Media clips
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April 16, 2021
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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 -
“As we move toward herd immunity, those issues around care infrastructure will get better,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “These structural things related to public health, we may not know the magnitude of how many people they’re keeping out of the labor force, but with the vaccine we can come at this with optimism that it will improve.”
New York Times April 16, 2021 -
Whitmer cited a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to ensuring fair pay, health care, and retirement security, that said payroll fraud cost workers $429 million in wages and overtime between 2013 and 2015. And an MSU study that said employee misclassification costs Michigan $107 million a year in evaded taxes.
Detroit Free Press April 16, 2021 -
Producers have urged Biden to keep the steel tariff, and they found a new point of argument in a recent study. Left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute found in a March 24 analysis that the steel tariffs delivered benefits in the near term, including drastic cuts to steel imports. The study was promoted after its release by the American Iron and Steel Institute, a nonprofit that represents U.S. steelmakers and iron producers.
The Section 232 actions had “no meaningful real-world impact” on the prices of steel-consuming products such as cars, and exclusions to the actions such as those instituted under Trump “mitigate positive economic impact,” according to the study. After the measures were implemented in 2018 and prior to the widespread downturn in 2020, steel producers in the U.S. outlined plans to invest more than $15.76 billion in new or upgraded steel facilities and to create more than 3,200 new jobs in the country.
There is “no doubt” the trade actions boosted profitability in the U.S. steel sector, increased long-term investment within the space and led to some form of a recovery, according to Robert Scott, an economist who worked on the study. However, the tariffs alone were unable to stop the issue of excess steel production abroad.
“Until we get that problem under control, I don’t think the need for the tariffs is going to go away,” Scott said in an interview. “Other countries aren’t going to be willing to make concessions without really tough international bargaining.”
S&P Global April 16, 2021 -
For instance, the average white family is more than 10 times wealthier than an average Black family, and white non-college graduates have more wealth than Black college graduates, according an April 2020 report from the Brookings Institution on the need for reparations. As the Economic Policy Institute has explained, there is a similar gap between the wages of Black and white workers — making it extremely difficult for labor alone to close that wealth gap.
VOX April 15, 2021 -
Declining unionization translates to a loss of $1.56 per hour worked, the equivalent of $3,250 for a full-time, full-year worker, according to an estimate by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Celine McNicholas, EPI’s director of government affairs and labor counsel, said that tying federal contract dollars to union jobs wouldn’t be sufficient for creating a workforce with strong union density.
“It will make a difference, but you absolutely need meaningful labor-law reform, not nibbling around the edges and offering piecemeal” measures, she said. “The system is fundamentally broken and requires fundamental reform.”
Bloomberg April 15, 2021 -
The depth and speed of the current economic downturn was unprecedented, but the longstanding gaps in wealth and wages indicate that Black and brown households will take longer to bounce back, according to Kyle Moore, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race and ethnicity.
“In periods of general economic growth, racial disparities in a wide range of poverty indicators have remained constant, suggesting a lack of political will over decades to tackle the root causes. Black and brown households have been hardest hit in every economic crisis, and taken the longest to recover,” said Moore.
The Guardian April 15, 2021 -
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the pro-union Economic Policy Institute, noted that the National Labor Relations Act requires employers to bargain in good faith. But she said only “really egregious conduct” violates that rule.
“That’s why you so often see companies dragging their feet at the bargaining table,” she said. “They don’t really face any penalties. And there are no tight time structures within the law as it exists now, so workers can end up bargaining for years.”
But legislation proposed in Congress known as the PRO Act would expand worker rights, McNicholas said, in part by requiring employers to negotiate first contracts in a timely manner.
The U.S. House passed the PRO Act last month, but its chances in the closely divided Senate are less certain.
Under the measure, companies would, for the first time, face financial penalties for violating federal labor law. They could also be considered “joint employers” even when they contract out work to another firm. Google, therefore, could be forced to come to the negotiating table rather than leave matters entirely in the hands of a contractor.
McNicholas couldn’t say what the PRO Act would mean specifically for the HCL employees in Pittsburgh, but she said it would give more leverage to workers overall.
“If you have any kind of influence over the way in which this workforce operates, you’re going to be compelled to bargain with them, so that workers are not trying to chase down different employers in a complicated contracting system,” she said.
90.5 WESA April 14, 2021