Media clips
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The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986, focuses on the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions, according to its website.
An EPI blog post on Wednesday pointed out as the COVID-19 delta variant spreads across the country, and hospitalizations rise, states with low vaccination rates — such as Missouri and Arkansas — have become more vulnerable to economic disruption.
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In Arkansas, a law going into effect prohibits state leaders from implementing mask mandates and declaring public health emergencies, according to EPI.
“The policy also prohibits local governments from enforcing mask mandates, though private businesses are permitted to require masks if they choose,” it said.
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EPI also called on Missouri to restore federal pandemic unemployment insurance benefits.
“The economic situation in Missouri is likely to get worse before it gets better,” the post said. “Even if the state does not mandate lockdowns or similar measures, a resurgence of COVID-19 cases will slow economic activity in many ways.”
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“The final step Arkansas and Missouri policymakers should take is enacting paid sick leave,” the EPI said. “Workers exposed to COVID-19 should not have to choose between working while sick or being unable to pay their bills.”
During the earlier wave of the pandemic (in 2020), EPI said, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act provided some sick leave for workers at businesses employing fewer than 500 people, but the provisions expired at the end of the year.
Fulton Sun July 30, 2021 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-employee pay ratio increased by 1000% in the past 40 years.
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CEO-to-employee pay ratio increased nearly 1000% in the last 40 years according to the Economic Policy Institute, widening the gap between average Americans and the top 1%. Reporting of this gap by US public firms was mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, with the first gap data becoming available in 2017. The paper explores how female and minority CEOs, given their background, may have “softer” management styles and approaches to personnel issues, which may translate to more equitable pay and lower CEO-to-employee pay ratios.
World Economic Forum July 30, 2021 -
Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal group that has long advocated for larger public investments, says a reasonable estimate might be that such investment programs will constitute about half of the $3.5 trillion Democratic package. At roughly that level, with the added spending on hard infrastructure from the bipartisan plan added in, he projects the Biden proposal would fund a durable increase in public investment equal to about 1 percentage point of the economy, far more than either Bill Clinton or Obama, the last two Democratic presidents, achieved.
In fact, Bivens says, the Democratic proposals would represent a net increase in new public investment probably unmatched since the late 1950s, when the nation built the interstate highway system that facilitated a massive move to the suburbs and also poured billions into education and scientific research after Russia took the lead in the space race by launching its Sputnik satellite.
“It’s totally different from anything put forward by Obama or Clinton,” Bivens says. “In terms of any kind of coherent strategic focus there’s been nothing like this since the build-out of the suburbs, and the buildup of the educational system” during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
CNN July 23, 2021 -
About 3 in 10 workers making less than $13 an hour work for employers that require these agreements, according to research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch July 23, 2021 -
Fact check: Biden makes false claims about Covid-19, auto prices and other subjects at CNN town hall
Facts First: Biden made very clear he wasn’t sure what the real number of workers was, but still the numbers he used were way off, according to his own administration’s previous estimates. Psaki told reporters on July 7 that noncompete agreements affect “over 30 million people” in the private sector. A White House document published on July 9, meanwhile, put the figure at “some 36 to 60 million workers,” citing an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute think tank.
CNN July 23, 2021 -
The average minimum wage worker loses approximately $3,300 per year due to wage theft, according to a survey conducted by the Economic Policy Institute. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment received 550 reports of wage theft in Denver in 2020, according to a city press release, but only 340 were claims of less than $2,000 and therefore were not criminally prosecuted.
Colorado Newsline July 23, 2021 -
But research has shown that many frontline workers are unwilling to work to serve increasingly hostile customers while making low wages, especially while risking exposure to COVID-19 at their workplace or while using public transit. Wages have largely stayed stagnant since before the pandemic, writes the Economic Policy Institute, but with workers having to wade through anti-mask and anti-vaccine customers, “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”
Truthout July 23, 2021 -
The coalition is made up of influential organizations representing a range of interests. Members of the Worker Power Coalition include political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, MoveOn and the Working Families Party; climate groups like the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club; and other organizations like Economic Policy Institute. It also has the backing of several major unions like Communications Workers of America and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT).
Truthout July 23, 2021 -
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee member Bill Cassidy, R-La., pressed former U.S. Department of Labor chief economist Heidi Shierholz on the implications of a chart showing parallels between trends in union membership rates and the percentage of income going to the top 10% of earners going back to 1917. Shierholz, now the director of policy at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, had cited the chart in testimony supporting the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions.
Cassidy, who was a medical doctor before entering politics, suggested these trends have more to do with the movement of high-paying manufacturing jobs overseas than legal roadblocks to unionizing, quipping “we contrast between association and causation” in medicine. Shierholz conceded the chart showed a “rough relationship” but insisted workers’ difficulties forming unions under current law have played a key role in rising income inequality.
“Rigorous research that digs in and really gets at causality does show that about a third of the increase in inequality between typical workers and workers at the high end over the last 40 years was due to the decline in unionization,” Shierholz said. “The whole rise in inequality is not due to unionization, but a big chunk of it [is].”
Shierholz was one of four witnesses who testified before the HELP Committee on Thursday during a more than two-hour hearing on the PRO Act, which is pending in the Senate.
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Shortly after Shierholz’s exchange with Cassidy, Sen. Robert Marshall, R-Kan., suggested declining membership has more to do with unions’ failings than gaps in labor law. Marshall asked Obama administration National Labor Relations Board Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce why the government should “restructure law in unions’ favor when unions are failing to make a compelling case?”
Law360 July 23, 2021 -
“The AEWR exists for two main reasons: To prevent farm workers who are recruited from abroad from being underpaid relative to other farm workers in the region where they’re employed, [and] to prevent downward pressure on the wages of farm workers in the United States,” wrote Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, in a 2020 analysis of a proposal to lower H-2A wages. “Lowering the AEWR will put downward pressure on the wages of all farmworkers.”
The Counter July 23, 2021