“Overall employment is now just 1% from its pre-pandemic level,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, tweeted. “Private-sector jobs record strong gains rising 426,000 in March with notable jobs added in leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and retail trade. Public-sector employment still slow to return.”
U.S. News & World Report
April 1, 2022
Harris was former acting and deputy labor secretary during the Obama administration, and in a 2015 paper on the gig economy, he called for a new “independent worker” classification for on-demand app workers. These “independent workers” wouldn’t be independent contractors or employees, and would qualify for collective bargaining rights but not hours-based benefits, including overtime or minimum wages—a proposal that drew criticism from the AFL-CIO and the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Law
April 1, 2022
But few observers would dispute the assessment of Celine McNicholas, a former NLRB special counsel who is now the general counsel and director of policy and government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, who tells me, “Installing Jennifer Abruzzo as the NLRB’s general counsel will be the most impactful action that the Biden administration took in its first term for working people.”
American Prospect
April 1, 2022
In such private tribunals, workers win far less often and the median damages awarded are just $36,500, compared with $86,000 in state courts and $176,000 in federal court, an Economic Policy Institute analysis found.
American Prospect
April 1, 2022
A 2020 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found only a few employers have spent more than $1 million on anti-union consultants, and it’s typically taken several years to rack up such a bill. Any spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars is on the high end. None of the companies in EPI’s analysis came close to spending as much as Amazon in such a short period of time.
Huffpost
April 1, 2022
But some think that a punitive tax on windfall taxes could be effective in reducing big price hikes. “If you had excess profits tax, firms would say, ‘I could raise prices a ton, but those profits will be taxed away, so I’ll just keep prices low,’” economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute said.
Fiscal Times
April 1, 2022
Black workers saw the greatest percentage-point drop in unemployment rates, falling from 6.6% in February to 6.2% in March.
“Those series tend to be volatile, so you have to kind of look at it over a longer period of time. In the last three months, there has been a consistent decline in the Black unemployment rate, and the labor force participation rate has been fairly stable,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.
“That does point to things moving in the right direction,” Wilson added.
CNBC
April 1, 2022
Over the past year, wage growth has actually been historic, but that’s because the labor shortage is forcing companies to attract employees back to work. It was historically slow between 1979 and 2017, however, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Business Insider
April 1, 2022
Even before the pandemic, the cost of child care in New York had soared: The average cost of child care is $15,394, more than both the cost of in-state college tuition and average rent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
19th News
April 1, 2022
From health care to education to economics and business, … A 2021 report from the Economic Policy Institute found the median hourly wage (paywall).
Crain’s Chicago Business
March 25, 2022
Staff shortages are an issue districts have been dealing with across Minnesota and the rest of the country. A recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found state and local public education employment down nearly 5 percent since the start of the pandemic.
MPR News
March 25, 2022
But not all of these workers are leaving the labor market. There is evidence that many are “reshuffling” — that is, moving among different jobs in the same sector, or even between sectors. According to an analysis of BLS data conducted by the Economic Policy Institute in November of 2021, hiring rates are exceeding quit rates across many sectors, which suggests that high wage growth is attracting new applicants to open positions — and that many workers are both able and willing to accept jobs that are sufficiently attractive.
Harvard Business Review
March 25, 2022
Earning $15 an hour is the equivalent of $31,200 annually, if you assume the worker is scheduled 40 full hours a week for the entire year (which isn’t true for many low-wage workers). That is below what anyone needs to maintain a “modest yet adequate standard of living” in Nevada, according to a separate analysis done recently by the Economic Policy Institute.
This is Reno
March 25, 2022
According to findings from the Economic Policy Institute, the growth in worker productivity over the past seventy years hasn’t been mirrored by anything like a commensurate increase in wages. In recent decades, however, compensation for those now at the commanding heights of financial activity has ballooned — average Wall Street bonuses growing by an astonishing 1,743 percent since 1985 when adjusted for inflation (had the minimum wage grown at the same rate, it would currently be $61.75 rather than a meager $7.25).
Jacobin
March 25, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute, women earn 22 percent less than men, but grocery stores don’t charge women 22 percent less for groceries. Utilities don’t give us a break on our telephone, water or electricity bills because we are women and earn less. The pay gap contributes to women’s economic insecurity. When the pay gap is combined with the effects of COVID-19 on women’s employment, the result is a precarious existence for too many women.
Richmond Free Press
March 25, 2022
“There is sometimes a perception that the workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage are mostly teenagers in their first jobs,” the authors of an Economic Policy Institute report wrote. “In fact, the data show that most of the workers who would benefit from a federal increase to $15 are older and full-time workers.”
Business Insider
March 25, 2022
In recent years, forced arbitration clauses have become standard in many employment and consumer contracts. How many? In 2019, a study by the Economic Policy Institute, the National Employment Law Project, and the Center for Popular Democracy documented that more than half of American workers were already bound to such contracts, and projected that if the trend continued, fully 80 percent of U.S. workers would be bound by those terms by 2024.
American Prospect
March 25, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the spending power of that $7.25/hour has already dropped dramatically since 2009. In 2021 dollars, $7.25 was more like $9.17 per hour in 2009.
News Nation Now
March 25, 2022
As You Sow further noted that CEOs’ pay gains are much higher in an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Think Advisor
March 25, 2022
In Massachusetts, the state where Marx worked at the time, employers are now no longer allowed to present employees with non-competes agreements after they have already accepted a job offer. But states have wildly different levels of regulation around non-competes and across the country as a whole they are quite common. Around 50 percent of employers ask their employees to sign non-competes, with some variation across different industries and wage levels, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute report.
Bulitin
March 25, 2022
Features Elise discussing the gender pay gap.
WBAI New York
March 25, 2022
But already, the $15 minimum wage is soon to be less than what most workers need to sustain themselves. According to a new family budget calculator by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, a full-time worker in the U.S. county with the lowest cost of living, Orangeburg in South Carolina, would need to earn $14.50 an hour.
The 19th
March 25, 2022
Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) who has closely studied the USPS for years, shared with me in a recent interview that she too was initially suspicious of the reform bill. Usually broad support “signals something that’s weak or ineffectual, or even bad,” she said. “Not in this case.”
LA Progressive
March 25, 2022
According to an Economic Policy Institute report, preemption is a policy tactic more prevalent in the South and rooted in racist policymaking that prevents people of color and low-income families from expressing their needs. It’s been particularly effective in its use against workers, stopping a raise in the minimum wage in Birmingham; paid sick leave in Dallas; and fair scheduling for retail and foodservice workers in Atlanta.
MLK 50
March 25, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Minimum Wage Tracker, only 12 states currently have a minimum wage above $12.50. And as the price of goods and services keeps climbing, even $15 an hour isn’t good enough. EPI says a worker needs to earn at least $14.50 an hour to cover the cost of living in America’s most affordable county (Orangeburg, South Carolina). For cities like San Francisco, New York, and even Seattle, it goes as high as $23.
Fast Company
March 25, 2022
The National Bureau of Economic Research reports that in 1980, stock options were rarely included in CEO compensation. When they were a part of the compensation package, average stock options rarely made up even 20% of the total direct pay for CEOs. But today, according to Lawrence Mischel from the Economic Policy Institute, “Stock-related compensation comprises around 85% of CEO compensation.”
Business Insider
March 25, 2022
Since Takano introduced the 32-Hour Workweek Act in July, several groups, including the Economic Policy Institute and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has close to 100 members, have endorsed the measure, which would reduce the standard workweek by eight hours.
New York Times
March 25, 2022
The practice of a subminimum wage for tipped workers, which allows businesses to pay their workers US$2.13 an hour on the good-faith effort that tips will make up the difference, is flagged as well. “The enforcement of that is very, very sketchy,” Henderson noted. Wage theft affects 17 per cent of low-wage workers, according to an Economic Policy Institute report.
Bloomberg
March 25, 2022
Kyle K. Moore, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, put it this way: “Our current system has so many points of failure that you really have to address them on multiple levels.”
The Center for Public Integrity
March 25, 2022
Ron Hira is an associate professor of political science at Howard University. He is also a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute. He has written widely on high-skilled immigration, offshoring, and the decline of the middle class. Daniel Costa is an attorney and the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, and is a visiting scholar with the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis. He researches and writes about US and global labor migration.
Jacobin
March 25, 2022