Those who don’t have access to an employer-sponsored plan can fall behind without perks such as employers’ matching contributions or the auto-enrollment of employees. As a result, 1 in 4 American workers don’t have even $10,000 saved for retirement.
“For many demographic groups, the typical working-age household either has no retirement account savings at all or only a trivial amount,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
February 16, 2021
It would even provide relief to middle-income parents for whom quality child care can be hard to find and even harder to afford. The average cost of child care for an infant in Massachusetts is nearly $21,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. A family with an infant and a four-year-old spend over $36,000 a year.
Boston Globe
February 16, 2021
David Cooper, “Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers,” Economic Policy Institute, February 5, 2019, available at https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2024-would-lift-pay-for-nearly-40-million-workers/.
Center for American Progress
February 16, 2021
But as economist Heidi Shierholz of the progressive Economic Policy Institute pointed out to us, most economists now believe that a higher minimum wage does not lead to substantial and widespread job losses.
“That’s become a gospel that simply isn’t true,” Shierholz says.
Even the CBO points out the substantial benefits: Up to 27 million workers would receive higher wages and pay more in taxes, raising government revenue. Federal spending on SNAP food stamp benefits and similar programs would decline.
Higher wages also lower employee turnover, Shierholz says, and that benefits businesses. “It reduces the chaos in people’s lives,” she says. “If their car breaks down, they don’t have to leave their job that requires a car to get there. They can afford to fix their car.”
The Chicago Sun Times
February 16, 2021
Raising wages for jobs filled by temporary foreign workers could help draw more Americans to those positions, but that isn’t enough, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington that advocates for low- and middle-income workers. The visa programs, Mr. Costa said, need to demand more of employers in both pay and recruitment of U.S. workers.
The J1 visa, for instance, a State Department-led exchange program for foreign college students, doesn’t require employers to show they couldn’t fill the jobs with Americans. Employers facing labor shortages need to scour regions in the U.S. with higher unemployment, Mr. Costa said, and offer prospective workers housing and travel subsidies.
The Wall Street Journal
February 16, 2021
Supporters say the coronavirus has made a higher minimum wage all the more urgent since workers earning it are disproportionately people of color. The liberal Economic Policy Institute found that more than 19% of Hispanic workers and more than 14% of Black workers earned hourly wages that kept them below federal poverty guidelines in 2017.
Associated Press
February 16, 2021
Actually, according to that same Congressional Budget Office, in 2019 the CBO said that $15 wage would boost the wages of 17 million people, while 1.7 million workers “could” become unemployed by 2025 due to the wage increase. Those are 17 million real people, with real families, whose lives would be improved.
However, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argued that the CBO’s estimated job losses from enacting a $15 minimum wage are “overstated.”
“The crucial fact is that an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off,” she wrote in a July 2019 report. “For a wide variety of reasons, a sizable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in and out of employment; each quarter, more than 20% of the lowest-wage workers leave or start a job.”
Gaston Gazette
February 16, 2021
“We have seen this failure before, with fiscal recovery efforts following the Great Recession of 2008-2009 that were insufficient and too short-lived,” Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute think tank, wrote this past fall. “As a result of this austerity, it took a full decade for the labor market to return to even its pre-Great Recession health.”
Fortune
February 16, 2021
State AGs’ interest in the workplace is an outgrowth of their civil rights, labor, and consumer protection responsibilities and powers under state law. Urged on by groups such as the non-partisan think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, they have stepped in to interpret state executive orders and new legislative protections for workers, and provide guidance and resources to help employers address workplace safety and workers’ rights.
Bloomberg Law
February 16, 2021
A federal minimum wage hike to $15 would affect a large share of workers in the South, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank.
Yahoo Finance
February 16, 2021