CEO salaries grew 1,007.5% from 1978 to 2019, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. The average worker’s pay grew 11.9% during that same time. The public policy that allows this wage gap to widen can be changed, though, Baker says.
De acuerdo con el economista Daniel Pérez, del Economic Policy Institute, en entrevista con Univision, aseguró que si bien muchos latinos fueron beneficiados con los apoyos gubernamentales, la realidad dicta que esta comunidad está expuesta a salarios bajos, la discriminación laboral.
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute of data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1948 to 2018, worker productivity has skyrocketed while worker compensation has stayed stagnant. The graph below shows just how wide that gap has gotten.
Over a roughly month-long span at the start of the pandemic, roughly 21.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits, according to an analysis at the time by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). But researchers said the number should have been much higher, estimating that as many as 12 million people did not apply for jobless aid because they faced such difficulties in obtaining it. As a result, only half the Americans eligible to receive unemployment checks actually were able to cash them by the end of April, EPI estimated.
“We believe that the CBO’s assumptions on the scale of job loss are just wrong and inappropriately inflated relative to what cutting-edge economics literature would indicate,” wrote experts at the Economic Policy Institute. “The median employment effect of the minimum wage across studies of low-wage workers is essentially zero, according to a 2019 review of the evidence.”
Domestic employment has always been a poorly paid, unappreciated job—not to mention one that leaves individuals vulnerable to sexual, physical, and verbal abuse. Before COVID, the Economic Policy Institute reported, domestic workers earned an average of $12 an hour and were three times as likely to live below the poverty line than others who worked for an hourly wage. Most do not get benefits, like health insurance, and as they are paid in cash, do not have access to retirement savings.
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that wage theft costs workers — especially low-wage workers — roughly $50 billion a year. Companies commonly do this by adjusting time sheets or clocking out workers for breaks or lunch even if they don’t take them.
How did they do that? Dube notes that the latest report “UPweighted more negative studies,” despite, in at least one case, evidence having emerged since the negative study to call its results into question. Even a recent review of the available data by noted minimum wage increase opponents David Neumark and Peter Shirley “had a median estimate of -0.15 for directly affected workers, less than half the size of the CBO assumption,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Ben Zipperer pointed out.
This week, the CBO sided firmly with the naysayers—which one could tell easily enough by how quickly left-leaning economists flamed its results. “We believe that the CBO’s assumptions on the scale of job loss are just wrong and inappropriately inflated relative to what cutting-edge economics literature would indicate,” Heidi Shierholz of the labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute wrote in a Monday blog post that was typical of the blowback. Critics accused the CBO of, among other analytical sins, putting far too much weight on a 2018 paper that showed Seattle’s push for a $15 minimum wage had eliminated a significant number of jobs, even though a followup study by the same team later suggested the impact of the hike was fairly small.