The trend is mirrored nationwide. Manufacturing across the U.S. is still down 720,000 workers from February despite gaining 29,000 jobs in August, with the pandemic more than wiping out the overall modest gains of 500,000 from Trump’s first three years in office — about the same pace of growth as under President Barack Obama. It was not an improvement over prior years — nor did it manage to restore more than a fraction of the jobs lost in the previous decade, according to an August analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
September 17, 2020
“Now, because of the pandemic, we will once again be trying to recover lost ground for years to come,” said Elise Gould, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Policymakers should take heed of the policies that worked to help produce positive outcomes in 2019 and help get us back on the road to full employment sooner rather than later.”
Los Angeles Times
September 17, 2020
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we started to see glimpses of Keynes’s imagined world at midcentury, around the time the journalist Tom Wolfe documented a proliferation of American subcultures dedicated to leisure—surfing, stock-car racing, dropping acid—that Wolfe called “a happiness explosion.” That boom was short-lived, however, because the working-class prosperity that supported it went kaput. Looking at trends in U.S. work hours from 1979, when the rise in income inequality began, to 2007, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute recorded an increase of nearly 11 percent—“the equivalent of every worker working 4.5 additional weeks per year.”
The New Republic
September 17, 2020
So what actually makes workplaces better for employees, particularly women workers and workers of color who experience racism and sexism on the job? The time-tested, if perhaps unexciting, answer is unions. As the Urban Institute noted last year, unions help close pay disparities between white workers and black workers; according to the Economic Policy Institute, they similarly reduce the pay gap between men and women. (At least one new study also suggests that unions additionally lower prejudice among white workers.) Like anything else, unions aren’t a magic fix for every conceivable workplace ill (and they’re sadly too few and far between after years of attacks from the right), but compared to tinkering with the demographics of the C-suite, unions win every time when it comes to improving working conditions for the majority of employees in a given workplace.
The New Republic
September 17, 2020
Costa, D., and P. Martin. 2020, March 24. “Coronavirus and Farmworkers: Farm Employment, Safety Issues, and the H-2A Guestworker Program.” Economic Policy Institute. Available online: https://www.epi.org/publication/coronavirus-and-farmworkers-h-2a/.
Agriculture and Applied Economics Association
September 17, 2020
In addition, a 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that Black Americans are way behind their white counterparts in terms of income, poverty rate, infant mortality rate, home ownership rate, life expectancy and college graduation rate.
The Emerald Magazine
September 17, 2020
This is a matter of simple math, but it is nonetheless a stark reminder of how much income has shifted over the years from labor to capital and from the median worker to the elite. It is a product of a sustained gap between growing productivity and stagnant wages. For example, an Economic Policy Institute study a while ago demonstrated that productivity (output per worker) had increased 74.4 percent between 1973 and 2013, while wages had risen only 9.2 percent during those same years.
Nonprofit Quarterly
September 17, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report features his “most egregious attacks on working people” since the president took office in 2017 after campaigning as their champion. The review comes as the country endures the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crisis—and as Trump prepares to face off against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in November.
Common Dreams
September 17, 2020
Wage theft costs the state’s workforce a whopping $2 billion in earnings per year, according to a 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C.
KQED
September 17, 2020
The pandemic already has cost New Jersey 56,900 jobs in state and local government, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group. That’s an 11% decline, behind only Wisconsin, New York, Virginia and McConnell’s Kentucky in the percentage of public sector jobs lost.
NJ.com
September 17, 2020