A new Economic Policy Institute report challenges the notion that record breaking wage growth in 2020 is “a cause for celebration.”
Yahoo Finance
February 25, 2021
The organizing drive still underway by workers at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Ala., reveals some of the many ways our current labor law gives employers too much power to stand in the way of workers trying to gain a collective voice.
The Nation
February 25, 2021
Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, agrees.
“States that rely more heavily on the harder-hit industries, like tourism, could be seeing a more acute difficulty from this time,” Gould told Insider.
Business Insider
February 25, 2021
12 million workers had likely lost employer-sponsored health insurance during the pandemic as of August 26, 2020. [Economic Policy Institute]
Inequality.org
February 25, 2021
Education is an important key in continuing to address issues such as why incarceration and sentences are higher for Blacks, and finding solutions to the rising wage gaps between Blacks and whites, which were higher in 2019 than 2000, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s 2019 wage report.
The Collegian
February 25, 2021
No. Under the current proposal, it would be raised in increments, hitting $15 in 2025. In 2021, it would rise to $9.50, then a year later to $11, next to $12.50 in 2023, the following year to $14, and finally to $15 in 2025, as outlined in Raise the Wage Act of 2021. An estimated 32 million people would benefit from the hike, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Fast Company
February 25, 2021
A new Economic Policy Institute report challenges the notion that record breaking wage growth in 2020 is “a cause for celebration.”
Yahoo Finance
February 25, 2021
The Houston Chronicle
February 24, 2021
Increased layoffs in retail, hospitality, construction, and janitorial services created more potential for wage theft, a common occurrence when workers don’t receive their final paycheck. From mid-March to December, the city of Minneapolis’ two wage theft investigators resolved 78 complaints and recovered $47,600 in unpaid back wages. The state Department of Labor and Industry, which has 17 investigators, collected $673,900 in the same time frame. These figures are vastly under-reported, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which estimates wage theft in a regular year to be in the tens of millions in Minneapolis and $600 million statewide.
Minnesota Monthly
February 24, 2021
- “Do you believe the U.S. trade deficit is too large and should reducing it be the major goal of U.S. trade policy?” This will cause an eye roll from economists, most of whom have long argued that trade deficits have a stronger link to national savings rates than trade policy. But it’s a litmus-test question that’s important to ask in large part because Tai is a lawyer with political antennae rather than an economist. Former President Donald Trump and his USTR, Robert Lighthizer, made reducing the trade deficit a primary goal and failed by their own metric. But progressives in the Democratic Party have long made the case as well. The left-of-center Economic Policy Institute has tied trade deficits directly to U.S. job losses. Is Tai with Trump and the economists at EPI? Or those who hold the more orthodox view? And what does she think the politically-safe answer is?
Bloomberg.com
February 24, 2021