SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Friday’s jobs report was a welcomed surprise for many observers. But encouraging as it is to see some people going back to work, the report also triggered alarm bells. Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute worries lawmakers might see those 2 1/2 million jobs added in May and forget about the 19 million other jobs that were lost in March and April.
NPR
June 10, 2020
Two reports from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute published in back-to-back years found “no evidence at all” of labor shortages in the top H-2B occupations. And in its editorial, the pro-immigration New York Times concluded that labor shortage claims don’t stand up. The Times, applying Econ 101 basics, wrote that when labor is scarce, unemployment falls, and wages rise. The Times noted that H-2B workers are subject to exploitation and unemployment “is high in the major H-2B fields, which include landscaping, groundskeeping, construction, hospitality and seafood processing, while wages in those fields have long been flat or declining.”
Korea Times
June 10, 2020
“None of what we’re seeing should come as a surprise,” says Valerie Wilson, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank which recently published a report on the impact of the virus on African-Americans. “If you’ve been alert and attentive to these inequalities over the generations, you can almost predict how any crisis is going to play out.”
Financial Times
June 10, 2020
VOX
June 10, 2020
McDonald’s did not bother to note in the video that for years, it paid lobbyists millions of dollars to combat the push for a $15 federal minimum wage. Lower wages are at the heart of the systemic oppression McDonald’s notes in the ad. Currently, there is a 30% pay gap between white and Black workers across the U.S, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Ad Week
June 10, 2020
“Racism generates exclusion, discrimination, oppression, exploitation in a number of ways,” Valerie Wilson, a director at the Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider.
Business Insider
June 10, 2020
“Many of the advocacy workers on these issues see the guest workers as being even worse off and more indentured,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. That’s because H-2A workers are completely dependent on the individual employers who sponsor them. If they lose their job—if they’re fired for complaining about working conditions or become too sick to work—they can be forced to leave the country immediately. Terrified of losing the chance to support their families, they’re unlikely to speak up about abuses.
The Appeal
June 10, 2020
The black/white wage gap was significantly wider in 2019 than at the start of the century — even as Hispanic workers have slightly narrowed their own gap with white workers, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
June 10, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute issued a lengthy report at the beginning of May that insisted the Department of Labor (DOL) allows employers to undercut local wages via the H-1B. “Among the top 30 H-1B employers are major U.S. firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Apple, and Facebook,” the group wrote. “All of them take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill.”
Dice Insights
June 10, 2020