While housing costs doubled or tripled, wages didn’t. Compensation rose 17.2% since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Sacramento Bee
August 11, 2021
“For the first time since the late 1990s, low-wage workers have a little more leverage to demand higher pay,” said David Cooper, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive Washington think tank.
AFP (via Yahoo! News)
August 11, 2021
The chief executives at major U.S. corporations received millions of dollars in bonuses or raises last year even as many companies saw slumping sales and job cuts because of the pandemic, a new analysis shows.
CEO compensation at the top 350 companies jumped nearly 19% in 2020 to an average $24.2 million, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. By comparison, pay for rank-and-file workers last year rose roughly 4%. The typical corporate leader at big companies in 2020 made $351 for every dollar earned by a typical employee, up from a ratio of 307-to-1 in 2019, according to EPI.
Economist Lawrence Mishel, who co-authored the report, said some companies touted reductions in pay for top executives to reflect the pandemic’s impact on business, but had little impact. “CEOs offering pay cuts during the pandemic yielded favorable headlines, but were symbolic at best and a head fake at worst,” he said in a statement.
CBS
August 11, 2021
“There is still a big gap in the labor market, but even with some slowing from this pace of job growth, we will be back to pre-Covid health by the end of 2022—a recovery *five times* as fast as the recovery following the Great Recession.” —Heidi Shierholz, Economic Policy Institute
Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics
August 6, 2021
Research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute has highlighted that Black women working in fields deemed essential in COVID recovery including doctors and nurses earned eleven percent to twenty seven percent less than their white male counterparts.
Black News Channel
August 6, 2021
Advocates for eradicating right-to-work laws say they degrade the power of organizing. Right-to-work laws “starve unions,” Heidi Shierholz, witness at the hearing and senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told HR Dive. “They say that [unions] that have to represent all these workers, legally — they have to represent everybody in the bargaining unit — cannot charge for any of those services.”
HR Dive
August 6, 2021
Bargaining units were not even guaranteed to win a first contract, Schadel declared, using 2009 data from the Economic Policy Institute. Even more than three years after winning a union election, 25 percent of bargaining units fail to win a first contract, EPI reported. Then again, non-union workplaces get contracts governing their employment zero percent of the time.
The American Prospect
August 6, 2021
According to a 2019 study from the Economic Policy Institute, “teachers are paid almost 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience and other characteristics.” Most teachers will tell you that it’s all worth it for their students, but a little appreciation goes a long way.
People
August 6, 2021
Average hourly earnings rose 3.6% to $30.40 in June. That’s the biggest spike since January 2009, according to data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute.
Entrepreneur (via Yahoo)
August 6, 2021
The issues the UMWA is seeing in Brookwood highlight a broader problem for unions in the U.S. By 2020, only 12.1% of workers were represented by a union — about half as many as 40 years ago — according to the Economic Policy Institute. On average, unionized workers earn about 11% more than non-unionized workers.
“The reason that we’ve seen such a big decline in unionization, despite workers’ interests in being unionized, has everything to do with massively increased employer aggressiveness against unions,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the EPI and a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s not that the workers don’t want to be in unions. It’s that the playing field has been so tilted that it’s really undermined workers’ fundamental rights.”
ABC News
August 6, 2021