“We have torn back toward normal at a really fast pace, and it would be unrealistic to think that could continue,” said Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Even slower wage growth, he said, wouldn’t worry him, as long as pay increases didn’t fall further behind inflation.
The New York Times
April 13, 2022
Heidi Sheirholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, explained in a Twitter thread that the U.S. economy is currently “on pace to recover nearly eight years faster” from the high unemployment rates created by the COVID-19 pandemic than it did from the Great Recession. This is in part due to Congress acting to provide COVID-19 relief, including the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan, Shierholz said.
Verify This
April 8, 2022
Studies show that if the overall unemployment rate drops low enough, “even those gaps start to erode a little bit,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.
Marketplace
April 8, 2022
“When inflation is not a problem, then it’s much easier to say, ‘We’re going to maximize employment and see how far we can take this,’ ” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy. “But with inflation in the mix, they’re in a position now where they can’t really ignore that.”
Associated Press
April 1, 2022
“Overall employment is now just 1% from its pre-pandemic level,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, tweeted. “Private-sector jobs record strong gains rising 426,000 in March with notable jobs added in leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and retail trade. Public-sector employment still slow to return.”
U.S. News & World Report
April 1, 2022
Harris was former acting and deputy labor secretary during the Obama administration, and in a 2015 paper on the gig economy, he called for a new “independent worker” classification for on-demand app workers. These “independent workers” wouldn’t be independent contractors or employees, and would qualify for collective bargaining rights but not hours-based benefits, including overtime or minimum wages—a proposal that drew criticism from the AFL-CIO and the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Law
April 1, 2022
But few observers would dispute the assessment of Celine McNicholas, a former NLRB special counsel who is now the general counsel and director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, who tells me, “Installing Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel will be the most impactful action that the Biden administration took in its first term for working people.”
American Prospect
April 1, 2022
In such private tribunals, workers win far less often and the median damages awarded are just $36,500, compared with $86,000 in state courts and $176,000 in federal court, an Economic Policy Institute analysis found.
American Prospect
April 1, 2022
A 2020 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found only a few employers have spent more than $1 million on anti-union consultants, and it’s typically taken several years to rack up such a bill. Any spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is on the high end. None of the companies in EPI’s analysis came close to spending as much as Amazon in such a short period of time.
Huffpost
April 1, 2022