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
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