By the early 1970s, the union-avoidance industry had become a big business. Lawyers and consultants have since spent decades finding even more weaknesses in NLRB law and procedures, effectively thwarting the desires of workers to unionize. A 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that employers spend $340 million a year on union-avoidance consultants. In 2018, 48 percent of nonunion workers said they would join a union if they could; yet just 10.8 percent of workers belong to a union today. Between those two numbers is the union-avoidance industry doing the bidding of the bosses.
Jacobin
March 8, 2021
“Low wages hurt all workers and are particularly harmful to Black workers and other workers of color, especially women of color who make up a disproportionate share of workers who are severely underpaid,” reports an Economic Policy Institute fact sheet on the minimum wage. “This is the result of structural racism and sexism, with an economic system rooted in chattel slavery in which workers of color — and especially women of color — have been and continue to be shunted into the most underpaid jobs.”
A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate just voted to keep it that way.
Salon
March 8, 2021
Many economists have also roundly rejected the idea that the extra unemployment checks discourage people from finding work. Josh Bivens, a research director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog last year that, “In normal times, economists and policymakers have focused a lot of attention (almost surely too much) on the incentive effects of [unemployment insurance] benefits.” But studies have found that, “The negative economic impacts of these incentive effects have always been exaggerated,” says Bivens, and that they’re negligible, especially under the exigent circumstances caused by the pandemic.
Truthout
March 8, 2021
The Biden proposal will make federal resources available to address both. It has the potential to create millions of new jobs in this country, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Jobs building the material that will make up our infrastructure are the kind that pay a premium wage to workers with less than a four-year degree. They’re precisely the kind the market needs more of right now.
Bay to Bay News
March 8, 2021
We also need to acknowledge the huge impact a minimum wage hike would have on the people who have been most harmed by the pandemic. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recently released an analysis of wages in the past year and found that average, inflation-adjusted wages in the U.S. had actually gone up in 2020. Great news, right? Wrong. The EPI found that average wages had increased because the makeup of the American workforce had changed so drastically — a huge proportion of those who lost their jobs during the pandemic were those making low wages, or around $14 per hour or less. In contrast, people making $25 per hour and above actually saw job gains overall in 2020.
Refinery29
March 8, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute analyzed the report and found that more than 25 million workers have been harmed by the dire state of the economy during the pandemic. The EPI concluded that, “Congress must pass the full $1.9 trillion relief package immediately.”
Rising Up with Sonali
March 8, 2021
In a meticulous analysis for the respected Economic Policy Institute, Monique Morrissey debunked the Yankee Institute report, revealing it was based on a cherry-picked sample of workers, used nonstandard control variables, and inflated the cost of retiree benefits in the public sector, while minimizing their cost in the private sector. Morrissey concluded that Connecticut public sector workers without college degrees are compensated somewhat more than those in the private sector, while those with college and graduate degrees are compensated somewhat less than in the private sector, even when factoring in more generous public sector benefits. In short, Morrissey writes, “taxpayers are getting a bargain!”
Connecticut Examiner
March 8, 2021
“If you’re a low-wage worker, you’re far less likely to have access to paid sick days,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told Yahoo Money. “So that simple fact of getting to a vaccine site, spending the time there, doing it again, and then potentially having side effects could make economically fragile families pass.”
“It’s very much of an issue,” she added.
Yahoo Finance
March 8, 2021
Robert Scott, a senior international economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera that the US has limited options to put pressure on China.
“Certainly we can sanction China in international arenas. We can consider putting limits on their diplomats, limit their voting rights in international forums like the International Monetary Fund where China has sought increased representation,” he said.
Al Jazeera
March 8, 2021
A majority of domestic workers are women of color and are three times as likely to live in poverty than other workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, an independent economic research organization.
Capital News Service
March 8, 2021