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
It is no wonder, then, that there is a national teacher shortage. In 2017, the Learning Policy Institute reported that two-thirds of teachers who left the profession did so for reasons other than retirement. From 2008-2016, there was an almost 38 percent drop in applicants to teacher prep programs. The Economic Policy Institute reported in 2019 that schools were having a harder time filling teaching vacancies. Additionally, “about 30 percent of college graduates who became teachers were not in the profession five years later.”
But the research indicates that teachers stay in their classrooms when they feel a sense of autonomy and administrative support. The Economic Policy Institute report cited testing and accountability measures and lack of administrative support as the first two reasons why teachers leave the profession. Test scores obscure important contexts: the relative ability of the cohort that year; how well its members get along; and the economic or cultural factors that contributed to the test score. Anyone who’s taken a test knows, too, that often, a test merely tells you how good a test-taker someone is, not their content knowledge or habits of mind.
San Diego Reader
September 17, 2020
As many as 6 million Americans may have lost their insurance as the coronavirus shuttered businesses and swelled the jobless ranks this year, the Economic Policy Institute estimated.
Bloomberg Government
September 17, 2020
CHATTERJEE: Wilson heads the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute. She says Black, Latino and Native workers were more likely to have jobs that were lost during the pandemic or jobs that did not allow them to work from the safety of their homes, therefore putting them more at risk of getting infected. Wilson says people in these communities are also less likely to have savings, making it harder for them to weather times of economic downturn. And she worries that the pandemic has worsened these disparities.
NPR
September 17, 2020