Critics of these moves worry about the consequences of putting adults without proper training in front of students at a time when school closures have cratered academic outcomes. Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that high-poverty schools have less-experienced and less-qualified teachers than wealthier ones and that teacher shortages are more acute in high-poverty schools.
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If there is any consolation for workers, it is that jobs remain plentiful, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“If workers were facing it [inflation] with higher unemployment … people would have fallen even further behind,” he said, adding that the impact of higher prices on Americans’ standard of living is indisputable.
“Inflation has reduced people’s purchasing power. There’s no two ways about it.”
NBC News September 16, 2022 -
Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that changed. At least for workers at the bottom and in the middle, said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Instead, we’ve seen wages at the top rise, we’ve seen a declining value of the minimum wage, we’ve seen measures implemented that make it harder for workers to form a union,” Gould said.
Marketplace September 16, 2022 -
According to Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrant workers who are already in our labor market would mutually benefit both our economy and the undocumented workers themselves. These workers often face horrific working conditions
Salon September 16, 2022 -
1. DOWN: Inflation-adjusted wages and salaries. Although wages are up, prices are rising faster. Between August 2021 to August 2022. While private-sector workers’ earnings rose by 4.6%, inflation shot up by 8%. In 12 of 13 sectors I studied, workers’ raises failed to keep up with price increases (the exception was mining; not even construction and leisure and hospitality kept pace with inflation). It is not plausible that worker bargaining power is causing price increases. Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, argues, “labor costs are dampening—not amplifying—price pressures.” In other words, workers’ rising wages have alleviated rather than exacerbated inflation.
Here’s a little more context: since 1979, U.S. wages adjusted for inflation have stagnated compared to the rest of the G7 nations, as well as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. There has also been meager improvement for American workers in other measures such as total compensation and working conditions. The increasing automation of tasks may lead to new kinds of stress and injuries, research suggests. The Economic Policy Institute has dubbed employers’ ability to intensify the working hour and day without increasing pay as “quiet fleecing.”
4. DOWN: Wages are not keeping pace with worker productivity. Since the Economic Policy Institute published the famous alligator graph in the 1980s, with the wide jaws of productivity going up and wages going down, workers have been giving more to the economy than they have been getting. This is the “quiet fleecing” mentioned above.
Forbes September 16, 2022 -
It takes unions an average of 409 days to negotiate a contract, according to a study conducted by Bloomberg Law. And just under half of newly formed unions reach a contract before the one year decertification deadline, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute. PAYWALL
Fortune September 16, 2022 -
Not surprisingly, surging prices have hit lower-paid workers especially hard. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 buys less today than it has at any point over the past 66 years, an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows. The current value of the minimum wage in real dollars is at its lowest level since February 1956, when the lowest U.S. wage was 75 cents — the equivalent of $7.19 in June 2022 dollars.
CBS September 16, 2022 -
Dave Kamper, a senior state policy coordinator at the Economic Policy Institute, told Fortune that the automatic minimum wage adjustments help low-wage workers in certain states keep up with inflation.
“This is what indexing the minimum wage does: It means that the lowest-wage workers don’t have to wait for a legislature to get its act together and raise the minimum wage for them to keep up,” he said. “Prices are up this year, considerably higher than what we’ve been used to for a long time, and low-wage workers are going to suffer from that more than anyone else.”
Kamper said the other five states, and D.C., that don’t use August’s CPI report will still see an increase in minimum wage but at various times throughout the year. Also, he said, more states are likely to begin indexing their minimum wage based on inflation because wages are growing slower than prices.
“What we’re seeing here is that as prices go up, worker wages are falling behind,” he said.
Nonetheless, Kamper thinks it should be a federal policy that the federal minimum wage be tied to inflation. It allows for predictability and stability for workers, and it gives them the ability to keep up with inflation as the costs of goods soar, he said.
“Indexing the minimum wage means the state’s minimum wage is protected from prevailing changes in the political winds,” Kamper added.
Fortune September 16, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Florida is one of just a handful of states nationwide that lacks a state labor department, which — prior to its abolition — had tracked workforce statistics, housed a hotline for workers to learn about their rights, and had served as a mechanism for enforcing wage and hour laws.
88.5 WMNF September 16, 2022 -
The Economic Policy Institute unpacked the question after Gallup released its annual survey on union favorability.
“U.S. workers see unions as critical to fixing our nation’s broken workplace – where most workers have little power or agency at work,” EPI concludes.
The pandemic spotlighted the ways essential workers kept their communities running during the worst public health crisis in a century despite inadequate pay or crucial tools they need to perform their jobs. However, these struggles pre-dated the pandemic.
“Workers today are rejecting these dynamics and awakening to the benefits of unions,” EPI says.
But what are those benefits? According to EPI, there are many.
First, pay and benefits.
EPI notes that “unionized workers … earn on average 10.2% more in wages than nonunionized peers” and “union workers are more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance. More than 9 in 10 workers covered by a union contract (95%) have access to employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with just 69% of nonunion workers.”
According to EPI, unions even benefit nonunion workers by raising standards across the board.
But unions benefit society in even broader ways.
“Black and Hispanic workers get a larger boost from unionization,” states EPI, with unionized black workers earning 13.1% more than their nonunionized peers and Hispanic workers earning 18.8% more.
Women also benefit from unions, earning 4.7% more than non-union women workers.
EPI also found a correlation between states with a weak union presence and states where voting laws were being threatened.
“Over 70% of low-union-density states passed at least one voter suppression law between 2011 and 2019.”
Conversely, states with higher union density passed fewer restrictive voting laws, according to EPI.
AFSCME September 16, 2022 -
The Washington Post September 16, 2022