To get clarity on some of these questions, Teen Vogue speaks with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
What defines a recession?
Teen Vogue
July 16, 2021
During his speech, Biden said that “at least one in three businesses require their workers to sign a noncompete agreement.” He is citing a survey, published in 2019 by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), of 634 business establishments with 50 or more employees in a variety of industries.
The survey found that nearly a third, 31.8%, of responding establishments said that all employees in their establishment were required to enter into a noncompete agreement, regardless of pay or job duties. Nearly half, 49.4%, reported that at least some employees were required to enter into a noncompete agreement.
Interestingly, more than a quarter — 29% — of responding establishments where the average wage is less than $13 an hour used noncompetes for all their workers.
Washington Post
July 16, 2021
Most of the base salary cuts made by executives in 2020 were “a public relations gimmick” and “almost inconsequential,” said Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute who has studied executive compensation.
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Still, Mishel said “the compensation number reported to the SEC is a legitimate description of the compensation of that executive.”
Los Angeles Times
July 16, 2021
“To replace him now would be a signal something is fundamentally wrong, and I don’t think they think that,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor research group that contributed to the Fed’s debate over how to reshape monetary policy to encourage more employment. “Powell has made a very big step forward in making the Fed a progressive force.”
Reuters
July 16, 2021
The fact sheet cites research from the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, which found that nearly half of organizations in an EPI survey said that at least some of their employees were required to enter non-compete agreements. Nearly a third of respondents in the survey said all employees at their establishments were required to do so.
HR Dive
July 16, 2021
“The Atlanta Fed measure is showing that while in general in this measure of wages that controls for composition bias, wage growth is actually lower if you look economy-wide than it was before the recession hit,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Insider.
That is, for “people who’ve remained employed, their wages are growing more slowly than they were before the recession,” Shierholz said.
The Economic Policy Institute’s Shierholz and Josh Bivens wrote in a recent analysis using this data that “overall wage growth fell in the first 15 months of the COVID-19 recession, largely in line with trends in the previous two recessions.”
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Shierholz told Insider that labor shortages and strong wage growth are really just in select industries right now, such as leisure and hospitality. This industry has been especially affected by the pandemic and is slowly making employment gains back to pre-pandemic levels.
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Shierholz said the wage growth we’re seeing in this industry is likely temporary, but there are ways to give workers more permanent “economic leverage.” Two ways, she said, are to pass a $15 minimum wage and the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or the PRO Act.
Business Insider
July 16, 2021
Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute calculated in 2019 that American workers were losing out on roughly $200 billion each year in pay and benefits that they could have had under collectively bargained union contracts. (President Joe Biden’s White House has also taken to citing this EPI study, according to the May 13 Reuters article and a May 14 report by Business Insider).
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U.S. employers are charged with violating federal labor law in 41.5% of all union election campaigns, and they spend about $340 million annually on “union avoidance” consultants who work to prevent unionization, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute. In the recent analysis, Reuters reported that workers “often fear that retailers will move to close stores and warehouses or fire people who try to organize.”
Reuters
July 16, 2021
As corporate tax obligations have declined, CEO pay has skyrocketed. According to Office of Management and Budget data and Economic Policy Institute research, when corporate tax receipts made up 21.8 percent of all federal revenue in 1965, the average CEO-to-median worker pay ratio was 21 to 1. After the 2017 Republican tax cuts, corporations plowed significant windfalls into stock buybacks and executive bonuses. By 2019, corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 6.6 percent of federal revenue and the average pay ratio had risen to 320 to 1.
Counterpunch
July 16, 2021
But Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, disputes that the labor market was all that tight to begin with. “We still have a huge jobs shortfall,” she told me via email, but “the data suggests that the hole is filling in rather steadily.” Subtract from new May hires all the firings and resignations that occurred that month, she noted, and that nets 609,000 jobs. That’s significantly higher than the 462,000 average for March, April, and May. And of course payroll employment has been rising for months. May’s quits rate of 2.5 percent, Gould said, isn’t much higher than it was before the pandemic tanked the economy; from October 2019 through February 2020 the quits rate was 2.3 percent.
New Republic
July 16, 2021
Research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows that tens of millions of workers in industries like construction and hospitality are required to sign non-compete agreements when they get hired. In fact, roughly half of all private-sector businesses require at least some of their employees to sign such agreements, and a third of businesses require all employees to do so, regardless of their job title or responsibilities.
Money
July 16, 2021