“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
On Wednesday, a day ahead of the jobless data release, Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and an Obama Labor Department veteran, broadly agreed with Deese.
“Things are getting back to normal,” Shierholz told Insider. “I think the key is we don’t want to make drastic policy changes at this point.” When it comes to relief and recovery measures for this recession, “we are doing it so right,” she said. But she warned that could still change.
Shierholz said she expects to see a quick bounceback and strong recovery, but changing course could threaten that. “If we start pulling back with those measures now, we’re going to just cut that off at the knees,” she said.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has floated an interesting hypothesis that wages might not be accelerating as quickly as we think. May’s wage growth was driven by the leisure and hospitality sector, which consists mostly of workers at restaurants that customers are only just starting to patronize again. What if that wage surge, Bivens posits, is really a tip surge? This sector reported a huge decline in wages in March and April 2020 as restaurants were shutting down, even as other sectors were experiencing that freakish momentary wage spike at the start of the pandemic.
What’s different about restaurants? Well, Bivens observes, restaurant workers get tips, and when customers disappear, tips disappear. Now customers are coming back, along with tips.
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Why have wages stagnated during the past four decades? The EPI’s Bivens and Lawrence Mishel argued last month that the blame rests with high interest rates, proliferating trade deals, ever-more-brazen wage theft (i.e., employers’ failure to pay minimum wage or overtime), an eroding legal minimum wage, diminishing legal overtime eligibility, judicial decisions restricting the ability of workers to sue their employers, deregulation, privatization, economic concentration, a fissuring workforce (meaning a trend toward outsourcing labor within the U.S. to smaller, less scrupulous companies), and declining union power. These were policies consciously pursued by government at all levels at the behest of the business lobby.
New Republic
June 11, 2021
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
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 10, 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.
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“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 10, 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 10, 2021