Media clips
-
Yet quickening wage growth isn’t the only hallmark of a shortage. The telltale sign is seeing this trend alongside stalling job growth, as Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute puts it. Just look at what’s been happening in the leisure and hospitality sector, among the most bruised by the Covid-19 shutdown. After jobs all but vanished in the throes of the pandemic, we’re starting to see a rebound: In May, the sector created 292,000 jobs, far outpacing other corners of the economy and contributing heavily to the overall increase in nonfarm payrolls of 559,000. June data, to be released Friday, are expected to show still stronger gains. Meanwhile, average weekly earnings have been rising faster than many other industries. In other words, the market is working to resolve a shortage: When employers lift wages, they’re able to attract the employees they need, as Shierholz said in a recent podcast. (She also notes that leisure and hospitality wages are only just meeting pre-Covid levels; they are not too high.)
…
Compare that with what happens in the U.S., where the conversation is largely driven by businesses trying to influence policy makers behind closed doors, write Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute and Philip Martin, an economics professor at the University of California, Davis. “While the data are sometimes clear, in many cases, shortage determinations are an inexact and subjective science,” Costa wrote in an email. Without a credible source of information and set of objective criteria, we’re ceding the debate to the loudest lobbyists with the fattest wallets.
Bloomberg Quint July 1, 2021 -
“Those workers are not free agents that can go work wherever the economy needs them most. They don’t just switch jobs and move on to higher wages if they find a better job,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. Reform is needed for nonimmigrant visas that restrict worker rights, he added—not just H-2B visas, but H-2A visas and L-1 visas, which are for transfers of executives or managers within a company.
…
“Historically, employers have pushed for relaxing visas and relaxing immigration policies in order to maintain a low-wage workforce,” he said.
Bloomberg Law July 1, 2021 -
The Economic Policy Institute found that Black workers were less likely to work at home than their white and Asian counterparts. It’s estimated that only about 20% of Black workers can work from home. Black workers are also less likely to work from home regardless of education level.
NewsOne June 30, 2021 -
But workers’ leverage may be shortlived, says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at Economic Policy Institute.
Quartz June 30, 2021 -
The former general counsel of the AFL-CIO has joined the U.S. Department of Labor as a senior adviser in its labor-management standards office, where she will also help the agency implement…[paywall].
Law360 June 29, 2021 -
“The pandemic has exacerbated well-documented opportunity gaps that put low-income students at a disadvantage relative to their better-off peers,” Emma Garcia and Elaine Weiss from the Economic Policy Institute wrote in September. They defined opportunity gaps as limits in access to conditions and resources that enhance learning and development.
Socio-economic factors are among the biggest drivers of educational success for kids, Garcia and Weiss found in a 2017 study. Children who fall behind in their early education rarely make up the lost ground, they said.
That can do lifelong damage to people’s wealth: Higher educational attainment correlates with lower poverty rates, according to the Census Bureau. A 2018 paper from the Congressional Research Service showed 78.9% of working-age adults living in poverty in the United States had at most a high school diploma — a much higher percentage than in the general population, where only 56% of people had at most a high school diploma.
The opportunity gap that Garcia and Weiss warned about always existed — but it got worse in the pandemic.
“This is not new,” Garcia, who focuses on education policy in her work as an economist, told CNN Business. But the consequences from the pandemic will compound and last beyond just the short-term, she said.
CNN Business June 29, 2021 -
Intentional employer “misclassification” of workers as “independent contractors,” stripping them of minimum wages, overtime pay, jobless aid, workers comp, and the right to unionize, is not just a “gig economy” problem, two advocates, and a top enforcement official warn.
Instead, it’s an increasing tactic of bosses to degrade and exploit workers from coast to coast. One expert warns if companies succeed in their push to turn all “employees,” now covered by labor law, into not-covered “independent contractors,” the U.S. workforce could turn to a “piece work” society, reminiscent of the garment sweatshops of the 1890s.
The panel, the first of two convened by the Economic Policy Institute, discussed both the report, Misclassification, The ABC Test, And ‘Employee’ Status and the expensive and successful campaign by two of the most-prominent “Gig” firms, the rideshare companies Uber and Lyft, to get California voters to permanently let them misclassify all their workers as “independent contractors.”
But the problem goes far beyond Uber and Lyft and far beyond California, EPI reports.
People's Weekly World June 29, 2021 -
It’s a Catch-22 familiar to many single mothers, says Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Women are being presented with false choices,” Gould says. “You can’t leave your kid home alone and go to work if you don’t have affordable child care. That’s not a choice that you’re making.”
The Washington Post June 29, 2021 -
“Low-wage, low-hours workers were hit hardest in the Covid-19 recession,” the Economic Policy Institute said in May, announcing its annual State of Working America report. OK, makes sense. But then how do you explain this chart?
The chart shows that in the two years from May 2019 to May 2021, pay went up nearly twice as fast for lower-wage workers as for higher-wage workers. That seems to undercut the Economic Policy Institute argument that Covid hit low-wage workers hardest.
“Too many white collars, not enough blue collars,” economist Edward Yardeni, founder of Yardeni Research Inc., wrote in a note to clients on June 27. “There’s no shortage of white-collar workers, including college-educated professionals, administrators, supervisors, and executives. There is a serious shortage of blue-collar workers,” he added.
In reality, both the EPI and Yardeni are correct, although about different aspects of the labor market. The Economic Policy Institute points out that during the pandemic, average hourly earnings were artificially boosted by the disappearance of many jobs at the bottom of the income ladder. Taking those very low-wage jobs out of the calculation made the average of those remaining higher. Some of those jobs have since returned, but not all.
Bloomberg June 28, 2021 -
He is not alone in having had a lucrative pandemic: six of the 10 largest executive packages on record were awarded last year, compensation group Equilar estimated. But the average US CEO pay ratio had already grown from 61:1 to 320:1 in the 30 years before Covid-19 struck, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and that gulf has started to trouble investors.
Financial Times June 28, 2021