American workers lost over $1 billion as a result of weak federal labor law that doesn’t make employers pay monetary penalties for illegally retaliating against those who attempt to organize.
Law360
April 26, 2021
Still, crowdfunding is not a sustainable way to keep money coming in and hasn’t made much of a dent on a broad scale in the past year — although it can help some individuals, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
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The government has expanded unemployment benefits, doled out stimulus checks and forgiven some taxes during the pandemic, significant steps that Gould hopes the system will learn from and continue to adopt in certain cases. But, she said, the past year also showed how ill-equipped in some ways our social safety net was to deal with a crisis of this scale — a key example was unemployment systems that were overrun with requests and inaccessible to many people for weeks or months. That delay was devastating to many.
“So many people are living on the edge financially,” Gould said. “Maybe they’re able to make their bills when they have their paycheck, but you lose your paycheck, and maybe you can’t pay your rent this month.”
Washington Post
April 26, 2021
That’s just one page from the epic tale of American industrial job loss. Nearly 5 million net manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute—roughly one out of every four. Though automation has played a dominant role in those job losses, critics also blame free-trade policies such as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The decline of American manufacturing jobs has helped shrink the middle class and worsen U.S. income inequality. Political scientists, moreover, have found strong links between the loss of those good jobs and the rise of political extremism in the U.S.
Fortune
April 26, 2021
Faced with management’s intimidation campaigns, many pro-union workers become wary of expressing their support publicly — and not without reason. Research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that workers are fired in 1 out of 5 union election campaigns.
Clearly the election process needs to be fixed. But doing so leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: Why are employers allowed to intervene in union elections at all?
Washington Post
April 26, 2021
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones
April 26, 2021
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
New York Times
April 26, 2021
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones
April 26, 2021
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
New York Times
April 26, 2021
The past few months have brought some encouraging signs for low-paid workers. Big employers like Walmart Inc. have announced pay raises, and higher minimum wages took effect in 20 states as of Jan. 1, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
April 23, 2021
The median Black household earns 61 cents for every dollar earned by a comparable White household, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This not only makes it more difficult to afford a home, but also to accumulate and pass on generational wealth. A primary residence accounts for the largest percentage of the average American household’s net worth, according to the Latest Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
Adding to the problem is that Black-owned houses are typically worth less and are more likely to lose value than White-owned homes in similar neighborhoods.
TIME/Next Advisor
April 23, 2021