But there’s been pushback from economists like Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, who wrote in the New York Times last week that states “cutting pandemic programs are weakening their own recoveries,” and that higher wages, not ending benefits, could solve perceived issues with worker shortages.
CNN Business
June 16, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO take-home pay grew by around 1,200 percent from 1978 to 2019. Meanwhile, the compensation for typical workers grew by 13.7 percent.
New York Magazine
June 16, 2021
A team of White House economics advisers had, ostensibly, convened a brain trust of left-leaning think tanks and policy experts on Monday evening to discuss how they might help President Joe Biden build a case for his economic agenda, a pair of proposals hitting the skids in negotiations with both Republican senators and their moderate Democratic colleagues.
But the wonks wouldn’t get down to business until Biden’s aides addressed one matter: Why had Biden and the White House appeared to have abandoned support for the supplemental unemployment benefits buoying workers through the fragile economic recovery? Representatives from multiple organizations—including the Economic Policy Institute, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Hamilton Project—raised the issue when it was their turn to speak, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Attendees didn’t belabor the subject, but the message was clear: The administration’s recent messaging on the subject is a real problem.
Mother Jones
June 14, 2021
More than a half-million child care workers would see a pay raise if the minimum wage was increased to $15 per hour, according to a new report.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that more 43.5 percent of child care workers, or 560,000 people, would benefit from the minimum wage being bumped to $15 per hour in the next four years.
Roughly 95 percent of the child care workers who would get a pay raise are women, and 36 percent are Black or Hispanic. Black and Hispanic child care workers would see their yearly income rise by $3,200 and $3,100, respectively.
“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,” Julia Wolfe, a co-author of the report and state economic analyst for EPI, said in a statement. “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.”
Newsweek
June 14, 2021
Josh Bivens/Economic Policy Institute: “They should definitely stand pat.” Fed officials view the price spike as a temporary consequence of the economy’s rapid reopening….and say supply will eventually rise to meet demand. “We’re measuring prices relative to a year ago and prices had just collapsed. and so if you take out what economists call that base effect, you get numbers more like just over 2% for core inflation over the past 12 months. That’s not much to worry about at all.”
Hearst TV
June 11, 2021
All in all, the labor report is a good sign for the economic recovery. “High quits mean workers feel comfortable leaving their jobs in search of better matches,” Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote. “Low layoffs are an obvious good. The economic recovery is gaining momentum.”
The Fiscal Times
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.
…
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