Media clips
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San Diego Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez’s office is calling attention to a new report published by the Economic Policy Institute, which “sheds light on the need for district attorneys and other public prosecutors to bring forward cases involving wage theft and other employer-committed crimes against workers,” according to her office.
“We need to actually enforce labor laws in this country and address the crimes committed against ordinary workers every single day with the urgency it deserves,” Gonzalez said in a statement.
The report found that minimum wage violations in the 10 most populous states, including California, affected approximately 2.4 million low-income employees, who lost an average of $3,300 a year, or nearly a quarter of their earned wages.
Sacramento Bee May 19, 2021 -
State and local prosecutors across the United States are increasingly bringing criminal charges against employers who violate their workers’ rights by stealing wages or providing unsafe work environments, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive, Washington DC-based think-tank.
“This is happening now in large part because worker organisations – like unions and advocacy groups – have pushed for it in many instances. This is happening now also because we have in our country a growing understanding of how extreme workplace violations have become,” Terri Gerstein, a senior fellow at EPI and the report’s author, told Al Jazeera.
Prosecutors are also reconsidering their roles and thinking of ways they could use their prosecutorial power to pursue economic and social justice by holding bosses who violate the law to account, Gerstein added.
Gerstein’s paper is the second in EPI’s New Enforcers series, which focuses on players at the state and local levels working to uphold and promote employee rights. The first report released last year, also authored by Gerstein, argued for increased state and local enforcement of workers’ rights.
Al Jazeera May 19, 2021 -
Neither a shortage of jobs, nor of people to fill them, seems to be the cause of sluggish hiring, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, who authored the report.
“Job openings are swamped by unemployed workers,” Shierholz said, adding a true labor shortage would drive up wages in the industries where businesses were desperate for workers.
That has happened in the restaurant business and in other parts of the leisure and hospitality industry, but a wholesale wage jump across sectors isn’t in the cards just yet, Shierholz said.
San Francisco Chronicle May 18, 2021 -
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs for the Economic Policy Institute, said Biden needs to get the legislation through the Senate to make good on his rhetoric. She said Biden’s encouragement of Amazon workers trying to organize in Bessemer demonstrates the limits of verbal support.
“The classic example of that at this point is, the president comes out with a statement in Bessemer and the union does not prevail in the election,” said McNicholas, a former special counsel for the National Labor Relations Board. “It didn’t create a free and fair election. That would require policy reform.”
The vote broke heavily in the company’s favor. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union has appealed the election to the NLRB, citing unfair labor practices. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.
“Calling on Congress to do its job we all know is insufficient for Congress to do its job,” McNicholas said. “This administration is going to have to take an active role in championing the bill and an active role in looking for legislative mechanisms to actually get it passed, because we will not be able to pass the PRO Act and a host of other critical reforms with the 60-vote threshold.”
Roll Call May 18, 2021 -
But Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist who researches low- and middle-income workers with the Economic Policy Institute, said health concerns and child care responsibilities seem to be the main reasons holding workers back.
In April, she said, at least 25% of U.S. schools weren’t offering in-person learning, forcing many parents to stay home. And health concerns could gain new urgency for some workers now that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most settings.
Shierholz added that unemployment benefits are designed to give workers the time to find jobs that are better suited to their abilities.
“We want people well-matched to their skills and experience,” she said. “That’s what helps the economy run better.”
Associated Press May 18, 2021 -
Two economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute conclude in a new paper that the government is to blame for the fact that pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s.
“Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” write Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively, trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue that a decades-long loss of leverage largely explains the gap between the pay increases that workers would have received had they benefited fully from rising productivity, and the smaller wage and benefit increases that workers actually received, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times.
New York Times May 17, 2021 -
Elise Gould, Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with reporter Chris Bangert-Drowns about why we shouldn’t overreact to disappointing jobs data in April, and how to move the economy forward.
WPFW May 17, 2021 -
Business owners across the U.S. say they can’t find enough workers. Right now, the U.S. unemployment rate stands at about 6 percent and millions of people are actively looking for a job. But some have suggested $300 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits is keeping low-income workers from returning to work. For many people, that’s more than they made while on the clock and it has become a lifeline. To help frame the debate, we ask labor economist Valerie Wilson to unpack what the numbers really tell us, and provide context for what the future of work looks like in high contact industries.
Matter of Fact May 17, 2021 -
Elise Gould with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said most people aren’t working from home and can’t take kids to the office with them.
“Many women who have a hard time are the ones who have to physically go into work—and that’s the vast majority to this economy,” Gould said. “Even today, 80% of workers are actually going physically to work. So they have no ability to take care of young kids. They can’t go to those jobs.”
Gould said women have borne the brunt of unemployment during the pandemic. That’s largely because they take on disproportionate caregiving responsibility. But she said this was a problem before COVID, too.
Gould said mothers’ labor force participation has been softening for decades. She said the cost-benefit analysis is hard to weigh.
“It’s a false choice that people are making,” Gould said. “They don’t really have a choice between being able to work in the labor market reliably, and get the early care and education that they want for their kids because it is simply out of reach.”
That’s not just the case for low-income families, Gould said. Many moderate income families also struggle. She said the burden is worse for Black and Latina women.
Still, Gould said she’s hopeful those displaced from work due the pandemic can rejoin the workforce soon.
“I’m optimistic. I think that there will be many opportunities as it becomes safe to completely reopen and schools are open and child care centers are reliably open,” Gould said. “I think there will be opportunities that will return to many people who have been sidelined in this economy.”
Gould said without policy change to better support families and child care providers, a “return to normal” will remain out of reach for many.
WGLT May 17, 2021 -
A paper from the Economic Policy Institute finds that the widening gap between what an average worker earns each hour and what they produce has been one of the main drivers of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades.
And that’s no accident. The paper’s authors, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, argue that’s “been generated primarily through intentional policy decisions designed to suppress typical workers’ wage growth, the failure to improve and update existing policies, and the failure to thwart new corporate practices and structures aimed at wage suppression.”
Overly austere economic policies, globalization and less unionization haven’t helped either. The solution is more political than economic.
Bloomberg May 17, 2021 -
One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.
For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.
New York Times May 14, 2021 -
Research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and Howard University professor Ron Hira found the visa program was exploited by outsourcing companies and that “most H-1B employers … are taking advantage of a flawed H-1B prevailing wage rule to underpay their workers … resulting in major savings in labor costs for companies that use the H-1B.”
The institute’s Daniel Costa and Hira found that in 2019, IT staffing and outsourcing companies had applied for large numbers of H-1B workers at the second-lowest wage levels, while Google, Apple, Cisco and Oracle had a mix of higher and lower levels.
The Mercury News May 14, 2021 -
Because of the decline in union membership, “American workers are losing $200 billion a year,” she said, citing unspecified research. “So, this impacts not only the quality of life of the American worker, this impacts the quality of life of all Americans because it impacts our economy.”
“And to the extent that we are interconnected — when our economy does well, when the middle class does well — we all do well, which means unions must do well.”
The task force is aimed at bolstering union membership and worker power, specifically in organizing and bargaining. Harris seemed to be citing research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which studied the impact of “deunionizing” over the past few decades.
Business Insider May 14, 2021 -
“Customers are coming back faster than restaurants can staff up,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “By raising pay, they are able to get more workers in the door.”
Associated Press May 14, 2021 -
CEOs of 350 large publicly traded companies in 2019 earned an average 320 times more than the typical worker in the same company, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, the average ratio was 61-to-1.
Huffpost May 14, 2021 -
A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute noted through March there were an average of 9.8 million unemployed workers compared to 8.1m job openings. Several industries, including the accommodation and food service industries, had more than 1.5 unemployed workers per job opening.
In regards to labor shortage claims, the Economic Policy Institute noted such claims would be short-lived as the accommodation and food service industry added 241,400 jobs in April last year. The leisure and hospitality sectors have experienced the most rapid employment growth over the past month, and economists with the Economic Policy Institute warned of the negative economic consequences of cutting pandemic unemployment insurance benefits.
The Guardian May 14, 2021 -
Liberal economists who were skeptical of the labor shortage narrative have also ceded that some restaurants and hospitality businesses will not be able to keep up with current wage demands.
“Labor shortages—which we would define by a large acceleration of wage growth to a rate that would be hard to sustain over the next year—do seem to have popped up in the leisure and hospitality sector,” wrote Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Hill May 14, 2021 -
David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that allowing people a little extra time to find more suitable work would actually benefit the economy in the long run.
“It may be that some job options being presented to them are very low-paying jobs, and if enhanced unemployment benefits are giving workers a little more bargaining power, maybe that’s a good thing,” he said.
“It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to pull back on unemployment benefits simply because restaurant owners are struggling to find staff.”
The Hill May 14, 2021 -
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-profit think-tank based in Washington, D.C., further determined that April’s slow job growth had little to do with continued unemployment aid, but rather continued health concerns and an “outflow” of workers — primarily women — from employment due to caregiving concerns.
“Millions of Americans continue to cite health concerns as a reason for reluctance to return to work — as further evidence of this, vaccination rates correlate positively with increased employment across states,” wrote Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the EPI in a blog post published Tuesday.
Nextstar Media Wire May 14, 2021 -
“Overall, jobless claims are about three times as high as they were pre-Covid, but they’re coming down” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
New York Times May 14, 2021 -
Individual states rolling back federal unemployment benefits could have a disproportionate impact on marginalized workers. A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at how much of the UI disbursed in each state was from federal benefits. The EPI report notes that this could impact workers along racial lines, since states where Black Americans make up a larger share of the population tend to have weaker UI benefits.
In South Carolina, for instance, around 76% of total UI came from federal programs in the fourth quarter of 2020. Arkansas and Montana both leaned heavily on federal benefits in disbursement of UI benefits, with federal UI making up 74.7% and 68.7% of their total disbursed benefits, respectively.
“The US economy is still down 8.2 million jobs from what we had prior to the pandemic — and if you account for people newly entering the workforce since then, we are down over 11 million jobs,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at EPI, said in an email to Insider. “So, the economy is simply not at a place where we should be cutting back UI benefits. There are far more people looking for work and unable to find it than there are employers unable to fill vacancies, and pulling back on UI will only slow down the recovery.”
Business Insider May 14, 2021 -
“Before long many more workers will come back into job-search as it becomes increasingly safe to pursue these public facing jobs … and as wages rise to compensate for the extra risk of working in face-to-face places during the lingering pandemic,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Reuters May 14, 2021 -
As more Americans get vaccinated and restaurants and retail reopen, economists say many are eager to spend, with businesses struggling to keep up with demand, therefore raising prices, though some economists say the big picture is important to consider since the numbers are compared to the same month a year ago.
“If we just go back in time, in April 2020 and think about what was happening in the economy then, that was the worst month of the COVID collapse,” said Josh Bivens, the director of Research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Sinclair Broadcast Group May 14, 2021 -
The jobs restaurant workers did before have changed, as has the world around them, and wages should reflect that, said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.“When restaurants post jobs, they are posting jobs right now that are just inherently harder, more stressful than they were before [the Covid-19 pandemic],” Shierholz said. “They have to deal with anti-maskers, much more disinfecting and sanitation requirements, and they’re actually riskier jobs than they used to be.”That being said, Shierholz isn’t yet convinced that a true labor shortage has taken hold in restaurants and other sectors. Data such as hours worked and wage growth don’t yet reflect that.Businesses that say they have a hard time finding the workers they need, should really include the qualifier, “at the wages I want to pay,” Sheirholz said.Expecting to pay the same wages ignores the Covid-19 realities, she said, noting health and safety concerns as well as ongoing childcare needs.CNN Business May 14, 2021
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Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, and South Carolina have also announced plans to terminate the benefits they blame for slowing hiring.
But it’s an idea that is hotly disputed.
“Cutting pandemic UI benefits now, as some states have done or are considering, will not just hurt workers who are depending on federal benefits while they cannot find work or are unable to work, it will also drag on the economy, as those benefits are supporting spending,” wrote the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz.
Reuters May 14, 2021 -
Though the numbers are encouraging, there still aren’t enough jobs available for everyone who is unemployed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzes jobs impacting low- and middle-income workers.
On average, there were 9.8 million unemployed workers compared with 8.1 million job openings in March. That means there were 1.2 unemployed workers for every job opening.
In other words, for every 12 unemployed workers, there were only 10 jobs available, the institute said. That means there were no jobs available for 1.6 million unemployed workers, no matter what they did.
The most impacted were educational services, accommodation and food services, other services, and transportation and utilities, where there were more than three unemployed workers for every two job openings, the institute’s analysis showed.
Chicago Tribune May 14, 2021 -
“Particularly with the lack of a Wage and Hour administrator, it is tougher to go forward with proactive things,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at DOL and now a senior economist and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’s going into new territory, and it makes sense—they need a wage and hour administrator in there to lead on that.”
Bloomberg Law May 14, 2021 -
Lee was most recently the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which put on that 2014 conference and has been critical of free trade policies. Earlier this year, she testified on Capitol Hill in support of the Biden administration’s plan to bolster workers here in the U.S., drawing attention to low-wage workers who rely on federal anti-poverty programs to make ends meet.
At the Labor Department, Lee will turn her attention to labor practices and abuses overseas. The bureau she heads up has already been scrutinizing the products made with forced labor in Xinjiang, an issue she is expected to weigh in on during future China trade talks.
NPR May 14, 2021 -
Bob spoke with Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, and former chief economist for the Department of Labor during the Obama administration, to find out what the numbers can really tell us, and what they can’t.
WNYC On Media May 14, 2021 -
Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said there is some evidence of a labor shortage in the leisure and hospitality industry. Wages may be slowly increasing but they’re still not high enough to attract workers, she argued.
Shierholz said fast-food employers are competing with hurdles like child care, ongoing health concerns and low wages. She said annual earnings for non-supervisory leisure and hospitality workers remain around $22,000 a year.
If employers want to bounce back, they need to address workforce concerns, Shierholz recommended.
“Listen to what workers need and then try to meet those,” she said. “People’s lives are just a lot more chaotic than they were before the recession. As much as policies can be adjusted to make room for that, that will help attract workers.”
ABC News May 14, 2021