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
“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