“It doesn’t change the overall picture — we had a tight labor market that was pulling people in and reducing poverty,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. But it underscores that “there was still a lot of room for improvement.”
New York Times
September 16, 2020
“If this applies to a reasonable share of their low-wage workers, then that’s really putting their minimum wage at a decent level, and that’s a nice thing to see,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute and formerly the chief economist at the Labor Department in the Obama administration.
CBS
September 16, 2020
In a response to Harris and Krueger, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote a paper noting that Uber drivers cannot keep their apps open and reject rides without being penalized by Uber for having a low acceptance rate. It also noted that Uber operates a “guaranteed earnings” program that keeps track of work time and basically functions like a minimum wage. “We disagree with the proposal to deny minimum-wage and overtime protections to Uber drivers and see no need for a third employment status,” the paper concluded.
Medium
September 16, 2020
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 16, 2020
Census officials noted the response rate to its annual survey was just 73% in March because of the health crisis, compared to about 83% in prior months and a year earlier. Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says the low rate raises “significant concerns about data quality.”
USA Today
September 16, 2020
That means the change in real median household income between 2018 and 2019 would have been a 4.1% increase instead of 6.8%, according to Elise Gould, senior economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
September 16, 2020
Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute said that with pandemic job losses, “the reduced income for a larger number of people will mean that more people are eligible for various programs.”
Wilson says job and income losses have been greatest among low-income workers of color, especially women.
Marketplace
September 15, 2020
[14] Rothstein, R. (2018). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation. For a case study, see Rothstein, R. (2014, Oct 15). The making of Ferguson. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson
Georgia Budget & Policy Institute
September 15, 2020
It is our collective responsibility to show the people what a labor union is, where our strength comes from, who the union belongs to, what collective bargaining is and what we mean by union solidarity. As recently stated in the Economic Policy Institute report How Today’s Unions Help Working People: “Unions improve the lives of all workers. Unions raise workers¹ wages and strengthen their rights at work.”
The CT Mirror
September 15, 2020
Economic inequality plagues Black families. A June 2020 report from the Economic Policy Institute determined the average hourly wage of a working Black male in America in 2019 was a little more than $20, or 71% of the average wage of a working white male, at $29. The salary of Black women was even lower: the average wage of a working Black female, about $18, was 83% of the average wage of a working white female, who made an average $22.
Cronkite News
September 15, 2020