Since 2001, free trade with China has cost millions of Americans their jobs. For example, the Economic Policy Institute has found that from 2001 to 2015, about 3.4 million U.S. jobs were lost due to the nation’s trade deficit with China.
Breitbart
April 22, 2020
“When we get on the other side of the pandemic, it’s going to be a buyers’ market again for labor,” said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute. “People will just be scrambling to get a job, any job.”
Bloomberg
April 22, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has sent shockwaves through the U.S. economy. In just three weeks, more than 10 percent of American workers applied for unemployment benefits, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Fox Business
April 22, 2020
It seems that this form of workforce tracking is becoming increasingly common in recent years. Walmart reportedly hired an intelligence-gathering service from Lockheed Martin and ranked its stores by labor activity when it faced protests eight years ago from the union-backed activist group OUR Walmart. Celine McNicholas, the director of government affairs and labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, said: “Employers spend millions of dollars a year to hire union avoidance advisers to see how susceptible they are to their workers organizing.”
Breitbart
April 22, 2020
In February, women accounted for 50 percent of the payroll and in March they accounted for 58.8 percent of lost jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that provides economic statistics and analysis.
El Nuevo Herald
April 22, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank, H-2A workers are already underpaid compared to other workers.
“In 2019, the average wage of all nonsupervisory farmworkers was $13.99 per hour, according to USDA, while the average wage for all workers in 2019 was $26.53 per hour, meaning the farmworker wage was just 53% of the average for all workers,” read an EPI post. “And the average wage for production and nonsupervisory nonfarm workers—the most logical cohort for workers outside of agriculture to compare with farmworkers—was $23.51.
Visalia Times Delta
April 22, 2020
In March, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that California will lose over 1.6 million jobs by this summer, close to a quarter of which will be in the leisure, hospitality and retail sectors. Nowhere will this be more acutely felt than Los Angeles County where fashion, food and tourism are staples of our economy. And a recent report released by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, and Ong & Associates finds this could affect Latino and Asian neighborhoods the most, leaving families scrambling for solutions without the means to pay rent or put food on the table. These communities are also the ones that will likely not receive a fair share from emergency financial relief programs.
NBC News
April 22, 2020
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than one-third of working women, compared with just 15.7 percent of working men, are employed in two industries that have been significantly affected by the virus: the health care and social assistance industry and the leisure and hospitality industry. In both fields, women are paid less than their male peers, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
April 22, 2020
Prominent companies such as Walt Disney (DIS) and Southern California Edison have been accused of replacing American workers with cheaper foreign labor. A New York Times report showed that outsourcing companies were “gaming the visa system.” A study from the Economic Policy Institute showed that H-1B workers were underpaid at Indian IT firms providing outsourcing services in the U.S. for American companies. These companies saved more than $20,000 a year per worker when they hired Indians instead of Americans. The Migration Policy Institute found that the top H-1B dependent companies, or those whose workforce consists of at least 15% H-1B visa holders, meet the criteria to avoid extra scrutiny via the loophole “but still pay their H-1B workers less and employ fewer workers with advanced degrees than those that are not H-1B-dependent.”
Investopedia
April 22, 2020