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
Suddenly, the people who literally built this country were recast as overpaid and entitled, nevermind that the average CEO-to-employee pay ratio has leaped 940% over the last 40 years, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute.
The report also states that CEOs in the country’s top companies make an average of $17.2 million a year, including stock options, for a pay ratio of 278-to-1.
CantonRep.com
September 8, 2020
“The state of the labor market is an F,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “We have fewer jobs than we had at any time during the Great Recession. There is no way you could give this economy a passing grade.”
CBS Moneywatch
September 8, 2020
And now, decades later, the United States has lost almost 90,000 factories, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs, and a wide array of essential supply chains.
Dallas Morning News
September 8, 2020
What most people don’t know is that after that century-long decline, the annual hours we work have risen considerably since the 70s. Data from the Economic Policy Institute show that work hours rose 13% from 1975 to 2016. Though the workweek remained relatively stable over this time, this change reflects an increase of about five additional weeks per year.
In These Times
September 8, 2020