Noncompete are agreements that ensure employees will not enrich a competing business either during or after the business relationship. They can place many limits on current and former employees, from when or even where they can work. Noncompetes can be provisions in an employment contract or a standalone agreement. And they are not uncommon. In 2019, the Economic Policy Institute reported that 32% of the private sector businesses reported that employees signed a noncompete agreement.
Minnesota Lawyer
February 3, 2023
And Black Americans also face disparities in employment; the typical white worker earns more than 24 percent per hour more than the typical Black worker, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
February 3, 2023
A report from the Economic Policy Institute cites a finding that 51.6% of North Carolina employers require at least one employee to sign a non-compete agreement and 29% require all their employees to sign one. These percentages are among the highest of the larger states and underscore the pervasiveness of this practice.
NC Policy Watch
February 3, 2023
People who took out student loans and attended some college — but didn’t finish and earn a bachelor’s degree — can land in a tough spot. Though they tend to have lower loan balances, they also don’t enjoy the 66% average income bump that college graduates have compared to high school graduates with some college, per 2017 data from the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
NerdWallet
February 3, 2023
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said the changes in resignations are negligible and that labor…(paywall).
The Epoch Times
February 3, 2023
US employers spend an estimated $340m annually on hiring union avoidance consultants to oppose unionization efforts and employers are charged with violating federal labor law in 41.5% of all union elections, according to a 2019 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian
February 3, 2023
A majority of farmworkers, or 68%, reported that they’re employed by farm labor contractors rather than by growers or farmers directly. Nationwide, farm labor contractors were found to be the biggest violators of federal wage and hour laws, according to a separate 2020 study conducted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Sacramento Bee
February 3, 2023
These restrictions have caused alarm among economists and worker advocates. The Economic Policy Institute has found that noncompete clauses have fueled rising inequality by reducing “labor market fluidity” — that is, the ability for workers to change jobs. One of the primary ways a nonunion worker can bargain for a better wage is to threaten to leave for a better paid position elsewhere, a dynamic that is eliminated by noncompete clauses.
The Intercept
February 3, 2023
Using minimum wage data from the Economic Policy Institute, Zillow analyzed how many full-time minimum-wage jobs would be required to afford the typical rent in the 50 largest U.S. cities and in the U.S. overall.
WRAL.com
February 3, 2023
A report last year from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that, in 2021, teachers made on average 23.5 percent less weekly than other college graduates, or about 76 cents on the dollar — a record high disparity for teacher salaries. This difference exists regardless of the common argument against raising teacher pay that teachers get summers off, EPI found, as the number of hours a teacher works weekly is comparable to that of other workers.
Truthout
February 3, 2023
Many minority groups are more likely to have no retirement savings at all, according to the Economic Policy Institute (paywall).
MarketWatch
February 3, 2023
Local 1 staffer Adam Stant (who was not subject to layoff) says that these layoffs come at a moment when the labor movement should be hiring, not firing, organizers. An Economic Policy Institute report presents evidence that suggests 60 million workers would join a union if they could. Some labor observers argue that the bottleneck preventing these workers from having a union is unions themselves.
In These Times
February 3, 2023
According to a 2022 report by Economic Policy Institute researchers Valerie Wilson and William Darity Jr., net productivity per work hour rose 69.6% between 1979 and 2019 while median wages for Blacks grew 5.2% compared to 20% for whites.
Charlotte Post
February 3, 2023
The Center for Economic and Policy Research notes that the wage gap between white and Black workers is narrower among postal workers than among private sector employees. The Economic Policy Institute has found that Black workers’ share of USPS jobs is significantly higher than their share of all public sector jobs.
Inequality.org
February 3, 2023
Links to Daniel’s blog post on California legislation on labor recruiters.
LA Times
February 3, 2023
On Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released state and unemployment data for December 2022, which the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) used to analyze employment changes for the entire year.
AFL-CIO
February 3, 2023
Slower wage growth on its own isn’t great for workers. But inflation has also been slowing down at a faster rate, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Marketplace
February 3, 2023
“Productive aging” — that’s a good one. Sounds reasonable while being utterly vacuous. Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute provides a concise translation: “Raise the retirement age.”
LA Times
February 3, 2023
I talked to three people who want to make it harder for employers to misclassify workers: Nick Hanauer, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded Civic Ventures, a public policy incubator in Seattle; Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on low- and middle-income workers; and David Weil, who ran the wage and hour division of the Department of Labor during the Obama administration but was rejected by the Senate for the same job in the Biden administration.
New York Times
February 3, 2023
Because of this placement, the break time law failed to cover approximately 1 in 4 working women of childbearing age—or nearly 9 million working women. According to the Economic Policy Institute, this includes “more than 1 million black women, 976,000 Hispanic women, 825,000 Asian women, more than 6 million white women, and 185,000 women of other races.
Center for American Progress
January 27, 2023
To check this practice, the Economic Policy Institute proposed a temporary excess profits tax, which could balance the pricing power of massive, consolidated corporations. They argue that the pandemic has distorted pricing practices, which are not useful economic signals but just a temporary mismatch between supply and demand.
Ms. Magazine
January 27, 2023
“The fact that tens of millions of workers want to join a union and can’t is a glaring testament to how broken U.S. labor law is,” the Economic Policy Institute asserts in response to the BLS report. “It is urgent that Congress pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. State legislatures must also take available measures to boost unionization and collective bargaining.”
In These Times
January 27, 2023
According to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, states with restrictive abortion laws also have worse economic conditions, lower wages, less employment security, higher incarceration rates, and less access to unemployment benefits.
Counterpunch
January 27, 2023
Only 1 percent of Michigan’s 4.4 million workers, about 52,000 total, were making minimum wage when the rate increased this month, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington D.C. that conducts research.
Lansing City Pulse
January 27, 2023
In recent years, a growing conversation about executive compensation and economic inequality has been hotly debated. Executive pay has grown 1,460% since 1978, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute last year. In 2021, CEOs earned 399 times as much as a typical worker.
Fortune
January 27, 2023
Based on data from the Social Security Administration, the percentage of earned income subject to Social Security’s payroll tax has declined from 90% in 1983 to just 81.4% as of 2021. As noted by a recently published blog from the Economic Policy Institute, that’s the lowest level of earnings being subjected to the payroll tax in 49 years. More importantly, it’s confirmation that wage growth for high-earning workers is outpacing the near-annual increase in the maximum taxable earnings cap for Social Security’s payroll tax.
Motley Fool
January 27, 2023
A report from the Economic Policy Institute backs up her assertion. Depending on where they live, teachers in the United States earn a weekly wage that is 3.4% to 35.9% less than that of their college-educated peers. In 28 states, that figure – known as a wage penalty – exceeds 20%. Benefits somewhat offset that pay reality, but not enough to level the playing field. The report found that teachers’ total compensation penalty grew by 11.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2021.
Christian Science Monitor
January 27, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Colorado teachers earn on average about $60,000 annually. That’s about 40 percent, or $21,000, less than other college-educated professionals in the state.
Denver 7
January 27, 2023
We turn to the Economic Policy Institute for the dour details of what it means to be an independent contractor in the American labor market now. “The way a worker is classified has serious implications and costs for their labor rights and economic security. When employers misclassify workers who are employees as independent contractors, they lose the legal right to earn at least the applicable minimum wage and to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime hours.
Counter Punch
January 27, 2023