The Economic Policy Institute separately found that roughly 1,800 U.S. factories shuttered during Trump’s first term.
Common Dreams
October 1, 2024
The letters were released days after the Economic Policy Institutereleased an analysis showing that CEO pay has soared by 1,085% since 1978 while the pay of typical U.S. workers has grown by just 24%.
Common Dreams
October 1, 2024
Joseph Costello, a Kamala Harris campaign spokesperson, reacted to Donald Trump’s speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, picking on the former president’s comments about overtime pay.
“As president, Trump took executive action to rip away overtime pay for *millions* of workers, including nearly 5 million workers without a college degree,” Costello said on Twitter/X.
Costello attached a link to a paper by the Economic Policy Institute titled: More than eight million workers will be left behind by the Trump overtime proposal.
The Guardian
October 1, 2024
During Trump’s term, the NLRB — a quasi-judicial body with up to five members appointed by the president — acted on all 10 items in a 2017 corporate wishlist from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit nonpartisan think tank.
Capital & Main
October 1, 2024
Several other states are considering similar legislation. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, estimates that 60 million workers could soon be protected by such bans.
Huffpost
October 1, 2024
Across the country, districts, parents and students are struggling with similar issues. While the number of bus drivers have increased since pandemic lows, employment has not fully recovered. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows a 15 percent drop in school bus drivers employed in k-12 public schools from September 2019 to 2023. During that time, 1.4 million more students enrolled in public schools. School bus workers tend to be older and paid less than the average worker, EPI notes.
PBS Newshour
October 1, 2024
‘[T]he use of AI in the healthcare setting is exacerbating long-standing issues that healthcare professionals have bargained over, including staffing ratios and discretion in patient care.’
—Analysts Patrick Oakford, Josh Bivens and Celine McNicholas. (Source: “Federal AI legislation: An evaluation of existing proposals and a road map forward.” Economic Policy Institute, Sep. 25)
AI in Healthcare newsletter
October 1, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of infant care in Montana is more than $9,000 a year.
Montana Public Radio
October 1, 2024
School bus driver numbers have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. There were 192,400 school bus drivers in September 2023, down 15.1% from September 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Ohio Capital Journal
October 1, 2024
In the past few years, America’s business lobby has sort to reverse that progress and roll back protections, according to the Economic Policy institute. This year alone, six states—Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, and West Virginia, enacted legislation to weaken child labor protections, despite an increase in child labor violations.
Common Dreams
October 1, 2024
Ben Zipperer, a low-wage labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the early fears around automation and robots threatening jobs in the foodservice industry are not being realized. Automation has shown to make workers more productive and effective, he said.
Robots have also been shown to make businesses more efficient and profitable, Zipperer siad, which creates an “offsetting demand factor.” That increased demand and profitability can actually help keep the cost of food for customers more affordable, he added.
States Newsroom
October 1, 2024
Around 900,000 workers — nearly a third of Missouri’s workforce — would either get automatic raises or likely get raises because they already make just above that new minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And with one in five private employees nationwide lacking paid sick time, organizers say that this proposition would especially benefit poor Missourians.
Kansas City Beacon
October 1, 2024
The meme claimed real weekly wages increased 8.2% under Trump and fell 3.9% under Biden. The data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and charted by the St. Louis Fed showed that, indeed, real wages rocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a historical height of $393 — a number based on 1982-84 inflation-adjusted dollars — in the second quarter of 2020.
This is due to the fact that low-paying jobs disappeared during the height of the pandemic while workers with higher-paying jobs adapted to remote work, pushing the average up, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Snopes
October 1, 2024
…between employers and unionized employees to take time; the Economic Policy Institute and the Department of Labor both say it often takes…[paywall].
Salt Lake Tribune
October 1, 2024
In an August 2023 blog post, he argued that the estimate of indirect and induced jobs in the API report was derived using “exaggerated multipliers” and “double counting.” In an email to us, O’Leary — using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the partially labor union-funded Economic Policy Institute — estimated that there were 55,509 fracking-related jobs in Pennsylvania in 2023, of which 18,636 were direct jobs and the rest were indirect and induced jobs.
FactCheck.org
October 1, 2024
According to a published 2019 report, the Economic Policy Institute found that the poverty rate among restaurant workers in those states was significantly lower than in states that do not require employers to pay the state minimum wage.
Worcester Telegram and Gazette (Massachusetts)
October 1, 2024
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank funded by labor unions, wrote in June that a mass deportation would create particularly bad bottlenecks in the food supply chain. He added construction to the list of acutely vulnerable sectors in an emailed statement to Business Insider and said that “the upward price pressure could be significant and pretty long-lasting.”
Business Insider
October 1, 2024
There’s an interesting history to why, nicely reviewed for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) by Nina Mast. As with so much in American life, the full history goes back to slavery, or, more precisely, the period just after Emancipation. Former slaves often found employment in food service and other service jobs, but, as Mast puts it, “instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services.”
Jacobin
October 1, 2024
Consider CEO pay (a glaring lacuna in the Business Roundtable’s 2019 missive about the new era of corporate responsibility). A report from the Economic Policy Institute found that in 2022, the projected average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned US companies was $25.2 million. Meanwhile, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was approximately 344-to-one, meaning it would take nearly 350 years for a typical employee to match what their CEO made in just one year. Compare that with 1965 when the ratio was 21-to-one.
Bloomberg
October 1, 2024
“Michigan’s in the process right now of reversing a lot of damage that was done to its state labor laws, and you could foresee that they might join some other states who have begun to get more ambitious,” said Jennifer Sherer, acting deputy director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network.
Sherer said the Michigan bills reflect a broader trend across states including Montana, Missouri, Illinois and New Hampshire, where lawmakers and residents have voted down right-to-work legislation and ballot initiatives.
Capital & Main
October 1, 2024
The average American needs to be making an average annual income of at least $421,926 in order to be considered part of the top 1%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The average income of everyone else (the “bottom 99%”) is $50,107.
MoneyWise
October 1, 2024
The political and union “concerns are linked and related,” said Jennifer Sherer, who leads the Worker Power Project at the Economic Policy Institute. “The vast majority of workers are in a position where if they decline an employer request, even if it’s something that might seem outlandish” such as attending a political candidate visit to the workplace or a Bible study, “most workers have a reasonable fear that could come with some consequence.”
Bloomberg Law
October 1, 2024
Trump NLRB appointees, the union contends, were too friendly with employers, hurting employees’ unionization efforts. The former president also finalized a rule restricting federal employees’ union activity, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and his OSHA team fielded fewer health and safety complaints, according to the National Employment Law Project.
HR Brew
October 1, 2024
Comparing pre-pandemic earnings with recent data may show a clearer picture because income in 2020, when the pandemic shuttered the economy, skewed higher due to millions of low-income workers losing their jobs that year, effectively excluding them from earnings data, according to left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Because of that, comparisons between 2020 and other years may not be apples-to-apples.
CBS Moneywatch
October 1, 2024
The sky-high job growth was bound to slow, in part because the economy lacked room for expansion after employers had hired the workers they needed and a dwindling number of unemployed people remained on the sidelines, according to Valerie Wilson, a labor economist who runs the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“We expected job growth at some point to slow down,” Wilson said. “To me, that alone isn’t cause for concern.”
ABC News
October 1, 2024
As I wrote in this Prospect piece, the good news is that heterodox economics is getting more of a respectful hearing nowadays. If you are very good, you can get tenure at a major economics department by studying the inequities and anomalies in the real world rather than by playing with models and manipulating algebra.
The Economic Policy Institute, founded in 1986, gets a good deal of the credit. Our colleague Harold Meyerson has just written this history of EPI and its increasing influence.
American Prospect
October 1, 2024
“Michigan’s in the process right now of reversing a lot of damage that was done to its state labor laws, and you could foresee that they might join some other states who have begun to get more ambitious,” said Jennifer Sherer, acting deputy director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network.
Sherer said the Michigan bills reflect a broader trend across states including Montana, Missouri, Illinois and New Hampshire, where lawmakers and residents have voted down right-to-work legislation and ballot initiatives.
Capital & Main
September 24, 2024
The average American needs to be making an average annual income of at least $421,926 in order to be considered part of the top 1%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The average income of everyone else (the “bottom 99%”) is $50,107.
MoneyWise
September 24, 2024
The political and union “concerns are linked and related,” said Jennifer Sherer, who leads the Worker Power Project at the Economic Policy Institute. “The vast majority of workers are in a position where if they decline an employer request, even if it’s something that might seem outlandish” such as attending a political candidate visit to the workplace or a Bible study, “most workers have a reasonable fear that could come with some consequence.”
Bloomberg Law
September 24, 2024