Nearly half of all U.S. farmworkers lack legal status, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Just more than a quarter of farmworkers are U.S.-born, according to the agency’s numbers. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research think tank based in Washington, D.C., estimates about 10% are foreign workers in the United States on H-2A temporary visas. The average farm wage was $13.99 an hour as of 2019, roughly 60% of the average non-farm wage.
Stateline
June 11, 2021
“This pandemic has been going on for 15 months. We have a lot of people that are stuck in long-term unemployment,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She said that right now, almost 30% of people who are unemployed have been out of work for a year or more.
Marketplace
June 11, 2021
Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, neither is its cause. New research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers.
To be clear, wage suppression was not an unintended consequence — it was the intentional outcome of policies at the legislative, regulatory and corporate levels deliberately implemented to keep wages low. As a nation, we chose to suppress wages on behalf of the rich and corporations — and with spectacular success.
The Hill
June 11, 2021
“High quits mean workers feel comfortable leaving their jobs in search of better matches,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Low layoffs are an obvious good. The economic recovery is gaining momentum.”
Politico
June 11, 2021
From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew 940 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And yet, in 2017, Trump and the Republican Congress cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Rolling Stone
June 11, 2021
Child-care workers have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. But a new report finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour could benefit more than half a million employees.
The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that if the federal minimum wage is gradually increased from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025, roughly 560,000 workers in the child-care sector will benefit.
…
“Child-care workers deserve to be paid a wage that better reflects the value of their work and allows them to care for their own families,” says Julia Wolfe, co-author of the report and state economic analyst for EPI. “Low wages for child-care workers reinforce existing racial and gender inequality, since both Black child-care workers and women are particularly likely to see their wages increase with a $15 minimum wage.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute brought up the point that not everyone can work from home. A person’s job type is one key reason.
“Only 16.2% of Hispanic workers and 19.7% of Black workers can telework,” The Economic Policy Institute reported.
Black Enterprise
June 11, 2021
“This will cut aid to nearly four million impacted workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, argued in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
We start the hour talking with ProPublica’s JESSE EISINGER, an author on “The Secret IRS Files” report, about what they found, how the rich avoid paying their fair share, and what it reveals about inequities in our tax code. Then, we examine the uneven economic recovery and the pandemic’s impact on income inequality and the racial wealth gap. Our guest is VALERIE WILSON from the Economic Policy Institute.
WHYY
June 11, 2021
Walsh can continue his overtures to Republicans to minimize adversarial exchanges, but Democratic members losing patience with GOP opposition to Biden’s jobs and social-policy agenda want the secretary to make a difference in the policy arena—even if that means abandoning the niceties.
“I would hope that the Education and Labor Committee pushes for a proactive agenda that the secretary is committed to and political capital is spent around accomplishing,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute. “Because as we emerge from the pandemic, if changes aren’t made to our workplace system of rights, then we know what type of recovery we will have—an unequal recovery where workers will pay a price.”
Bloomberg Law
June 11, 2021