Media clips

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• Joe Biden Wants To Crack Down On Noncompete Clauses

  The crackdown on noncompetes is meant to increase competition among employers and restore workers’ leverage in the job market. Labor economists say limiting or banning such clauses will give workers more mobility and ultimately greater earnings, by allowing them to take their work to the highest bidder.

  “If you’re a nonunionized worker … basically your only source of power with your employer is the implicit threat that you can quit and take a job somewhere else,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

  Huffpost July 9, 2021
• Biden aprobará una orden ejecutiva para ayudar a los trabajadores a mejorar su empleo

  Un análisis realizado en 2019 por el liberal Economic Policy Institute estimó que entre 36 y 60 millones de trabajadores podrían estar sujetos a acuerdos de no competencia.

  Telemundo July 9, 2021
• Activists want policymakers to reimagine unemployment program, which typically serves only a fraction of the jobless

  Mason’s experience is one of the reasons advocates are calling on policymakers to reimagine the unemployment system. In a new report, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is calling for setting minimum federal standards to replace wildly divergent levels of benefits from state to state, tying the term of benefits programs to the economic conditions on the ground instead of relying on Congress and expanding eligibility in a system with a long list of reasons for rejecting people.

  EPI say state-level unemployment programs are obsolete and riddled with exclusions. Absent federal intervention that temporarily expanded eligibility during the pandemic, less than one-third of jobless people in the U.S. received unemployment benefits in 2019.

  Nevada Independent July 9, 2021
• Labor shortage? Wage data sends mixed signals.

  But, “there really isn’t any evidence of widespread labor shortage,” said Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute.

  If there were, Wilson said, employers would be jacking up wages across the board to entice unemployed workers. Instead, there are some pockets of wage acceleration, “in leisure and hospitality. A big boost in those wages is the fact that they’re getting more tips now because more people are coming to those restaurants in person.”

  Marketplace July 9, 2021
• There’s no labor shortage — just not enough good jobs

  “Nothing about this is going to be permanent,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

  LA Times July 9, 2021
• Biden Moves To Restrict Noncompete Agreements, Saying They’re Bad For Workers

  The White House estimates that noncompete agreements are used by roughly half of private-sector businesses for at least some of their employees, affecting anywhere between 36 million and 60 million workers. The numbers come from a 2019 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which surveyed 634 employers.

  The report found that while businesses with well-paid, highly educated workers are more likely to use noncompetes, the agreements were not uncommon in sectors dominated by low-wage workers. Almost 30% of establishments offering an average hourly wage below $13 require noncompetes for all their workers, the survey found.

  Famously, the sandwich chain Jimmy John’s agreed to stop using noncompetes in 2016 after being sued in New York and Illinois. The chain had prohibited its sandwich-makers and drivers from working for another sandwich shop within a 3-mile radius of any Jimmy John’s in the country.

  Noncompetes are still fairly common in construction, manufacturing and retail, the EPI survey found. And workers bound by them often enter jobs unaware of the requirement. Almost a third of businesses surveyed said they ask new employees to sign the agreements after they’ve accepted the job, often on their first day of work.

  NPR July 9, 2021
• Schools Pay a High Price for Low Teacher Salaries

  In the meantime, teachers—who, according to recent data by the Economic Policy Institute, earn about 20 percent less than other professionals with similar experience—continue to face financial hardships.

  Education Week July 9, 2021
• Hiring crunch is boosting pay for restaurant workers

  So while restaurant workers have more options today, “that doesn’t mean there are a bunch of family-sustaining jobs,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “The weekly wages that are in that industry — they are extraordinarily low.”

  In June, average weekly earnings for all employees in the leisure and hospitality sector amounted to $483, or just over $23,000 per year, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  “Wages have grown in leisure and hospitality this year for sure, but they plummeted in the earlier part of the recession. So it’s not like the wages are high by any stretch in this industry,” Shierholz said. “These workers definitely have more leverage than they did in December in the worst of this, but it is far from an industry where workers call all the shots. It’s still extremely low wages, unstable hours, weak benefits.

  Eventually, the industry is likely to arrive at a post-pandemic equilibrium, and workers will lose some of their newfound bargaining power.

  “I looked hard and I can’t see anything in this that I expect to be permanent,” Shierholz added. “We’re in a labor market that’s in very rapid flux, so there are some pockets like this where we’re seeing unusual dynamics. But I think this is a temporary shift in some of the bargaining power to workers.”

  CBS News July 9, 2021
• 11 Charts on Taxing the Wealthy and Corporations

  As corporate tax obligations have declined, CEO pay has skyrocketed. According to Office of Management and Budget data and Economic Policy Institute research, when corporate tax receipts made up 21.8 percent of all federal revenue in 1965, the average CEO-to-median worker pay ratio was 21 to 1. After the 2017 Republican tax cuts, corporations plowed significant windfalls into stock buybacks and executive bonuses. By 2019, corporate tax receipts had fallen to just 6.6 percent of federal revenue and the average pay ratio had risen to 320 to 1.

  Inequality.org July 9, 2021
• ‘Trying to strangle local governments’: What happens when states and their cities become adversaries?

  The fault lines of inequality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have also thrown the pre-emption issue into starker relief. A 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute notes that legislative moves are “disproportionately harming the same communities that have been pre-empted from taking local action, limiting their ability to effectively combat the public health crisis.”

  The report, which focuses on the South, characterizes pre-emption as “embedded in a racist history.” Pre-emptive laws “are passed by majority-white legislatures and tend to create barriers to economic security in cities whose residents are majority people of color.”

  MarketWatch July 9, 2021