According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost half — or 49.4% to be exact — of all businesses ask employees upon hiring to sign a noncompete contract that effectively prohibits where a person can work in the future or for whom. And while it may be more standard for chief executives or corporate higher-ups with access to sensitive trade secrets, noncompete clauses have increasingly become de rigeuer in the lower ranks of the workforce as well.
Courthouse News Service
July 16, 2021
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said Thursday that “noncompetes are ubiquitous, harmful to wages and to competition, and part of a growing trend of employers requiring workers to sign away their rights.”
Truthout
July 16, 2021
The justification for the 2017 tax cuts was that lower taxes on companies would create more jobs and enable growth. But according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, companies paying minimal corporate taxes were actually more likely to cut their workforce. The report also showed no data to support the idea that lower tax rates encourage investments or broader economic growth.
The Hill
July 16, 2021
Heidi Shierholz / sr. economist and director of policy, economic policy institute) we know that non compete agreements suppress workers wages and so banning them will remove that wage suppressing effect and actually increase workers wages.
CBS News
July 16, 2021
The Federal Arbitration Act is a 100-year-old law that was initially designed to be a cost effective way for business entities to resolve disputes. A series of Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1990s expanded its scope. In 1992, just 2 percent of U.S. workers were subject to mandatory arbitration clauses. By 2018, more than 56 percent were, or roughly 60 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The 19th
July 16, 2021
This executive order comes as noncompetes are on the rise across the country, with anywhere between 27% and 46% of all private-sector workers subject to the agreements, according to a 2019 survey by the Economic Policy Institute. Though broadly intended to discourage employees from taking trade secrets along with them when they switch jobs, noncompete clauses are increasingly worked into jobs across the economic scale.
LA Times
July 16, 2021
Black workers are especially underrepresented in industries and occupations with the fastest growth in pay. Valerie Rawlston Wilson…[Paywall]
USA Today
July 16, 2021
According to a 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 31.8% of private-sector businesses that responded to EPI’s survey (a total of 634 respondents were surveyed) reported that all of their employees had to sign a non-compete agreement, regardless of their job duties or compensation. And of the respondents that had an average wage of less than $13.00, 29% of them required all their workers to enter into non-compete agreements.
Forbes
July 16, 2021
For more than three decades, our friends at the Economic Policy Institute have been waging a lonely struggle against the conventional wisdom about the causes of widening inequality. They did not have powerful allies on their side. All they had was reality.
Now, EPI’s research has been vindicated, and is increasingly accepted by mainstream economists. Wage inequality is the result of deliberate suppression of wages, which in turn is the result of a deepening power inequality.
Even better than having reality on their side, EPI economists now have a Democratic administration on their side. Several senior Biden people, including Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey on the Council of Economic Advisers, are former EPI staffers, and EPI’s insights are at last influencing national policy.
EPI pulled together all of this research in a document called “Unequal Power.”
I recently had a Zoom conversation with former EPI president Larry Mishel, the leader of this research project, along with professors Anna Stansbury of MIT and Suresh Naidu of Columbia University, to discuss the findings. You can watch the interview below:
The American Prospect
July 16, 2021