On this episode, you’ll hear from:
Seritta Norige, former Disney World employee
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, Economic Policy Institute
Julie Schecter, Skimm’r
Tappan Vickery, director of voter engagement, Headcount
Salvatore Attardo, professor of linguistics, Texas A&M University
Skimm This podcast
October 13, 2020
It’s unclear whether DOL can still set AEWRs for 2021 without the USDA farm labor survey. Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that it might simply choose to retain this year’s AEWRs for next year. This would avoid a potential significant pay cut, but it wouldn’t reflect any wage increases observed in 2020.
The Counter
October 13, 2020
Research co-authored by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, shows that shift Nair described in employer behavior. In 2015, 41% of approved labor condition applications were for level one wages, while in fiscal year 2018, only 16% of approved labor condition applications were level one. “They basically all shifted to level two,” Costa told Bloomberg Law.
Costa contends the new increase in wage levels likely won’t result in fewer H-1B visa holders in the U.S.
For fiscal 2019 data, more than 300,000 employer applications for level three and level four H-1B wage earners were approved, far in excess of the number of visas actually issued, Costa said. So even if all employers seeking H-1B workers at a level one or level two wage stopped sponsoring those workers because their salaries would be too costly, there would still be many more applicants for H-1B jobs than the number of H-1B petitions approved last year, he said.
Bloomberg Law
October 13, 2020
Happily, the Economic Policy Institute (on whose board I serve) has just launched a project on Unequal Power. It is the indispensable frame of analysis for political and economic comprehension and action.
The project has commissioned two dozen reports from historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars. The first paper, by Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan who was once law clerk to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, explains just how conservative courts have taken us back to the pre–New Deal era in undermining worker rights legislated by Congress.
With worse to follow if far-right Republicans tighten their grip on the courts. You need to read this.
The American Prospect
October 13, 2020
A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that the U.S. has lost overall more than 91,000 manufacturing plants and 5 million manufacturing jobs since 1997. It is true that the U.S. gained about 500,000 manufacturing jobs from 2016 to 2019, largely due to increased domestic purchasing from tax cuts and increased federal spending.
NBC News
October 9, 2020
According to research by the Economic Policy Institute published in late August and taking into account jobs gained back after the worst of the shutdowns during the spring, the coronavirus pandemic has left more than six million Americans without job-sponsored health insurance. When you take into account dependents, that number rises to more than 12 million.
“Though we don’t yet know precisely how damaging the Covid-19 shock has been to health insurance access, the shock has laid bare the huge uncertainty that employer-linked health insurance introduces into U.S. families’ lives. Even in normal times millions of U.S. households must manage coverage transitions in a given month. During economic crises, these coverage changes increasingly include transitioning into uninsured status, which puts families’ health and financial security at risk,” wrote Josh Bivens, author of the report and director of research at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
October 9, 2020
Elise Gould, “State of Working America Wages 2019” (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2020), available at https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/.
Center for American Progress
October 9, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the ending of weekly $600 jobless benefits in late July cut personal income by $667 billion, expressed on an annual basis, in August.
“One way to scale this impact is to express it as the equivalent of an across-the-board pay cut for all U.S. workers — in these terms it can be thought of as an economy-wide 7.1% pay cut,” writes the EPI’s Josh Bivens. “In September’s data, when the full $600 is completely gone from personal income data, this will rise to closer to 10%.”
MultiBriefs: Exclusive
October 9, 2020
However, as important as savings may be, many Americans simply aren’t making it happen. One study from GOBankingRates showed that 57% of the 8,000 people it polled had under $1,000 in savings and 39% had nothing saved at all. And, according to the Economic Policy Institute, almost half of American families have nothing in retirement savings.
Star-Herald
October 9, 2020
The real-world consequences of not passing new stimulus at this point in the crisis are “huge,” Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under the Obama administration, told ABC News.
“It’s literally millions of jobs in the balance here,” Shierholz, who currently works as a senior economist and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, added.
ABC News
October 9, 2020