For example, investments in the power grid are “needed to protect from catastrophic weather events, but also to allow us to move to renewable sources,” says Robert E. Scott, a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Or better broadband internet access could make less commuting (and less carbon emissions) possible, he says.
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And that tracks for green jobs, too. Manufacturing jobs, including those in clean energy, will “generate large numbers of excellent jobs for non-college-educated workers,” says Scott. “Those are the people who’ve been left behind for the last 20 years.”
CNBC
April 16, 2021
Conversely, the decline of unions has played a big role in rising inequality and wage stagnation. And workers have lost bargaining power as weak antitrust policies have allowed corporations to gain ever more market power.
New York Times
April 16, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute noted the key role that Amazon workers played in the pandemic, said they deserved “a fair election,” and called for the PRO Act to become law.
Reuters
April 16, 2021
The Bessemer results “reveal a broken union election system,” Celine McNicholas, labor counsel at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement. “It is clear that if policymakers do not reform our nation’s labor law system, then they are effectively denying workers a meaningful right to a union and collective bargaining.’’
AP News
April 16, 2021
Under the Trump administration, the NLRB “systematically rolled back workers’ rights,” according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. President Joe Biden has already signaled he intends to be much more pro-worker than his predecessor, releasing a video in support of unionization efforts and against corporate “anti-union propaganda” – as Amazon employees were voting.
Markets Insider
April 16, 2021
The decline in collective bargaining has translated to a loss of $1.56 per hour worked for the median worker, the equivalent of $3,250 for a full-time, full-year worker, according to he Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It has also contributed to the widening wage inequality gap, as unions disproportionately benefit low-wage earners,” EPI said.
Market Watch
April 16, 2021
At this distance, Goleman’s denunciation of irrational and “mean-spirited impulses” looks like a refusal to acknowledge concrete societal factors that were right before his eyes. “All pain, no gain for most workers,” authors at the Economic Policy Institute announced in a 1996 report, concluding, in language that was unusually agitated for Washington economists, that, since the seventies, an erosion of wages, a loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, and greater job insecurity had had a catastrophic effect on the middle class. The pain had intensified with the winnowing away of social services, and even progressive politicians were more concerned with demonstrating their bona fides as business-friendly than with affirming their concern for the working class, Blacks, immigrants, or women. “Mean-spirited” seems too gentle a word for the era’s distinctive retreat from progressive struggles. Who could forget Rodney King’s beating at the hands of police, the disbelief of the politicians who interrogated Anita Hill, or the empty chairs of the women whom Congress had refused to call as witnesses in support of her testimony?
The New Yorker
April 16, 2021
Richard Rothstein, a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow, emeritus, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), gave this opening statement before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs’ hearing on the “Legacy of Racial Discrimination in Housing,” on behalf of himself and Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the LDF. Here is a link to the full testimony.
MarketWatch
April 16, 2021
The challenge would be to collapse the distinction, and recent economic research backed them up. Federal investments in care yielded twice as many jobs as similar investments in infrastructure, according to a 2016 study from the Economic Policy Institute, and it would also free up women to participate in the economy, leading to even greater employment. If the workers were being paid fairly, that would spur a number of “respending” jobs, the sorts of jobs that get created when people have money to spend. This was all the more important given that care is expected to be the fastest-growing segment of the economy over the next decade, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics. The jobs would be there anyway—they might as well be good. “I was getting to the point where I had to say, ‘Care job creation is vastly superior, but physical infrastructure is still good, also,’” says Josh Bivens, the EPI economist who worked on the study, recalling conversations with colleagues. On the day the campaign launched the caregiving proposal, Bivens, at the behest of Biden advisers, published a blog post asserting the campaign’s plan would, in fact, support 3 million new jobs.
Mother Jones
April 16, 2021