Unfortunately, many of the workers businesses as well as federal, state or local governments label essential don’t always get treated like it.
“Despite being categorized as essential, many workers in these industries are not receiving the most basic health and safety measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus,” the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that focuses on issues involving low- and middle-income workers, said in a May blog post. “Essential workers are dying as a result.”
The Houma Courier
September 8, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute recently pointed out that 12 million Americans have lost their employer-provided health care insurance during the pandemic.
Newsweek
September 8, 2020
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
The U.S. lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between January 2000 and December 2014 because of “growing trade deficits in manufacturing products prior to the Great Recession and then the massive output collapse during the Great Recession,” according to a 2015 report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Fox Business
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
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
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
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