As union membership approaches all-time lows in recorded history, income inequality is now worse than it’s been since the Great Depression, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Indeed, workers are feeling the effects — an EPI report earlier this year found that the median full time worker is making $3,250 less per year than in 1979 because of declining unionization.
Truthout
July 16, 2021
Each year, minimum-wage violations by California employers sap the state’s workforce of nearly $2 billion in earnings, worsening conditions for the financially vulnerable and dragging down the state’s overall economic health, according to nonprofit think tank the Economic Policy Institute.
WWD
July 16, 2021
“For non-unionized workers, which are the vast majority of workers in this sector, the only source of economic leverage they have with respect to their employers is their implicit ability to quit their job and go find a better one,” Economic Policy Institute economist Heidi Shierholz explained to the media outlet.
Mashed
July 16, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, companies get caught violating federal law in 41.5 percent of all NLRB-supervised elections; another study found that nearly 20 percent of union activists get fired during union election campaigns.
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The PRO Act adds what amounts to a $100,000 civil penalty for any illegal discharge or other serious economic harm to an employee. If such penalties had been in place during the past 10 years, they would have raised as much as $1.8 billion in revenue (per EPI numbers).
Washington Monthly
July 16, 2021
How far will those payments go toward childcare? Here are the average monthly childcare costs for four-year olds nationwide, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
- California: $956
- Texas: $589
- New York: $1,030
- Wisconsin: $850
- Massachusetts: $1,258
- Washington D.C.: $1,593
- Arkansas: $457
- Florida: $607
- Oregon: $838
Fast Company
July 16, 2021
Where she lives, in central Pennsylvania, the Economic Policy Institute figures that with no child care costs, she would need about $49,000 to have a modest yet adequate standard of living. Harri will have a little more than that. Bringing in $53,600 will not provide her with a life of luxury, but the magnitude of that change should be transformative for Harri and her children.
In These Times
July 16, 2021
Trade unions will only bid up wages for their members at the expense of employment for everyone else. Pay rises must be limited to what productivity can support, and if we go beyond that, inflation must result. How then do we shake the folk model out of our heads? Josh Bivens, at the Economic Policy Institute, has written a piece that seeks to do just that.
The Guardian
July 16, 2021
A Democratic-controlled board could reverse that and speed up the union election process, said Celine McNicholas with the Economic Policy Institute.
“Standard timelines, preventing unnecessary litigation from occurring before an election actually is held … those would make real differences,” McNicholas said.
Marketplace
July 16, 2021
Yahoo Money explains:
Noncompete agreements prevent workers from going to a competitor or starting a competing business within a certain period after leaving their previous job. Between 36 million and 60 million private-sector workers were subject to noncompete agreements in 2019, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.
“The only economic leverage that non-unionized workers have is the implicit threat that they could quit and go somewhere else,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Money. “Noncompete agreements reduce wages. Your employer doesn’t have to pay you bigger wages if they know that you don’t have outside options.”
Limiting noncompete agreements or making them unenforceable — as Biden’s order sets out to do — may not be enough, according to Shierholz. Banning them instead would give workers more leverage, she said.
Poynter
July 16, 2021