Mr. Biden isn’t out of options if the Senate won’t go along, however. He has the power to unilaterally and directly raise pay for federal contractors by raising their wage floor to $15 an hour, which would affect at least a quarter million Americans, according to an estimate Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, shared with The Times. And the ripple of effects of such an action will reverberate throughout the American work force.
The New York Times
February 5, 2021
However, the agency is rife with it. For instance, in a segment on the minimum wage on a Dec. 9 news program, Ben Zipperer from the Economic Policy Institute asserted that “we have a racist and sexist labor market in the U.S.” No opposing point of view was offered. How is that for balance? When I checked the newsroom’s Polygraph site, I found that, on Dec. 3, it ran a fact check attacking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for saying that the Golan Heights are part of Israel. The “Verdict” was “Misleading.” An in-house analysis of Polygraph’s audience showed that more than 70% came from the United States. By law, VOA is not supposed to target American audiences.
Washington Times
February 5, 2021
The minimum wage hasn’t changed since 2009. As reported by the Economic Policy Institute,
Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would undo the erosion of the value of the real minimum wage that began primarily in the 1980s. In fact, by 2021, for the first time in over 50 years, the federal minimum wage would exceed its historical inflation-adjusted high point, set in 1968.
Medium
February 4, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute — a non-partisan think tank — estimated that workers could lose more than $700 million annually under Trump’s rule.
“With no meaningful limit on the amount of time tipped workers may perform nontipped work, employers could capture more of workers’ tips,” the Economic Policy Institute wrote. “It is not hard to imagine how employers of tipped workers might exploit this change in the regulation.”
Business Insider
February 4, 2021
Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Newsweek that raising the minimum wage is “well overdue.”
“Minimum wage workers today are paid substantially less than what their counterparts earned even 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation,” Zipperer said. “I’m not too concerned about the scare stories regarding the minimum wage: shutting down businesses, hurting the people that the policy is trying to help, etc.”
Newsweek
February 4, 2021
Advocates for the $15 minimum wage are planning to cite reports from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and the University of California, Berkeley that found that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would reduce government spending on public assistance programs and increase tax revenue. The Congressional Budget Office is expected to also soon release a report at Sanders’ request that will make the case for $15 an hour.
Politico
February 4, 2021
According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers. More than half of those who would benefit would be women.
Rep. Alma Adams
February 4, 2021
Executive compensation. Executive compensation is already a contentious issue in many jurisdictions where investors are voting for “say on pay” proxy resolutions and against egregious pay packages for underperforming CEOs. However, when it comes to economic inequality, the issue of executive compensation is less about a few outliers and more about a widening gap between executives and average workers. Quoting from the Economic Policy Institute: “From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,008%; the compensation of a typical worker, meanwhile, rose just 12%. The ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation was 278-to-1 in 2018—far greater than the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965.” In addition to issues related to general socioeconomic inequality, very little of this increase in executive pay has accrued to BIPOC families, serving to widen the racial wealth gap. For example, per the COQUAL, Black people account for only 3.2% of senior leadership roles at large companies in the US and less than 1% of Fortune 500 CEO positions, versus about 12% of the total population.
Chief Investment Officer
February 4, 2021