Wage theft is particularly rampant among farmers and farm labor contractors who employ H-2A workers, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Last year, the Department of Labor identified 12,000 labor violations in the H-2A program. The vast majority of those were wage violations. According to the Labor Department, farmers owed 5,000 workers a total of $2.4 million in back wages. Farm labor contractors were by far the most egregious offenders. Because many employees choose not to file complaints out of fear of retaliation, these numbers likely paint only a partial picture of the situation.
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Fixing the H-2A program’s broken wage system would involve a series of regulatory changes at the Department of Labor. That would be fairly easy for the incoming Biden administration to implement, according to Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the report on H-2A wage violations. The proposed wage freeze is already the subject of several lawsuits filed by Farmworker Justice on behalf of the UFW. If the wage freeze is found to be invalid, the Biden administration could simply choose not to litigate it further. Even if the wage freeze goes into effect, the new secretary of labor could choose to publish new regulations to supersede the Trump administration cuts.
New Republic
December 22, 2020
Heidi Shierholz with the Economic Policy Institute told Marketplace that the economy is backsliding without more stimulus spending to help shore up state and local government budgets.
“What happens in recessions is state and local governments see a big drop in revenues, because people have less money to spend,” Shierholz said. “Unless the federal government steps in to fill in their budget shortfalls, they have to make big cuts.”
She said that after the Great Recession, Congress didn’t provide enough relief to state and local governments, which meant they had to make big cuts.
That, she said, probably delayed recovery by over four years.
NPR Marketplace
December 22, 2020
“We just made this mistake. It would be less utterly infuriating if we hadn’t,” said Shierholz, who is a senior economist and the director of policy at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. During the Great Recession, she said, “it’s very straightforward and simple that austerity, severe austerity at the state and local level, caused by not getting enough federal aid, delayed the recovery by years. It didn’t have to be that way, but we made policy choices that allowed it.”
Huffpost
December 22, 2020
“It was the continuation of the assumption that policymakers had about white superiority, African American inferiority, and the desire to keep the two apart.” — Richard Rothstein, Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute
Axios
December 21, 2020
In fact, the Economic Policy Institute, says it may take up to a decade just for Latino workers to make up those losses. Correspondent Jessica Gomez travels to Chicago to show us the challenges facing Latino communities trying to get back on their feet.
WBAL-TV
December 21, 2020
Early in the pandemic, more than 1 in 6 Black workers lost their jobs between February and April, and as of April, less than half of the adult Black population was employed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The institute concluded that Black workers were less able to weather the storm because they have fewer earners in their families, lower incomes and lower liquid wealth than white workers.
Chicago Tribune
December 21, 2020
Biden could try to tackle parts of his economic agenda on his own. He could modify Trump’s trade tariffs, for example, or change regulations around the Affordable Care Act. These ideas might be helpful in the long run, says Heidi Shierholz with the Economic Policy Institute, but they don’t tackle the financial problems people are facing right now. The economy needs a stimulus and…
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: The president just doesn’t have those tools.
KHALID: The tools, for example, to offer more money to state and local governments so they can keep firefighters on the job. And so the biggest economic test for Biden isn’t how much he can do on his own, but how good he is at cutting deals.
SHIERHOLZ: The thing he’ll have to resort to is trying to lean on his nearly 50 years of experience in Washington. That is what it will come down to. Can President Biden convince Mitch McConnell to move on some of this stuff? Because that is what it will take to get the stimulus that is needed.
NPR
December 21, 2020
“We made the mistake of not enough fiscal stimulus in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and we should not be making it again,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider. “It appears we are on the cusp of making it again.”
Business Insider
December 21, 2020