute was publishing for the next president—assuming that president was a Democrat. Hacker (who is now a Prospect board member) was proposing that the government create a “public option” for health insurance, under which Americans not yet eligible for Medicare could purchase a health insurance plan, equivalent to that provided by Medicare, from the government. As public-option plans didn’t have to deliver profits such as those that enriched major investors in private plans, they would be cheaper than their private competitors. And, by the logic of the market, they’d compel those private competitors to bring down their prices if they wanted to stay in business.
American Prospect
March 31, 2023
Contrary to the name, right-to-work laws make it “harder for workers’ organizations to sustain themselves financially” and “aim to undermine unions’ bargaining strength,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The USA Today
March 31, 2023
Yet, despite the vital role public schools play in the education of future generations of Americans, the national public school system faces a myriad of problems in “equity, adequacy, effort, and sufficiency,” according to the Economic Policy Institute. Despite these issues, however, public school enrollment has, on average, increased from figures 10 years ago.
LI Herald
March 31, 2023
“The entire increase in unionization in 2022 was among workers of color—workers of color saw an increase of 231,000, while white workers saw a decrease of 31,000,” wrote the Economic Policy Institute in a press release in February. “Of all major racial and ethnic groups, Black workers continue to have the highest unionization rates, at 12.8%. This compares with 11.2% for white workers, 10.0% for Latinx workers, and 9.2% for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers”.
Payday Reports
March 31, 2023
March 15 was Equal Pay Day in the United States; however, not a lot has been done to close the gender pay gap in the last three decades, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Wright State Guardian
March 31, 2023
“We don’t really have pensions anymore,” Kyle Moore, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, previously told theGrio. In discussing how higher interest rates disproportionately affect prospective Black home buyers, Moore said, “401k’s are so risky. The stock market is risky. Homeownership has been that consistent, reliable method of building wealth.”
The Grio
March 31, 2023
The legislation is also supported by organizations, including: The National Immigration Law Center (NILC); Jobs with Justice; Economic Policy Institute; National Employment Law Project (NELP); Tulane Immigrant Rights Clinic; AFL-CIO; and SEIU.
Office of Congressman Bobby Scott
March 31, 2023
In a September survey from Bankrate.com, more than half of respondents said that their incomes hadn’t kept up with rising household expenses amid persistent high inflation. A report from the Economic Policy Institute, meanwhile, found that, as of June 2022, 14% of gig workers in the U.S. earned less than the federal minimum wage and that 26% earned less than $10 per hour.
Tech Crunch
March 31, 2023
The upshot is that about 85% of U.S. workers today make $15 an hour or more, according to the Economic Policy Institute. When the Fight for $15 was getting off the ground, fewer than 60% did.
Fast Company
March 31, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s company wage track, 57% of Dollar General employees made less than $12/hour in 2022.
FOX 13
March 31, 2023
The presence of unions may also signal support for, and provides organizing around, other state policies that benefit workers, said David Kemper, the senior state policy coordinator at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that supports unions. In general, right-to-work states scored lower on a number of issues, from wages to workplace safety conditions to political participation, according to a report by Illinois Economic Policy Institute. and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
FiveThirtyEight
March 31, 2023
That second assertion, sadly, is on the money. As a recent survey by the Economic Policy Institute demonstrated, teacher pay has been falling relative to the pay of other college graduates since 1979.
American Prospect
March 31, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute found that a year of infant care can cost Wisconsinites more than tuition at a public college. Families have started to plan pregnancies around the availability of care, as they encounter years-long wait lists at child care centers.
Wisconsin Watch
March 31, 2023
And yet, the rich continue to grow richer. According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs now make 400 times more than the average worker. The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, has risen from 0.353 in 1974 to 0.494 in 2021. The top one percent of the United States held 27% of the nation’s wealth in 2021, a higher share than the middle 60% of households by income.
People's Dispatch
March 31, 2023
In just the last year, the number of children employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (paywall).
The Guardian
March 31, 2023
(paywall) … the American Rescue Plan Act—that led to a rapidly growing economy and very strong demand for workers, said a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
MarketWatch
March 31, 2023
Though a majority of Americans support unions, just a small fraction of workers—about 12%—are actually in one. Labor experts say one reason for that discrepancy has to do with the efforts companies have made to fight or derail union organizing. And all those efforts have come at a hefty cost: Employers spend more than $400 million a year on “union-avoidance consultants,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Fast Company
March 31, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, New York is the most unequal state in the country, where the richest 1% take home 31% of all income. (Nationwide, the richest 1% take home 21% of all income.) Rather than directly addressing the need for stable housing, incomes, and health care, we’ve seen these basic services replaced by ever more intensive and invasive policing: stop-and-frisk, quotas, abusive anti-crime units, homeless sweeps and the broad criminalization of young people of color.
City and State New York
March 31, 2023
As a recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reveals, the much-publicized Youth Hiring Act of 2023 is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the weakening of child labor standards. Over the past two years, some ten states have either introduced or passed legislation in this vein, with eight of such bills appearing in the past few months alone.
Jacobin
March 31, 2023
According to a report last year from the Economic Policy Institute, the average weekly wages of U.S. public school teachers increased $29 from 1996 to 2021. The weekly wages of other college graduates rose by $445 in the same period. What the report calls “the teacher weekly wage penalty” is greater than 20% in 28 states (in Maine, it’s 24%), where teachers are paid less than 80 cents on the dollar compared to similar college-educated workers in those states.
Central Maine
March 31, 2023
The data come from Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who runs the tracker “How many low-wage workers are in the U.S.?” Before the pandemic, fast-food workers, home health aides, janitors and other low-wage workers saw modest pay increases largely due to 30 states raising their state minimum wages above the $7.25-an-hour federal requirement, Zipperer says.
Washington Post
March 31, 2023
Workers in the 10th percentile, that is those making less than 90% of everyone else, saw real wages (or those adjusted for inflation) grow 9% between 2019 and 2022, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. They earned $12.57 per hour in 2022, or $26,145 annually. It’s the biggest hike they’ve seen in decades as measured by business cycles, which are periods of economic growth followed by a contraction and possible recession.
CNBC
March 31, 2023
That roughly 2-to-1 relationship between Black and white unemployment has held true for a long time, according to Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The gap is especially harmful during times of crisis — when Black workers routinely face unemployment rates upwards of 15 percent — but it also means that Black and other marginalized workers can see their unemployment rates drop faster than white workers.
FiveThirtyEight
March 31, 2023