Beginning in 2026, the federal minimum wage would be indexed to median wage growth. 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.
Atlanta Daily World
January 28, 2021
A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out that the official number of unemployed is miscounted in the best of years, made far worse in the age of COVID-19. The methodology itself is skewed. Issues such as overlooking individuals more likely to be unemployed than those included in final calculations lead to an official unemployment rate that was off by 1.5 percentage points at the beginning of 2020. That means 2.7 million unemployed people were “misclassified as not in the labor force” even before the pandemic hit. And that’s a conservative estimate. The wonky nature of that skewed methodology that produces skewed numbers means that it’s hard to get a real number and therefore a real handle on how bad things really are. And this is no accident. As Professor Wolff put it, “There is literally no aspect of this subject that isn’t loaded with people’s ideological agendas. It’s built into the numbers. It’s built into the way that those numbers are interpreted. Both the numbers and their interpretation are highly contestable.”
Mint Press News
January 28, 2021
Thea Lee, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute put it this way: “This is not a normal recession. We are definitely in uncharted territory due to the nature of this recession.” She emphasized the especially deep losses that low-income workers, Black and Hispanic workers, and women have faced this time around.
Washington Post
January 28, 2021
According to an analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Act would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including nearly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers, and more than half of the people who would benefit are women.
Business Insider
January 28, 2021
But those warehouses that some citizens are fighting against have proven to be an economic engine for the metropolitan area economy. The Logistics Park Kansas City project has created more than 12,000 jobs since 2012, according to the Economic Policy Institute. It also has generated more than $4.4 million in tax revenues for Johnson County and Edgerton.
United States Supply Chain Management Council
January 28, 2021
Specifically, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase the federal minimum wage over a four-year period from $7.25 to $15. It would also index future increases in the federal minimum wage to median wage growth in addition to phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities. According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers.
Sen. Tim Kaine
January 28, 2021
Nationally, 3,878,000 Americans were considered long-term unemployed (having gone six months without work while looking for work) as of December. That number accounts for fully a third of all unemployed Americans, and the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould tells Bloomberg the percentage is “going to be continuing to rise.” Speaking to the New York Times, Rubeela Farooqi, the chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, says that we should expect to “see layoffs mounting” over the next few months. In the weeks ending January 9 and January 16, more than 900,000 people filed new claims for state unemployment benefits. But the unemployment rate doesn’t paint the full picture. It doesn’t count those who’ve dropped out of the job market or who are underemployed and living below the poverty line. Many of those counted as employees in the food and beverage industry are, in reality, working much less and making too little.
New York Magazine
January 28, 2021
Analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a $15 minimum wage would raise the wages of nearly 32 million workers in the U.S. A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the wage raise could lift 1.3 million people out of poverty.
Truthout
January 28, 2021
Richard Rothstein: THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Wednesday, January 27, 2021 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM PDT
Richard Rothstein is the author of THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. A Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In addition to his recent book, The Color of Law, he is the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found at his web page at the Economic Policy Institute.
Archinect
January 28, 2021