But Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a Labor Department economist during the Obama administration, told the Wall Street Journal that the rule does not address wage inequality, and instead could shift work to servers that would traditionally not fall to them.”If the administration wanted to raise pay for back-of-the-house workers, they could have supported a minimum-wage increase,” Shierholz said.
FOX 2 Detroit
December 24, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute last week published five charts showing some impacts of the Pandemic Recession, including these two:
Daily Kos
December 24, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a Labor Department economist during the Obama administration, told the Wall Street Journal that the move will “allow employers to shift work from non-tipped to tipped workers.”
Shierholz also argues that the rule does not address wage inequality, adding that if the Trump administration wanted to raise pay for back-of-the-house workers, “they could have supported a minimum wage increase.”
Fox News
December 24, 2020
But cutting this protection for workers has the potential to severely limit a tipped workers’ wage, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who previously served as Obama’s chief economist in his Labor Department. In an EPI release, she said that this “immense loophole” for employers could cost $700 million in servers’ wages annually—and that’s a pre-COVID-19 figure, which stands to be higher now.
Fast Company
December 24, 2020
Damage to public payrolls will ripple through a community, said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. “You start laying off firefighters and teachers and they spend less and that hurts your local businesses.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution
December 24, 2020
Legally, employers are free to court other candidates, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“For the vast majority of workers, there is no legal right of recall, if the employer starts hiring again,” Shierholz said. “The exception to that is for unionized workers,” who often have specific rules about hiring and recall in their bargaining agreements.
Marketplace
December 24, 2020
Confronted with an economic collapse induced by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. government took several measures—including direct stimulus checks, boosting the amount of unemployment insurance, and giving funds to businesses to keep people on payroll—to alleviate the challenges caused by business shutterings and job losses. Fast Company talked to Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, about the government’s overall response: how it got off to a decent start before petering off into inaction— and leaving gaping inequities that need to be fixed in 2021.
Fast Company
December 24, 2020
“‘Reasonable time’ is not defined, and its ambiguity will make it difficult to enforce, providing employers an immense loophole and leaving workers behind,” said Heidi Shierholz, a scholar at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department under President Obama.
The Hill
December 24, 2020
The rule also removed a previous requirement around how much time tipped workers could be required to spend on non-tipped work. Previously, the government limited the amount of time a tipped worker could spend on non-tipped activities to 20% of their shift. Doing away with that limit allows employers to underpay workers drastically, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who worked in the Labor Department under President Obama.
“It allows employers to have workers spend more time doing non-tipped work while they’re still getting paid sub-minimum wage,” said Shierholz.
…
Over the course of a year, tipped workers would lose more than $700 million under this new rule, the EPI estimated last fall. That number has likely increased since the coronavirus pandemic, Shierholz noted. With indoor dining drastically reduced, many restaurants that have managed to stay open have shifted to mostly non-tipped work, such as preparing carryout orders.
CBS Moneywatch
December 24, 2020
The vice president didn’t mention how the Trump administration’s 2017 tax cuts overwhelmingly benefited wealthy households and powerful corporations, with corporate income tax rates slashed from 35% to 21%, corporate tax revenues plummeting, and a surge in stock buybacks while workers saw “no discernible wage increase” according to a report released last year by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Common Dreams
December 24, 2020