According to congressional testimony from the Economic Policy Institute last month, “Due to the impacts of structural racism and sexism, women and Black and Hispanic men are concentrated in low-wage jobs” and would greatly benefit from a higher minimum wage.
The Washington Informer
March 8, 2021
Kayla Blado will join the NLRB as press secretary later this month. She currently handles press for the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, and serves as president of the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union.
Bloomberg Law
March 8, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, over thirty percent of Black workers would get a raise if the federal minimum wage increases. LGBT families of color would directly benefit because many Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming rank and file workers are employed in low wage service and food sector jobs.
LA Progressive
March 8, 2021
Losing our manufacturing prowess means sacrificing a vital part of America’s economic foundation, past, present and future: As a 2015 report from the Economic Policy Institute declared, “Manufacturing is by far the most important sector of the U.S. economy in terms of total output and employment.”
Forbes
March 8, 2021
According to a range of research compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 would deliver pay increases for nearly 32 million workers, 21 percent of the entire U.S. workforce.
Truthout
March 8, 2021
According to Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, the impact of the pandemic has revealed that African-American women, Latinas, as well as Asian women are in the greatest economic lag , since, for the most part, they have jobs in the service industry.
La Opinion
March 8, 2021
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
Employers steal billions of dollars from American workers’ paychecks every year, according to a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank.
Researchers looked at 10 states, including Illinois, and found “2.4 million workers lose $8 billion annually from being paid at an effective hourly rate lower than the states’ minimum wage,” the institute reported. “These findings suggest that employers across the country are pocketing over $15 billion each year that is owed to their employees.”
Chicago Sun Times
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
The Raise the Wage Act would raise wages for nearly 32 million workers — the majority of whom are women (59 percent, or nearly 19 million) — according to analyses by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the National Employment Law Project (NELP). Findings in the reports paint a clear and compelling picture: nearly one-third (31 percent) of African Americans and one-quarter of Latinos would get a raise if the federal minimum wage were increased to $15; and nearly 23 percent of all workers who would see a raise are Black or Latina women. According to the EPI report, African Americans and Latinos are paid 10-15 percent less than white workers with the same characteristics, concluding that the Raise the Wage Act would deliver the largest benefits to Black and Latino workers at roughly $3,500 annually for a year-round worker.
The Hill
March 8, 2021