Internal documents on worker wages at outsourcer HCL Technologies, a leading provider of IT contract workers, are central to the allegations in the report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, based on documents obtained via a federal government whistleblower lawsuit against HCL in a federal court in Connecticut.
Seattle Times
December 23, 2021
HCL Technologies, based in India, wields the H-1B skilled-worker visa as a way to undercut competition and find the cheapest workers, according to the study by the Economic Policy Institute.
News Nation Now
December 23, 2021
In Oregon alone, Amazon has four warehouses, from Troutdale to Hillsboro. Oregon also has provided Amazon with more than $342 million in subsidies in recent years, rewarding one of our nation’s most profitable companies with lucrative tax breaks. While lawmakers may view this exchange as beneficial for Oregon’s economic growth, research shows that’s not the case. A report by the Economic Policy Institute found the opposite — states have more to lose by offering Amazon tax incentives to bolster job creation.
The Register-Guard
December 23, 2021
The even bigger picture: Since 1978, the Economic Policy Institute reported earlier this year, CEOs at major U.S. corporations have now realized, after inflation, a pay hike of a whopping 1,322 percent. The typical worker earnings bump over the same four-plus decades: just 18 percent.
Inequality.org
December 23, 2021
More money is stolen each year in wage theft than in property crimes.
A 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that “the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year,” per The Guardian. That’s more than the value of stolen goods in all property crimes, according to the latest FBI statistics.
The Center for Public Integrity
December 23, 2021
“The thing that we really need to be careful about is making sure that we are sufficiently measuring what that really means,” said Valerie Wilson, Director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
KIRO
December 23, 2021
Black men, for instance, are paid just $0.71 for every dollar paid to white men, the Economic Policy Institute reported in 2020.
Business Insider
December 23, 2021
In a free market economy, governments can be lobbied or influenced to set, or not set, regulations and rules. For example, the federal government, through its inaction on the federal minimum wage law, in part, has traditionally created a lack of mobility for employees on the lower end of the labor market. Unwittingly, now, that inaction on the federal minimum wage is creating mobility for employees working at or around the minimum wage. Throughout history, Congress has raised the minimum wage only 22 times. The current level, at $7.25 an hour, was set in 2009 and has not kept up with real economic growth (as noted by the Economic Policy Institute).
Forbes
December 23, 2021
“The quits are people who are quitting their job to take another job,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank and a former Labor Department economist in the Obama administration, told Nightly.
Politico
December 23, 2021
The problem is, historically it’s not clear that there has been a labor shortage in tech. Skeptics point to the fact that median wages in the sector haven’t increased everywhere in the country, or all that dramatically. “What happens when there’s something in short supply?” said Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University and research associate with the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “You have a price mechanism. In this case, it would be wages. So, anything in shortage you’d see wages going through the roof.” The fact that there haven’t been dramatic wage spikes, he says, suggests that claims of labor shortages in the U.S. are overblown.
Politico
December 23, 2021