At the Republican National Convention in August, the GOP claimed that their policies under Trump have benefitted Black workers across the United States.
However, research paints a starkly different picture. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wage gap between Black and white Americans has actually grown nearly 33% from 2000 to 2019.
NJ Today
September 8, 2020
Look at the success of SEIU Local 32BJ in organizing and setting wage and benefit standards for building-service workers up and down the East Coast, or the success of UNITE-HERE in setting standards in the hotel industry before the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked such havoc on the industry. (Full disclosure: I co-authored a report on unions bargaining beyond the worksite for the Economic Policy Institute.)
The Nation
September 8, 2020
Today, if you walk past a construction site in New York, you will immediately notice that the stereotype of the white male construction worker is a thing of the past. A 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that minorities account for over 55 percent of the union construction workers in New York. The same transformation is occurring across the country. The building trades in California are increasingly Latino.
The American Prospect
September 8, 2020
The first $1,200 cash payments to U.S. households cost about $300 billion, according to one estimate from the Economic Policy Institute.
Fox Business
September 8, 2020
Hamric-Waninger said, “Overall, to have that steady, stable growth is good. We’re very diversified here. We’ve held our heads above water during COVID. A lot of cities haven’t.”
She said, “We rarely see double-digit growth in wages. Maybe we did when the hospital was being built. But most of our growth is steady. Not a lot of spikes. Three% is good.”
The Economic Policy Institute agrees. Its website says the growth target for wages should be between 3.5% and 4% a year.
It says, “It will take wage growth of at least 3.5 to 4% for workers to begin to reap the benefits of economic growth — and to achieve a genuine recovery from the Great Recession.”
Messenger Inquirer
September 8, 2020
Though they make up about one in nine workers overall, Black workers comprise about one in six of all front-line industry workers, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. They are disproportionately represented in employment at grocery stores, public transit, warehouses, and child care.
The Progressive
September 8, 2020
Or, as Mr. Hubbard said in an online seminar hosted by the Economic Policy Institute last month, “if an overweight person comes to the E.R. with a heart attack, you treat the heart attack before you lecture him or her about weight.”
New York Times
September 8, 2020
Did the pay of the forgotten men and women improve relative to CEOs? No. Again, even before the economic collapse, the relationship worsened from the worker’s perspective during the Trump years, according to a study by Lawrence Mishel and Jori Kandra for the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Mishel and Kandra found that the ratio of CEO compensation to worker compensation — which was “only” 21 to 1 in 1965 — has continued to rise. The ratio was 293 to 1 in 2018. It was 320 to 1 in 2019. Happy Labor Day!
“It’s just to me amazing that somehow Trump has been able to maintain this idea that . . . he cares about or has done anything good for working people,” said Thea M. Lee, EPI’s president. “He has sold himself as a billionaire populist, but his policies have attacked working people and working-people power at every turn.”
Washington Post
September 8, 2020
The unemployment rate for Black, Hispanic and Asian workers in New Jersey was well above 15% for the second quarter of 2020, while the rate for white workers was 13%, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
September 8, 2020
Building back better starts with one word: unions. According to the Economic Policy Institute, workers earn 11.2% more income when they are represented by a union, compared to their non-unionized peers in the same industries. That wage benefit is even more significant for workers of color. Black union members are paid almost 14% more, and Latinos are paid 20% more, than equivalent workers who don’t have the benefit of a union fighting for them.
Detroit News
September 8, 2020