Executive pay at companies has been on the rise — growing faster than the stock market, the pay of typical workers, college graduates and even the top 0.1% according to the Economic Policy Institute. That contributes to rising inequality, the institute finds. Proposition L, a tax measure on the November ballot, is intended to give businesses incentive to change their pay structure to bring executive compensation more in line with workers’.
San Francisco Public Press
October 6, 2020
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute on the educational challenges posed by the pandemic found that remote-learning programs are effective only if students have consistent access to the internet and computers and if teachers receive targeted training and support for online instruction.
Though researchers acknowledged the risk of virus infection is greater at school, they found that students who have not returned to the classroom are falling behind.
“Children’s academic performance is deteriorating during the pandemic, along with their progress on other developmental skills,” the study said.
LA Times
October 6, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic is disproportionately affecting the Black community, with 31 percent of Blacks personally knowing someone who had died of COVID-19, compared to 9 percent of white people, according to a poll conducted by the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Black women are nearly twice as likely as white men to have been laid off, furloughed or had their hours or pay reduced because of the pandemic, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. They are also more likely than white workers to work outside the home as an essential worker. Couple this with the #BlackLivesMatter movement that’s casting a glaring spotlight on racial injustice across the country, and we’ve got a recipe for a mental health crisis.
NBC News
October 6, 2020
Daniel Costa, an immigration law expert at the Economic Policy Institute, said that scrapping the survey could let the government use a different data source starting next year, and that it is almost certain to produce lower wage rates than the AEWR. Most workers would see their pay go down, particularly in the Southeastern states where the weak federal minimum wage prevails, he said.
Costa said the maneuvering by the Agriculture Department is consistent with Trump’s other policies on guestworker programs. The White House has said it wants to limit such programs to help U.S. workers, but in reality the number of visas for low-wage workers has grown under Trump’s watch, providing a pipeline of cheaper labor. Lowering pay could make the programs even more enticing.
“The wages should be fair,” Costa said. “If you set the wages so low that no [U.S. worker] will ever apply for these jobs, then yeah, you’re creating a labor shortage that leads to a justification for more guestworkers.”
Huffington Post
October 6, 2020
“September was the 7th month of the COVID crisis in the U.S. labor market, and the situation is dire,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said on Twitter. “Not counting temporary census jobs, our jobs deficit is now 11.0 million jobs.”
CBS Moneywatch
October 6, 2020
Trump’s administration still refuses to restore the $600 weekly add-on to unemployment benefits that expired at the end of July. On an annualized basis, according to Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the benefit’s expiration “pulled $667 billion of purchasing power out of the U.S. economy” just during the month of August.
New Republic
October 6, 2020
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute offers a dramatic, state-by-state look at efforts by state legislatures to preempt local ordinances and laws, from a higher minimum wage to paid leave policies, aimed at bettering the lives of their citizens — especially during the pandemic.
“Southern states are more likely than states in other regions to use preemption to stop local governments from setting strong labor standards that would support people struggling to make ends meet, such as raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing paid sick leave,” the report’s authors conclude.
They attribute this prevalence to a “long history of events and actions that have reinforced anti-Black racism and white supremacy toward preemption to the region’s long history of adopting policies that have.”
Pennsylvania Capital-Star
October 6, 2020
State government education and local government education lost 49,000 jobs and 134,000 jobs, respectively. Those losses reflect layoffs at public universities on the state level and layoffs at elementary, middle and high schools on the local level.
“There were large losses in the public sector in September, not only because of the decrease of temporary Census workers, but more acutely because of the losses in local K-12 education,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Education employment was already suffering prior to the current economy crises. School systems need more, not fewer, resources in these challenging times.”
CNBC
October 6, 2020
CRONIN: That’s Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. My first question for Heidi – is there, like, some kind of worker shortage happening?
SHIERHOLZ: The answer to that is just an absolute no. Right now, there are quite literally more than 8 million more unemployed people than job openings. So there’s an absolute excess of workers who need jobs – over and above job openings that are posted.
NPR Planet Money
October 6, 2020