Media clips

---

• The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for 15 years. How the election may change that

  Raising today’s federal minimum wage would help low-wage workers who are trying to earn a living and have a sense of economic security, said Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that provides economic research.

  “The minimum wage has basically lost, 29%, 30% of its purchasing power over the last 15 years, simply because Congress has failed to update it,” Zipperer said.

  Lifting the minimum wage threshold to $15 per hour would increase the incomes of about 20 million workers, Zipperer said. That would include people who are low-wage workers who may be earning hourly pay that is slightly more than the federal minimum wage threshold.

  “Changes in wages don’t necessarily result in big changes in employment,” Zipperer said.

  “When you raise wages at a particular workplace, that makes it a lot easier to recruit and retain workers,” he said.

  CNBC August 20, 2024
• Mixed bag of news on joblessness in Alabama

  The Alabama Department of Labor is out with the State’s latest unemployment report. Communities in the State’s region known as the “Black Belt” are ranked as having the highest number of residents without jobs. However, quarterly figures from the Economic Policy Institute indicate that African American workers in Alabama have had better employment levels than much of the nation.

  Alabama Public Radio August 20, 2024
• Kansas districts facing bus driver shortages as school year begins

  Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that school bus driver employment continues to be far below pre-pandemic levels. In September 2023, nationwide, about 192,400 bus drivers were working in K-12 schools, down 15.1% from September 2019.

  KWCH-TV August 20, 2024
• Fast Food’s Automation Problem

  In April, California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour—the culmination of a long campaign by fast food workers across the state. Even in the state’s rural inland counties, where the cost of living is lowest, the new rate isn’t enough for a single adult without children to survive working forty hours per week, every week, for the entire year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s cost of living calculator. 

  The Progressive Magazine August 20, 2024
• ‘Not tipping 20% makes you look like a fascist’: Why has tipping, once branded as ‘un-American’ and ‘anti-democratic,’ become such a hot political issue?

  Taxing tips is a double-whammy for underpaid workers. In fact, Nina Mast, economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, sees tips as a modern tool of racist oppression in the South. “Tipped workers are more likely to be people of color, women, women of color, or single parents, and are disproportionately born outside of the U.S.,” she wrote in a paper published last June.

  Tipped workers experience high rates of poverty, and are vulnerable to wage theft and sexual harassment, she said. “The South has the largest tipped workforce of any region. Tipped workers in the South are paid the second lowest median wage of any region, and most Southern states allow employers to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 an hour,” Mast added. In that context, the culture of tipping is toxic and taxing tips seems punitive.

  MarketWatch August 20, 2024
• Harris — like Trump — wants to stop taxing tips. That’s a bad idea.

  We’ve all noticed how tipping has spread like wildfire; it seems like almost every purchase you make is now accompanied by a request for a tip, even when you received nothing resembling “service” at all. More importantly, tipping is a practice that has deeply racist roots; as an Economic Policy Institute report notes, “Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved Black workers were often relegated to service jobs (e.g., food service workers and railroad porters). However, instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services.” 

  MSNBC.com August 20, 2024
• Harris Needs to Put Working-Class Policy Before DC Decorum

  Failing to raise the minimum wage has kept millions of low-wage workers, mostly restaurant and service industry employees, from meeting basic financial demands, according to a 2023 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on economic trends and policies affecting workers.

  Jacobin August 20, 2024
• New California bill would demand equitable hiring practices in infrastructure projects to support disadvantaged communities

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black people have the highest California unemployment rate of 8.2% despite only making up 4% of the population. That’s roughly double the unemployment rate for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which sits at 3.8%, and significantly higher than the Hispanic population, who had the second-highest unemployment rate in the state at 5.8%. 

  CAP Radio August 20, 2024
• Some School Workers Now Get Unemployment Over the Summer. Here’s How It Works

  If every state were to make school workers outside the classroom eligible for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, employees would collectively earn $1.2 billion more per year than they currently do, according to a forthcoming data analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Spending on K-12 education would increase by no more than half of 1 percent in any state if workers claimed unemployment benefits at the same rate they did during the first summer the Minnesota law was in effect, according to the group’s research.

  “We have created a series of jobs that are vitally important to the teaching of our kids but we don’t give them year-round wages, and they don’t even get 40 hours a week,” said Dave Kamper, a state policy strategist for EPI, who helped craft and study the potential impact of the Minnesota legislation. “By taking that job, they’re foreclosing the possibility of full-time employment year-round. UI is a reasonable step to address that.”

  Education Week August 20, 2024
• Harris and Trump steal from each other’s playbooks on economic policies

  What Democrats can point out in defense is rising wages relative to inflation. According to the Economic Policy Institute, average wages have beat the rise of inflation for the past year. Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that in a recent post.

  Washington Examiner August 20, 2024