According to the Economic Policy Institute, 60% of the H-1B positions in the fiscal year 2019 were at a wage lower than the local average wage. Increasingly, H-1Bs are used less to secure hard-to-find competencies than they are to subvert the American worker market to get foreign labor at a discount.
Detroit Free Press
June 25, 2020
Coupled with other coronavirus relief measures, the extra $600 in enhanced benefits has helped many Americans stay afloat — and even save more than usual — throughout the pandemic, with some economists calling it the “best” part of the economic response to the coronavirus. The $600 increase has been “one of the most effective parts of the CARES Act on both humanitarian and economic grounds,” writes Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
CNBC
June 25, 2020
“In case the administration hasn’t noticed, the immigration system is already shut down, almost entirely, as a result of the pandemic,” said Daniel Costa, an attorney with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
“Considering the number of new coronavirus infections continues to increase rapidly in the United States and abroad, it’s difficult to imagine the immigration system opening back up anytime soon,” Costa wrote in an analysis published Tuesday.
“Would any of the banned visas have been issued in these programs before the end of the year absent this proclamation? I’m not convinced they would have.”
Voice of America
June 25, 2020
“There’s still this two tracks of this ongoing hemorrhaging of jobs while we also see a lot of people getting rehired,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Wall Street Journal
June 25, 2020
“There’s still this two tracks of this ongoing hemorrhaging of jobs while we also see a lot of people getting rehired,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Wall Street Journal
June 25, 2020
These are also relatively good-paying jobs for black workers since they face less wage discrimination in the public sector than in the private sector. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that black workers’ earnings amounted to only 87.1% of white workers’ earnings in the private sector, when controlling for age, education, and other factors. By contrast, in the public sector, black workers earned 97.8% as much as their white counterparts.
GV Wire
June 24, 2020
But the truth is that even those of us who take an expansive view of immigration’s benefits to society and the economy get a little queasy when the subject turns to guest-worker programs. As the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute noted in a 2018 report, such programs tend to leave migrant workers “vulnerable to exploitation and abuse” and employers altogether too “reliant on temporary, low-wage migrant labor.”
New Republic
June 24, 2020
The racial pay gap is well-documented and persistent. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, Black workers “have been losing ground since 2000, with larger [B]lack-white wage gaps across the entire distribution of earnings.” For example, Black wages at the median in 2019 were only 75.6 percent of white wages, a 3.6 percent increase from 2000, when Black wages at the median were 79.2 percent of white wages. Even when looking at wages by education level, Blacks are paid less than whites. Blacks with advanced degrees are paid 82.4 cents for each dollar earned by whites with an advanced degree.
Forbes
June 24, 2020
A 2017 study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that 2.4 million employees across the ten largest U.S. states lost $8 billion annually to just one form of wage theft — employers paying less than the minimum wage. In states with the most severe cases like Pennsylvania and Texas, researchers found that the average victim lost 30% of their annual salary to wage theft.
Money
June 24, 2020