Harrison said she expects that the negative effects of the proposal will be more “severe” in the District because residents of the city pay more on average for basic necessities than most other Americans. A 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the District is the most expensive place to raise a family in the United States.
The Washington Post | June 20, 2018
“Average childcare costs are astronomical,” says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “The majority of families with kids have both parents working. In states that lack infant and child care, the cost of childcare has a massive impact. According to a recent EPI study, a two-parent, two-child family in many major cities pays more to child and day care centers—who are struggling with rent and staff costs—than to the landlord. In 500 out of 618 communities nationwide, child care costs more than rent for a two-child family, and there isn’t a single community where a full-time, full-year minimum-wage worker with one child can afford a “modest yet adequate standard of living” while also paying for child care. Take San Francisco. In 2016, it became the first city in the nation to require six weeks of paid maternity leave. But while that’s a useful head start, it doesn’t address the mounting costs of child care between birth and starting school. According to EPI’s analysis, California is one of 33 states where infant care is more expensive than college. Child care for two children, an infant and a 4-year-old, costs $20,047 annually on average, 25.6 percent more than rent. A typical California family would have to spend 31.5 percent of their income on child care.
Curbed | June 20, 2018
“The trade policies have been so erratic and inconsistently messaged that they are not a part of a broader strategic plan for the economy,” said Thea Lee, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute and a trade specialist. “Even to the extent that there is some playing favorites, singling out workers in different sectors, that’s problematic, because it’s dividing. What workers need are policies that will be empowering, that will lift them up across sectors and not divide them.”
The New York Times | June 19, 2018
The other major argument against Initiative 77 is that it will kill jobs. It is true that restaurants in general operate on razor-thin margins. But this isn’t an economic experiment without precedent: Other states and locales—including the entire state of California, home to multiple cities full of restaurants, some of which I’m told are pretty good—already pay servers the minimum wage, and the evidence doesn’t support the fear-mongering on job losses. To quote the Economic Policy Institute, henceforth known as The Good EPI (emphasis added): According to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, full-service restaurants in equal treatment states saw stronger growth both in terms of number of establishments and number of jobs compared to states with a separate, lower minimum wage for tipped workers (Figure B). Between 2011 and 2014, equal treatment states saw 6.0 percent growth in the number of establishments compared to 4.1 percent growth in states with separate, lower tipped minimum wages. Likewise, employment grew 13.2 percent in equal treatment states compared to 9.1 percent in other states.
Splinter News | June 19, 2018
“This is an incredibly hard nut to crack because the data are extremely limited,” says David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at Economic Policy Institute who has written reports in favor of eradicating the tipped minimum wage.
DCist | June 19, 2018
Besides, as a 2016 ROC United report found, tipped workers in the nation’s capital are nearly twice as likely to experience poverty in comparison to other D.C. workers. “The people who are serving you food can’t even afford to feed themselves,” says TJ. Initiative 77 could make real inroads on this issue. As research from the Economic Policy Institute shows, tipped workers have lower poverty rates in states without a subminimum tipped wage. (EPI cited throughout and chart included)
Inequality.org | June 19, 2018
Mandatory arbitration agreements have steadily grown over the past two decades as lower courts supported the practice, according to research by Cornell University professor Alexander Colvin funded by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Today, such agreements are in place at more than half of non-union, private-sector employers in the United States. Now plenty more businesses may roll them out.
CNN Money | June 19, 2018
The falling wages promise to exacerbate historic levels of U.S. inequality. Within the labor force, it means workers who were already making less are falling further behind. And if private laborers as a whole are seeing their earnings flatten while the economy as a whole grows at an annual rate of more than 2 percent, that means the gains are going almost exclusively to people already at the top of the economic ladder, economists say. “The extra growth we are seeing in the economy is going somewhere: to capital owners and people at the top of the income distribution,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, noting workers’ share of corporate income remained relatively low as of January. “And what we’ve seen is in recent period a much higher share of total income earned going to owners of capital.” (Heidi quoted too)
The Washington Post | June 18, 2018
“The nature of work hasn’t fundamentally changed,” argues Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a left- leaning research and advocacy organization “Freelancing and gig work are not taking over.” … In a study, Mishel reports that although Uber has about 833,000 drivers in a year, most drive only part time and for part of the year. Taking the high turnover into account, he estimates that the number of Uber drivers is equivalent to 90,521 full-time workers. Even including similar jobs at other companies, that’s only about 0.1 percent of full-time U.S. employment — one-tenth of 1 percent. Hardly a revolution.
The Washington Post | June 18, 2018
It is not just the white working class that is suffering — it is the working class, period. And we can’t solve the problem if we refuse to see who those workers actually are. By 2032, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the American working class will be made up mostly of people of color, including black workers
The New York Times | June 18, 2018
An internal Democracy Alliance analysis determined that some of the progressive nonprofits it supports, such as the Washington, D.C.-based Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and the Economic Policy Institute, receive a large portion of their revenue from unions and could thus see a dip in their budgets in future years. In preparation for the Janus decision, Democracy Alliance has appealed to its non-union donors and asked them to prepare to step up to help patch budgets for organizations that are used to receiving union funds.
Politico Pro | June 18, 2018
The tipping system, which has its roots in racial discrimination, can disadvantage servers of color. A Cornell University study found that black servers are tipped significantly less than white ones. Research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows that raising the minimum wage disproportionately benefits women of color. Nationally, almost 13 percent of tipped workers live in poverty, or nearly double the rate of non-tipped workers, according to a joint report by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California-Berkeley. … David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute and a supporter of 77, says that’s a common refrain from resistant owners. “The fact of the matter is that in those [seven states where there is no subminimum wage], small, locally owned restaurants have been thriving,” he says. “The notion that DC can’t figure out what their counterparts in Minneapolis or San Francisco or Portland have is just ridiculous. It seems like a ruse.”
Mother Jones | June 18, 2018
Actually, we have a very real edge over your big-city hipster pals. The annual cost of raising a family in the Northern San Joaquin Valley is far, far, far lower than elsewhere in the state. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a family of four needs $77,317 a year to live comfortably in Stanislaus County. In San Joaquin it’s only $75,909; Merced County is lowest in the state at $70,675. Compare that to Santa Clara County ($129,082), San Diego ($97,547), Los Angeles ($92,295) or San Francisco ($141,320). Forget about Marin at $151,031.
The Modesto Bee | June 18, 2018
“There has been absolutely no change in tipping practice, to the best of my knowledge, in any of the states that have no tipped minimum wages,” says David Cooper, senior economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that favors 77. “Think about it: When folks cross the border from Arizona to California to go out to eat, do you think that they are aware of the difference in the state’s tipped wage policy and change their tipping behavior? I doubt it.” (Dave and EPI cited throughout)
City Lab | June 15, 2018
According to research from the Economic Policy Institute, tipped employees in states that use the tip credit are twice as likely to live in poverty compared with workers in the seven states where that credit has been abolished.
Governing | June 15, 2018
In December 2017, Trump’s NLRB reversed the decision when ruling that a group of 100 welders at an Oregon company can’t legally organize without the participation of the other employees. “[Corporations] simply want to make it easier for employers to defeat an organizing campaign, by manipulating who is in a bargaining unit,” wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Associate labor counsel Marni von Wilpert at the time. “By overturning this rule, the Trump administration has once again shown that it wants to make it harder for workers to organize and join unions.” This May, an NLRB regional director in Seattle ruled that the welders can establish a union after all, despite the Specialty Healthcare reversal.
Salon | June 15, 2018
California ranked a dismal 49th in social and economic well-being and in median family income in this year’s report. It also has one of the highest unemployment rates (4.31 percent) among dads with children ages 17 and younger, and it ranked 43rd in the category of lowest childcare costs. Recent figures from the Economic Policy Institute reveal that, despite the state’s overall economic recovery, things are still tight for many residents in Southern California. A family of two adults and two children in L.A. County, for example, needs to earn $92,295 a year to meet all of its living expenses, according to the institute’s Family Budget Calculator. That far outstrips the county’s median family income of $66,203 per year.
The Mercury News | June 13, 2018
Subcontractors often fold to avoid wage theft claims, and typically neither the subcontractor nor the contractor is held accountable, according to Marni von Wilpert, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “What happens so often is the bigger company is off the hook,” she said. “The smaller companies committing the violations, which are kind of fly-by-night, are much harder to track down.” … Texas has a wage theft problem. In 2017, analyzing just one form of wage theft, the Economic Policy Institute found that around 11 percent of low-income Texans are effectively paid less than minimum wage — a collective theft of almost $1.2 billion a year. Texas is also unique among the country’s five most populous states in requiring employers to pay only the federal minimum of $7.25, so when the Lone Star State’s poorest workers are robbed, it hurts them more than a poor Californian or New Yorker. (EPI chart included)
The Texas Observer | June 13, 2018
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009, but state and local governments have enacted higher wage floors in recent years. Typically, they include specific annual raises for the first few years and then increases annually in amounts tied to inflation. “2013 is really when the current wave started,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “There were already seven states that had automatic adjustments for inflation, primarily on the west coast.” Cooper’s organization general supports minimum wage hikes.
Bloomberg BNA | June 13, 2018
Many places have already gotten rid of the subminimum wage for tipped workers, including California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and Nevada, and a number of cities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, poverty rates for servers and bartenders are much lower in states that don’t allow a subminimum wage.
Think Progress | June 13, 2018
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit, has published an explanation of the case and why it matters, saying: “If the court rules for Janus, it will likely have the most significant impact on workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively in 70 years.” Here is that piece, published on the website of the institute, which gave me permission to publish it.
The Washington Post | June 13, 2018
(U.S. Edition) President Donald Trump is preparing to meet with North Korean President Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. We’ll look at how much the area is spending to host the two leaders, and what both countries are hoping to get out of this meeting. Afterwards, we’ll recap this weekend’s G7 summit between various world leaders, which includes the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Germany. According to Ian Bremmer, founder of political risk consultancy the Eurasia Group, this was the geopolitical equivalent of Trump firing Comey. Plus: We talk with the Economic Policy Institute about new data showing the gig economy isn’t actually taking over the workforce. Today’s podcast is sponsored by Battelle (battelle.org/campaign/qi), Indeed (Indeed.com/marketplace), and Michigan Economic Development Corporation (planetm.michiganbusiness.org). (06/11/2018)
Marketplace | June 12, 2018
“What’s at stake with Janus is state and government workers’ ability to effectively collectively bargain,” said Celine McNicholas, the director of labor law and policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). As the law stands now in 22 states, state and local government employees who aren’t dues-paying members of a union are compelled to pay “fair-share” or “agency” fees for the union benefits they receive. (The other 28 states have “right-to-work” laws, which allow workers to decide whether or not to buy into unions.) (Celine, Julia and EPI data cited throughout)
CityLab | June 12, 2018
Arbitration has a long history, but its prevalence in the workplace is new. In 1995, only 7.6% of employers had instituted mandatory arbitration, according to a survey by the Government Accountability Office. Today 53.9% of nonunion companies have done so, per a survey last year commissioned by the Economic Policy Institute. This figure is sure to rise given the Supreme Court’s decision.
The Wall Street Journal | June 12, 2018
David Cooper is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has spent years studying the tipped minimum wage. “I don’t claim to be able to see the future and to say definitively what would happen if this should pass, but it’s not like there aren’t any other places that have done away with their lower tipped minimum wage,” he noted. “In those places, there still are restaurants, customers still tip when they go into those restaurants, and in fact, servers in those states make on average about 17 percent more per hour than tipped workers in states that have a lower minimum wage.”
The Intercept | June 12, 2018
Many economists question whether this poses a threat to national security, but, as trade expert at the Economic Policy Institute Robert Scott says, “The WTO can’t really force you to change your trade policy.” In fact, they have never ruled on such a case because either the tariff was dropped or the cases never moved forward. No previous case has been as significant as President Trump’s though.
The Inquistr | June 11, 2018
Lawrence Mishel, an economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and a long-time skeptic of the significance of the gig economy, said it wasn’t surprising that the report showed relatively little impact from online marketplaces. “A lot of this hype has been driven by the tech world believing that they are the center of the universe,” Mr. Mishel said. But Mr. Mishel said he was surprised by the slower growth in other areas. And he wasn’t the only one perplexed by the report.
The New York Times | June 11, 2018
“What this says to me is the vast majority of workers in the United States still have traditional jobs as their main source of income,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “We should be spending most of our time thinking about boosting wages in traditional jobs so people don’t need a side hustle.”
The Washington Post | June 11, 2018
Not everyone agrees the government’s latest report is misleading. “The whole idea that we’re all becoming freelancers is just that much: hype,” said Lawrence Mishel, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. But Mishel does agree many more workers are using contract work to supplement their income. And that, he says, speaks to other problems in the job market. “The fact that alternate work has not grown does not diminish one iota the fact that we really need to pay attention to wage stagnation and deteriorating job quality,” Mishel says.
NPR | June 11, 2018
As has been pointed by out by Larry Mishel and others, most of the people doing gig economy work do it as a sidebar, in addition to their main jobs. But it is worth noting that even here the data points to a decline in the percentage of workers employed in multiple jobs over the last quarter century.
Common Dreams | June 11, 2018