Reported in an April 21 New York Times article with the headline: C.E.O. Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic
“Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.”
Counterpunch
July 6, 2021
“Unemployment insurance is not going to solve care problems. It’s not going to solve health concerns,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist and director of policy for the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. “Cutting [unemployment insurance] is not going to have a huge effect on the labor shortages.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
July 6, 2021
“Many people who lost jobs at the start of the pandemic have been unemployed ever since. As jobs come back they will get work but there is still a big jobs deficit,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-learning Economic Policy Institute, in a Twitter thread.
The Hill
July 6, 2021
Dr Valerie Wilson, the director of Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (Pree), warned against treating any one month’s report with too much importance, “The caveat is that subsequent revisions or updates to the numbers could always change what that story is. We always know more in retrospect than we do in any at any single point.”
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These differences, of course, have been entrenched throughout US history. In particular, Wilson is concerned with “occupational segregation”, which has historically meant that Black and brown workers are disproportionately represented in some industries and not others.
“For example, we know that women – women of color in particular – are more likely to be in low-wage service and those industries are hit extremely hard during a recession,” she said.
Industries, such as leisure and hospitality, continue to falter in regaining their pre-pandemic rates of unemployment.
The Guardian
July 6, 2021
Reported in an April 21 New York Times article with the headline: C.E.O. Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic
“Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.”
Counterpunch
July 6, 2021
And they’re refusing to work in shit conditions. The Economic Policy Institute points out that many of the people screeching about worker shortages are restaurant owners. Lots of the businesses struggling to attract workers in Ohio and South Carolina come from the restaurant and hospitality sectors. These business owners are trying to find workers at the same wages they paid pre-pandemic.
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Workers exist for these jobs. UE reports that when Klavon’s Ice Cream, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, raised their wages to $15 an hour, they were “flooded with applicants.” As the Economic Policy Institute says, in a labor market as complex as America’s, there will always be pockets of worker shortages. But right now, “Employers post their too-low wages, can’t find workers to fill jobs at that pay level, and claim they’re facing a labor shortage… whenever anyone says, ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ she should really add, ‘at the wages I want to pay.’”
Scary Mommy
July 2, 2021
Over 200,000 workers will see their paychecks grow, according to an estimate by Ben Zipperer of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Of the workers who will benefit, most are women, according to Zipperer; Black and Hispanic workers will see the largest hikes.
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Workers who earn above the minimum wage will likely also benefit from hikes, according to Zipperer. They’ll feel “ripple” effects as their employers adjust pay internally, and could see their own wages increase.
Insider
July 2, 2021
As the U.S. economy (and our favorite eateries) reopen, many restaurants are facing a service worker shortage. Saying goodbye to the tipping model could be just the solution, said David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute.
“I think [the pandemic] has rightly forced us into this sort of rethinking about job quality and what workers should expect. And that’s created the scenario we’re in now, where employers are struggling to fill these jobs because, generally, they’re just low-quality jobs,” he said.
Cooper added that the stressors of pandemic-era serving, including having to police mask-wearing or social distancing, as well as the risks of working an in-person job, added more to the plates of low-paid service workers.
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But if the service industry wants to recruit and retain employees, Spriggs and Cooper believe it has to re-evaluate the gratuity model that allows customers to determine the total pay of their employees.
Marketplace
July 2, 2021
Low-wage workers in general were struck most severely by the current recession, as less than 75% of low-wage workers were still working in 2020 as opposed to 95 percent of high-wage earners (or those in the top 25 percent of wage distribution), according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank.
Yahoo Finance
July 2, 2021