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
Part 2. The Tactics Used by Amazon to Defeat Union Organizing Drives
Guest: Lynn Rhinehart is a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, where she works on labor and employment policy, with a focus on collective bargaining. She wrote the piece How Amazon Gerrymandered the Union Vote—And Won. The PRO Act would put voting decisions back in the hands of workers and the National Labor Relations Board.
KPFA
April 23, 2021
The National Labor Relations Act’s inadequate protections for workers who are fired for engaging in protected activity has cost them billions of dollars in potential legal remedies “even using the most conservative of calculations,” a left-leaning group said in a report released on Thursday.
The Economic Policy Institute said the NLRA shortchanges workers by not allowing them to sue for retaliation in court or be reinstated to their jobs while their cases are pending, and by not levying monetary penalties on employers who are found to have violated the law.
Reuters
April 23, 2021
The Detroit News
April 23, 2021
Unfortunately, this is also a pretty common practice across the United States: the Economic Policy Institute estimates that $15 billion in total wages is stolen from workers every year due to minimum wage violations (merely one form of wage theft among many). Wage theft is effectively a standard form of upward economic redistribution in America, made possible by toothless Departments of Labor.
AZ Central
April 23, 2021
“It’s important to keep in mind that the trend is going in the right direction,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “but we’re still at crisis levels of unemployment claims.”
The New York Times
April 23, 2021
Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., says the changes contemplated in the PRO Act, coupled with the surge in demand for labor that Biden’s infrastructure plan would unleash, would benefit workers: “It will give them more leverage and reduce the market power of the employer.”
Bloomberg
April 23, 2021
Labor unions are key backers of Mr. Biden’s presidency, and several of his early immigration-policy decisions have shown some deference to their concerns.
“H-2B visas are intended for use during times of labor shortages, but the latest unemployment rates for the main H-2B industries are sky high,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal critic of guest-worker programs.
Mr. Costa pointed to March data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing an unemployment rate of 19.9% in the hospitality industry and 11.8% among restaurant workers.
The Wall Street Journal
April 23, 2021