Thanks to state-level minimum wage hikes and a tight labor market, low paid and historical disadvantaged workers saw the fastest wage growth between 2019 and 2023, although wage growth has slowed as pay for managers increases. However, wages for jobs at the bottom of the pay scale remain insufficient to make ends meet, and the wealthiest earners keep taking bigger pieces of the pies off the top.
“Low- and moderate-wage workers typically have seen very little wage growth over the past 40 years, and that makes it harder and hard to make ends meet,” Gould said. “They were barely making ends meet before and they are still barely making ends meet today, and they are not able to get head because of the four decades up to about 2019.”
Truthout
June 24, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers steal up to $50 billion in wages from American workers every year, exceeding violent theft and auto robberies combined.
Jacobin
June 24, 2024
Reshoring and the push to grow US manufacturing are compounding the worker shortage, with Ms Andrias saying “some firms appear to be turning to children to help keep wages low”. These are often unaccompanied migrant children — a crisis at which southern states are at the coalface — whom employers can “potentially exploit with impunity”, says Economic Policy Institute analyst Nina Mast.
fDi intelligence
June 24, 2024
Directors & Boards
June 24, 2024
“What people don’t realize is how widespread it is,” said Helen Gerhardt, a benefits advocate at Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, a nonprofit that helps people with unemployment claims. It impacts customer service workers, truck drivers, janitors, retail workers, landscapers and security guards, according to a 2023 study from the Economic Policy Institute.
90.5 WESA
June 24, 2024
Speakers this week will tackle each of these issues and offer policy recommendations for narrowing the wage gap. Guest Speakers – Dr. Michelle Holder, Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York – Dr. Michael Reich, Professor of Economics and Chair, Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California at Berkeley – Dr. Heidi Shierholz, President, Economic Policy Institute – Dr. Austin Clemens, Senior Fellow, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Ethnic Media Services
June 24, 2024
Nearly 1 in 5 Black Pennsylvanians was unemployed as 2020 ended, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). At the time, that was the highest rate of unemployment for Black workers in any U.S. state. However, by the end of the 2023, Black unemployment in the Keystone State had dropped to 5.7%, a record low and below the national average of 6.1%.
WHYY
June 24, 2024
Zoom out: The NLRB has streamlined the rules around union elections — cutting the time between petition and voting.
- The agency also withdrew a Trump-era proposal that would have excluded private college and university student workers from unionizing — driving a wave of graduate student organizing. These elections tend to have very high win rates, a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute finds.
Axios
June 24, 2024
Wage theft affects every aspect of our economy, none more than the workers that directly feel its effects, most often low-wage earners, disproportionately women, immigrants and people of color. The crime takes many forms: not paying minimum wage or overtime, denying meal breaks, unpaid sick leave, tip theft and bounced paychecks. The costs add up, no matter how you look at them. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average worker lost an equivalent of a month and half of rent, or money to cover critical household costs, such as child care and groceries.
San Jose Spotlight
June 24, 2024
In 2017, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a change to the minimum wage regulations that would have allowed employers to pool workers’ tips and then keep the tips, if they wanted. One estimate from the Economic Policy Institute found that if the Trump proposal had gone into effect, employers would have pocketed $5.8 billion of workers’ tips.
MSNBC.com
June 24, 2024