Proper or not in a business context, MA now constitutes a vast privatized judiciary that “has largely displaced the civil justice system for most of the major transactions of ordinary people,” in the words of a 2015 briefing paper by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The College Fix
September 17, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 465,000 workers in Connecticut would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15, nearly 60 percent of which are women. The demographic affected by minimum wage also skews significantly older, with only 12 percent of those workers aged 19 or younger expected to be impacted. cq
Yale Daily News
September 17, 2020
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that public school teachers were paid about 20% less in weekly wages than college-educated peers in 2019.
The report’s authors, Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel, call this the “teacher wage penalty” — and it’s actually gotten better since 2018. The 19.2% rate in 2019 was down from 22% in 2018.
Business Insider
September 17, 2020
Four years later, it’s clear that Trump’s trade policies have failed U.S. workers. Instead of more good jobs, his ever-escalating trade wars have led to higher costs, lost markets, and more plant closures. Economic Policy Institute research shows that nearly 1,800 U.S. factories disappeared between 2016 and 2018.
USA Today
September 17, 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 17, 2020
“Now, because of the pandemic, we will once again be trying to recover lost ground for years to come,” said Elise Gould, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Policymakers should take heed of the policies that worked to help produce positive outcomes in 2019 and help get us back on the road to full employment sooner rather than later.”
Los Angeles Times
September 17, 2020
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we started to see glimpses of Keynes’s imagined world at midcentury, around the time the journalist Tom Wolfe documented a proliferation of American subcultures dedicated to leisure—surfing, stock-car racing, dropping acid—that Wolfe called “a happiness explosion.” That boom was short-lived, however, because the working-class prosperity that supported it went kaput. Looking at trends in U.S. work hours from 1979, when the rise in income inequality began, to 2007, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute recorded an increase of nearly 11 percent—“the equivalent of every worker working 4.5 additional weeks per year.”
The New Republic
September 17, 2020
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