The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has released a study arguing that wealth for the top 1 percent has grown by double digits while falling for the remaining 99 percent.
Providence Magazine
May 12, 2023
Program critics are urging U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to look deeper at H-1B petitions coming from tech companies, “some of which are laying off tens of thousands of workers,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.
TechTarget
May 12, 2023
Some economists also remain skeptical of the researchers’ findings that St. Paul’s minimum wage increases, which didn’t start taking effect until 2020, led to job losses in 2018 and 2019 as employers anticipated the coming changes. Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute called that finding “completely implausible.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
May 12, 2023
“I’d definitely say 2011 was a step forward in how aggressively the debt ceiling was weaponized to secure partisan policy goals,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, previously told Vox. “I’d say 1995 was also important; [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich threatened this but didn’t take it as far as the GOP did in 2011.”
VOX
May 12, 2023
With passage, Ohio would join a small train of states rolling back child labor laws. Arkansas, Iowa, New Hampshire and New Jersey enacted such policies in 2022 and 2023. Another six states have considered but not yet passed them, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI, a progressive think-tank, called the state attempts part of a “coordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.”
Cleveland.com
May 12, 2023
However, there are reasons to believe Hoyt’s model may show a real trend. The topsy-turvy pandemic era job market has helped out the lowest-paid workers quite a bit: Between 2019 and 2022, wages for the bottom 10% of workers grew 9% after adjusting for inflation, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, found.
Investopedia
May 12, 2023
After outlining the impacts of a default—including cuts to Inflation Reduction Act climate provisions that “would be literally catastrophic”—Economic Policy Institute experts Josh Bivens and Samantha Sanders also asserted Tuesday that “all of this clearly calls for abolishing the debt limit to keep irresponsible congressional majorities from holding the nation’s economy hostage to its policy preferences in the future.”
Common Dreams
May 12, 2023
Kroger Co.’s planned $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons Cos. could cost grocery workers $334 million in lost wages, a new study shows.
Cincinnati Business Courier
May 12, 2023
The class of 2023 is entering a job market “that is much stronger than it was just one year ago, stronger than it was before the pandemic even began,” said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute.
Marketplace
May 12, 2023
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute determined the deal would result in lower wages for 776,000 grocery workers in 55 metro areas. Collective annual pay for those employees will fall by $334 million, or about $450 per worker, Cincinnati Business Courier reports.
Baltimore Business Journal
May 12, 2023
“Unemployment rates remain low across the board and historically low for Black workers,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.
CNBC
May 12, 2023
Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that, after adjusting for inflation, teachers’ average weekly wages have been relatively flat since 1996 — almost 30 years.
Missouri Independent
May 12, 2023
It reached a record 23.5% in 2021, with teachers earning an average 76.5 cents for every dollar earned by other college-educated professionals, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Associated Press
May 12, 2023
Kroger is firing back after a report from the Economic Policy Institute claimed a merger between the Cincinnati-based grocer and Albertsons would cost workers over $300 million in lost wages annually.
Supermarket News
May 12, 2023
Cites EPI and Daniel Costa’s research
The Takeaway
May 12, 2023
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, said there are currently no signs of a recession and if one erupts it will be due to Fed overreach.
“We are in the middle of a soft landing right now — we have shown we can bring down wage growth, bring down inflation,” she said.
Associated Press
May 12, 2023
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that, as of January 2023, 21 million workers still make less than $15 an hour. Workers in states that still adhere to the federal minimum wage are 46% more likely to make under $15 an hour, according to EPI, showcasing the power that the federal standard still holds.
Business Insider
May 5, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute reports since 2009 the minimum wage has lost 27% of its purchasing power due to cost of living increases. The Institute adds, 23 states and Washington D.C. raised state minimum wage in 2023, including Sanders’ own Vermont. Starting January 1, 2023, Vermont raised its state minimum wage to $13.18 per hour. That is an increase of $0.63 from the previous minimum wage of $12.55.
Gray TV
May 5, 2023
A few weeks after Sanders’ hearing, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a study that found: “Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation.”
EPI’s chief economist Josh Bivens wrote that more than half of companies’ price increases since the start of the pandemic “can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8 percent of this increase,” adding: “This is not normal.”
The EPI analysis should have been definitive — but the corporate pundit class chose to ignore it.
The Lever
May 5, 2023
Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Department of Labor and current head of the think tank Economic Policy Institute, said the labor market isn’t too hot.
“Wage growth is generally trending down,” Shierholz tweeted Friday.5 “We can absolutely sustain the kind of labor market tightness we are seeing today, if the Fed doesn’t stand in the way (or hasn’t already).”
Investopedia
May 5, 2023
Lawmakers across eight states — including Minnesota and Missouri — have bills in progress that weaken youth labor laws, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
CBS News
May 5, 2023
Persistently high turnover rates also come with a significant financial cost for school districts. According to a report published in 2017 by the Economic Policy Institute, large urban districts spend approximately $20,000 on every new hire.
EdSurge
May 5, 2023
Sanders made the announcement outside the U.S. Capitol where he was flanked by AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry, and Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz.
UPI
May 5, 2023
Heidi Shierholz, the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said at the press conference that the economic impact of an increase to the federal minimum wage is one of the most-studied subjects in economics.
“The weight of that evidence shows that (when the) minimum wage increases, they raise the wages of our lowest wage-workers, they reduce inequality, they reduce poverty, they reduce child poverty, they reduce gender wage gaps, they reduce racial wage gaps because Black and brown workers, due to the broad impacts of structural racism on our labor markets, are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-wage jobs,” Shierholz said.
New Jersey Monitor
May 5, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal think tank, argues the H-1B program is exploitive and needs to be reformed because employers use it to trade highly paid US workers for lower paid foreign workers. The group said the top 30 H-1B employers hired about 34,000 H-1B workers in 2022 while laying off about 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023.
“Rather than turning to the H-1B program as a last resort when US workers cannot be found, most employers hire H-1B workers because they can be underpaid and are de facto indentured to the employer,” EPI said in a blog post recently. “This is evidenced by government data showing that technology companies continue to hire H-1B workers in large numbers while significantly reducing the sizes of their workforces.”
The Register
May 5, 2023
“Haven’t wages for low-wage workers naturally grown in the tight labor markets of the pandemic recovery?” asked Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist for the Department of Labor.
“Yes, they have,” she said. “But so has the cost of living.”
ABC News
May 5, 2023
While child labor exploitation is on the rise, Republican lawmakers across America are simultaneously pushing to weaken child labor laws. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in 2023, bills proposing to weaken protections against child labor have already been introduced in seven states: Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Popular Information
May 5, 2023
Several states, including Minnesota and Missouri, have also recently introduced youth employment bills that extend work hours for teens, according to the Economic Policy Institute. New Jersey and New Hampshire enacted such laws last year.
CNN
May 5, 2023