Media clips

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• To address teacher shortage, Missouri commission hones in on teacher pay

  An analysis released in August by the Economic Policy Institute shows teachers’ weekly pay and total compensation have worsened over time compared to other college-educated professionals. The EPI report acknowledged this situation discourages college students from entering teaching careers and makes it more difficult for districts to retain teachers.

  K-12 Dive October 21, 2022
• Latinos also are less likely to have access to investing. Latino household wealth lags that of white counterparts, and only 26% of Hispanic households have access to an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, compared to 37% of Black households and half of white ones, the Economic Policy Institute found.

  The big picture: Over 61% of people who work cleaning houses in the U.S. are Hispanic, according to an analysis of census data from the Economic Policy Institute think tank.

  Axios October 21, 2022
• Here’s how venture capital is helping to lift the next generation of Latinos in finance

  Latinos also are less likely to have access to investing. Latino household wealth lags that of white counterparts, and only 26% of Hispanic households have access to an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, compared to 37% of Black households and half of white ones, the Economic Policy Institute found.  

  CNBC October 21, 2022
• Burned Out on Your Personal Brand

  Modern interpretations of the “brand called you” present a trade-off of sorts. Workers are no longer reliant on the fecklessness of an employer that could at any moment pivot, downsize or cut wages. There are heaps of corporate data pointing to those possibilities: Over roughly the last four decades, typical hourly worker pay rose 17.5 percent while productivity rose by nearly 62 percent and C.E.O. compensation by 1,460 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  New York Times October 21, 2022
• Officials seek more employers to grow affordable child care program statewide

  The Washington, D.C.-based think tank Economic Policy Institute estimates that day care in Michigan costs $905 a month for an infant, and $741 for a 4-year-old child. Housing in Michigan on average costs $844 a month, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  MiBiz: West Michigan Business News October 21, 2022
• Give Boys an Extra Year of School, a New Book Suggests

  Like many observers, Reeves paints a picture of an economy that has failed men. Their labor force participation has fallen sharply, for instance. However, Reeves’s contention that the drop is due to “a one-two punch, of automation and free trade” is undermined by his subsequent concession that no academic consensus exists on these points. Reeves also writes that the “median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since.” But analysts ranging from the liberal Economic Policy Institute to, well, me, have found that, after a lengthy period of decline, men’s pay has rebounded back to historic highs over the past 30 years.

  Education Next October 21, 2022
• Abrams: Reproductive health is an ‘economic imperative conversation’

  The Economic Policy Institute reported that economic consequences of being denied an abortion included a higher chance of living in poverty, a lower likelihood of full time employment and an increase in unpaid debt and financial distress.

  The Hill October 21, 2022
• The Child Tax Credit Needs to Be Revived to Fight Child Poverty

  The CTC originated from the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. It started at $400 per qualifying child and was a nonrefundable tax credit. Nonrefundable tax credits reduce the taxpayer(s)’ tax liability and aren’t issued as a tax refund. The Economic Policy Institute stated that the purpose of Congress creating the CTC was to minimize the tax burden of families having more children. It gained momentum and was widely supported by both Democrats and Republicans, which led to an increase of $1,000 per qualifying child of age 16 and under in 2001 initiated by the Bush administration’s tax policy.

  Bloomberg Tax October 21, 2022
• Day care shortage grows, worries parents

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average child care worker in the U.S. makes about $13.51 an hour. That’s roughly $30,000 a year, which is less than half of what the average U.S. worker makes at almost $28 an hour.

  The Economic Policy Institute says that raising the minimum wage to at least $21 per hour would help retain the workforce and give workers the financial security they need.

  News Nation Now October 21, 2022
• Collaboration, instead of lower standards, is a better fix for teacher shortages

  The Virginia Mercury previously cited a 2019 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute that ranked Virginia last in the country in terms of the “teacher wage penalty,” referring to the gap in weekly salaries between teachers and other college-educated professionals. Business.org this year ranked Virginia 49th (behind Arizona and Washington, D.C.) when comparing the average salary of teachers to the average salary for all jobs in the state. 

  Virginia Mercury October 21, 2022
• Tense Debate Between Abrams, Kemp Shows Continued Political Conflict in Georgia Gubernatorial Election

  “We have the lowest unemployment rate in the country for African Americans,” said Kemp, which is true based on what has been reported by the Economic Policy Institute, but its map also shows many states that did not report Black unemployment figures. “We’re also in the top ten of the states for Black entrepreneurship in the state of Georgia…we will continue to work with all of those entrepreneurs in the days ahead and working class Georgians.”

  BET October 21, 2022
• GOP Plan on Threatening Recession if They Can’t Cut Medicare, Social Security

  If they pull a similar move in 2023, it could be similar to 2011, when the GOP manufactured a debt ceiling crisis that ultimately “led directly to the worst recovery following a recession since World War II,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  Truthout October 21, 2022
• Labor Unions on Defense in Tennessee, on Offense in Illinois

  “Over the past two decades, there has not been a single minimum wage ballot initiative that has failed, when eventually put to a vote,” Ben Zipperer, Economic Policy Institute economist, said in an email.

  Bloomberg October 21, 2022
• Inflation is still voters’ top concern. We took a look at what Fetterman and Oz say they would do.

  “In terms of things that would lower prices on store shelves, it’s pretty tough to act that quickly,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

  Philadelphia Inquirer October 21, 2022
• Industrial Policy: Now Comes the Hard Part

  A third element was a long-overdue ideological shift in the Democratic Party, especially its presidential wing. Before Biden, economic advisers to Democratic presidents were free-traders, counseling that the nature and location of production was the proper business of the market, not the state. With Biden, voices long in the wilderness on industrial targeting, such as the labor movement, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, have had the heady experience of actually influencing and making policy.

  American Prospect October 21, 2022
• Employers Are Fearing A Hard Truth About Quiet Quitting

  Bottom line: Employers Could Be Quitting On Workers

  There is a truth behind the idea of “quiet quitting,” but the truth is that employers are quitting on workers. The evidence points in the direction of workers feeling increased pressure and working too much instead of too little. The Economic Policy Institute has argued that “quiet fleecing” would be a better term.

  Forbes October 21, 2022
• Colorado House District 12: Anya Kirvan

  According to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, Colorado teachers earn almost 36% less than other workers with college degrees, the widest such gap in the nation and a full 3 percentage points worse than the next closest state, Virgina. How would you help the state change this and boost salaries for Colorado educators?: Not all teachers work the same hours. According to the World Economic Forum, U.S. teachers spend 998 hours in the classroom per year. Teachers’ prep time and homework from students vary but add more hours. Teachers who work longer hours and produce better results should be rewarded. But the educational system is a monopoly and does not allow this flexibility. More solutions than this one-size-fits-all for rewarding teachers are needed. There is also disparity among teachers and other professions. Degrees in the (science, technology, engineering and math) area considered more rigorous than education degrees. Many times, teachers are teaching subjects they are not even trained to teach. Teachers are also told what to teach and how to teach it; this is vocational at best — becoming technicians rather than professionals. Our teachers should be given the autonomy to use their ingenuity to challenge all students to think, create, innovate. Change is needed in the Colorado public school system.

  Daily Camera October 21, 2022
• What’s at Stake in the 2022 Midterm Elections

  As the country deals with inflation and a looming recession, the economy is top of mind for Americans in the 2022 midterm elections. However, when researching candidates, it’s important to remember that policy makers did not cause inflation. Inflation was caused by global and public health issues, like supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19, port shutdowns, a shift of spending from services to goods, and the war in Ukraine. Knowing this, Economic Policy Institute(opens in new tab) President Heidi Shierholz advises voters to elect candidates based on their willingness to boost living standards and eliminate inequalities, which directly impacts the economy. 

  “[Elected] policy makers don’t have the ability to really affect inflation. They do have the ability to pass policies that ameliorate the harms of high inflation for the people who are hardest hit,” she says. “So things like raising the minimum wage, the expansions of the child tax credit which were in the relief and recovery packages(opens in new tab). Those are the kinds of things that policy makers can do for the people who are getting hit hardest by inflation until inflation comes down. And it is.”

   

  Additionally, union organizing is at its highest point of approval since 1965(opens in new tab). State and local governments, not just the federal government, have the ability to build worker power(opens in new tab) (the Economic Policy Institute has outlined some of the ways(opens in new tab) they can do so). That starts with electing leaders in the midterms who can enact these policies. 

  Marie Claire October 21, 2022
• Chaucer Was Cleared of Rape, but What He May Have Done Instead Remains Illegal Today

  In July 2021 President Joe Biden issued an executive order promoting competition in the economy that encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to impose a national ban or limit on noncompete agreements. The FTC held a workshop on noncompetes the following year. It isn’t clear how any FTC-imposed ban would be enforced. California has a law barring enforcement of noncompete agreements, but a 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that 45 percent of the state’s businesses maintained them anyway. Lower-wage workers are easy to intimidate even when the law isn’t on management’s side. Another problem is that an FTC ban would face a likely legal challenge from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the agency lacks jurisdiction over the matter. “Non-competes have a legitimate place in contract law,” the Chamber’s Sean Heather, senior vice president of anti-trust policy, told The Wall Street Journal in June. Republican FTC commissioner Noah Phillips agrees. But as FTC chair Lina Khan pointed out to the Journal, the rationale for noncompetes “really falls apart” when they’re imposed on low-wage workers.

  New Republic October 21, 2022
• Seniors In Debt: A Newish And Growing Problem

  Older households are more likely to be indebted than they were three decades ago and a typical older household held roughly three times as much debt in 2016 as it did in 1989, adjusted for inflation. The increase in financial fragility is highlighted in the forthcoming Older Workers and Retirement Security Chartbook, a research collaboration between The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Economic Policy Institute funded by the RRF Foundation for Aging.

  Forbes October 21, 2022
• A Socialist Response to the American Fascist Threat

  In capitalist societies, it’s a given that corporations are run for elite owners and investors, not the workers who actually create the value and profits. It’s also a given that corporations will try to pay their employees as little as they possibly can. In 2021, CEO compensation packages at the top 350 U.S. corporations averaged $27.8 million annually, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, CEOs earned 399 times as much as the average worker. In 1965, CEOs by contrast earned only 20 times the average worker compensation. But it’s actually worse for many. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the 300 largest corporations paying the lowest median wages in 2020 had a CEO to worker pay gap of 670 to 1!

  CityWatch LA October 21, 2022
• Is the stimulus to blame for high inflation?

  But Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that inflation has been ubiquitous “across every advanced economy” since the pandemic began and he didn’t believe the American Rescue Plan was a major contributor to inflation. An analysis published in August by Bivens, Asha Banerjee, and Mariia Dzholos examined the United States’ core inflation from December 2020 to May 2022 and compared it to core inflation in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. To calculate the rate of acceleration in each country, the researchers took the difference between the “post-pandemic” core inflation and the “pre-pandemic” core inflation using data from 2018 and 2019.

  Bivens also pointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s research on housing inflation and said that price gains in the United States were mostly driven by pandemic-related events that would have occurred without the stimulus — like supply chain disruptions and increased demand for housing. And although he said he believed the American Rescue Plan had inflationary impacts, the trade-off was necessary to stave off higher unemployment numbers.

  “We could have kept inflation much lower in the US if we had raised interest rates through the roof beginning in early 2021 and hadn’t done the stimulus package,” Bivens said. “But there would be a huge cost to that. We’d be looking at a very different labor market with much higher unemployment.”

   

   
  VOX October 21, 2022
• Unseparate and Unequal

  A recent special issue of The Journal of Law and Political Economy casts a jaundiced eye on the convenient fiction that employment contracts reflect the free choices of employees. The issue was conceived and edited by Lawrence Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute.

  “This is Econ 101 silliness, that any transaction between consenting adults is optimal,” Mishel said. “The basis of at-will employment is that if a worker can quit then an employer has to be able to quit a worker. That’s the logic. If you articulate it like that, people would be something between horrified and laughing.”

  The main power workers do have is the threat to quit. But, Mishel wrote in his introduction to the special issue, “The death on the job of eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six in an Amazon warehouse when tornadoes struck the Midwest in December 2021 vividly illustrates the ineffectiveness of quitting, either as a constraint on employer exploitation or as a protection of basic worker freedoms.” (The final death toll in the Kentucky factory was nine.)

  New York Times October 21, 2022
• SOME TEACHERS ARE STRESSING OVER LOW PAY

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2019 teachers made about 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experiences.

  WVUA 23 October 21, 2022
• Latest US inflation data raises questions about Fed’s interest rate hikes

  An April analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive economic think tank, put numbers behind the theory that corporate pricing is an inflationary driver.

  Prices have risen at an annualized rate of over 6% since 2020’s second quarter compared with 1.8% during the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007-2019. EPI broke prices in the non-financial corporate sector into three main components: labor costs, non-labor inputs and profit margins.

  Over half of the Covid recovery era increase “can be attributed to fatter profit margins” while labor costs represented less than 8%, the report’s author, Josh Bivens, wrote.

  That’s nearly an exact flip of what was seen in the decades leading up to Covid, the report found.

  “Companies are taking higher inputs, putting a bigger markup on them than they were previously, then passing that on to customers,” Bivens said.

  Skyrocketing demand for durable goods coupled with supply chain problems has created “enormous pricing power” for companies that had stock on hand, Bivens said. Typically corporations attempt to widen margins by suppressing wages, but that changed during the Covid recovery, he added.

  The situation is ever-evolving. Wages are falling, which should mean people are buying less and eroding corporations’ pricing power, Bivens said, and some supply chain issues are resolving themselves – the cost of some shipping containers is down by 64% from the same week last year.

  Guardian October 21, 2022
• You can make more money if you know how much your job is worth

  “There is no silver bullet,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said. “But I think pay transparency moves us in the right direction.”

  VOX October 21, 2022
• After decades of ‘quiet fleecing,’ Philadelphia could lead a workers’ revolution

  Average wages in the U.S. have been stagnant for years, while the cost of living has grown and worker productivity has fueled increasing corporate profits. “Quiet fleecing” is the term the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, recently came up with to describe the situation. It’s a play on the more-viral term “quiet quitting” — the idea that workers do what’s required of them to keep their job and nothing more.

  In recent years, any growth in wages has been outpaced by growth in worker productivity. Instead, that productivity has been funneled into greater corporate profits and ballooning executive salaries, according to data from EPI.

  Billy Penn October 21, 2022
• https://en.as.com/latest_news/which-states-have-the-highest-minimum-wage-n/?omnil=resrelrecomv

  According to research by the Economic Policy Institute in 2019, gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would have directly lifted the wages of 28.1 million workers. The average directly affected worker who works all year would receive a $3,900 increase in annual wage income, equal to a raise of 20.9 percent.

  AS USA October 21, 2022
• Indiana struggles with ongoing teacher shortage

  Economists point to the gap between what teachers are paid compared to their peers with similar education. Economic Policy Institute research said in 1979, teachers made 7% less than those peers, but this year, the pay gap has grown to 23%, a record high.

  Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, citing 300,000 public education vacancies nationwide, said the issue boils down to two factors.

  “What’s happening is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to find teachers, and other education personnel, who will take those jobs under current working conditions and at current wages,” Shierholz observed.

  95.3 MNC October 21, 2022
• Agency battling wage theft in California is too short-staffed to do its job

  California stands out among states for its efforts and policies to tackle wage theft given its union density, number of worker centers and public dollars committed to combating the problem, said David Cooper, a researcher who has studied wage theft at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which is based in Washington, D.C.

  Union members accounted for 15.9% of wage and salary workers in California, compared to 10.3% nationally. That higher than average membership helps workers identify wage theft, Cooper said.

  “California has far more immigrants than a lot of other places, and we know that immigrants, and people of color generally, tend to more likely be victims of wage theft,” said Cooper, who is director of the institute’s Economic Analysis and Research Network, which coordinates nearly 60 state and local research and advocacy efforts nationally. 

  “Immigrants who are either undocumented, or may have family who are undocumented, are not going to speak up as vocally if their rights are being violated.”

  Cooper said the thousands of wage theft claims filed in California each year are likely an undercount of stolen pay cases.

  Cal Matters October 21, 2022