A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute cites a study finding 55% of Michigan employers require at least one employee to sign a non-compete agreement and 38% require all of their employees to sign one. While the share of those employees that earn wages close to the minimum wage is not known, those percentages are among the highest of the larger states and underscore the pervasiveness of the practice.
The Alpena News
January 22, 2020
Looking at the December data, Elise Gould, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), noted it was the first time there has been such an increase since 2010 when the Great Recession shrank the male-dominated construction and manufacturing trades.
Gould wrote on the EPI blog that men make up 77 percent of jobs in construction and manufacturing combined and women make up 77 percent of jobs in education and health services. But while construction and manufacturing together increased by 356,000 jobs between 2018 and 2019, she wrote, education and health care services employment increased by 603,000 jobs.
SHRM
January 22, 2020
A report published by the Economic Policy Institute shows that middle-income, low-income, college-educated, blue-collar, and white-collar workers alike are affected by rising income inequality. The authors cite a 9 percent raise in worker compensation contrasted with a 74 percent increase in productivity from 1973 to 2013. On the other hand, the top 1 percent of earners, and especially the top 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent, has experienced disproportionate personal economic gains compared to the bottom 90 percent of earners. Top 1 percent earnings grew by 138 percent between 1979 and 2013 while the bottom 90 percent of earners felt their earnings grow by only 15 percent over the same amount of time. This remarkable contrast in the distribution of income has far-reaching consequences and roots in historic policies and trends.
Hartford Courant
January 22, 2020
In the United States, a family with two parents and two children require about $5,466 a month on average to maintain a basic standard of living, according to the Economic Policy Institute (source). So, a family of four that follows the recommendation will aim to have $15,000 to $30,000 in its emergency fund.
Supermoney
January 22, 2020
I’d wager heavily that most people would answer “rent.” It’s a bigger slice of personal spending. Short-term accommodation accounted for just 1% of U.S. household budgets in 2016, compared to the 16% spent on housing, according to analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Bloomberg
January 22, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average wealth for white families is seven times higher than the average wealth for black families.
USA Today
January 21, 2020
Despite working in an expanding economy with low levels of unemployment, Americans’ wages are only slowly inching up.2 According to a 2018 report from the Economic Policy Institute, labor income for the bottom 90 percent of Americans as a share of all market-based income shrunk by 11 percentage points between 1979 and 2015.3
Center for American Progress
January 21, 2020
Recently, the Trump administration also succeeded in getting Congress to agree to its USMCA trade deal with Canada and Mexico. USMCA will replace NAFTA, a trade agreement that allowed Mexico to suppress their workers’ rights and wages to entice U.S. businesses to move abroad. NAFTA has been nothing but devastating for Tennessee. The Economic Policy Institute found that Tennessee lost over 16,000 jobs because of the spike NAFTA caused to the U.S.-Mexico trade deficit – and that was in 2010. It was high time for change, and the Trump administration delivered it. It’s remarkable how, in just three years, the president has completely changed the competitive standing of the U.S. – especially considering how little changed in the decades prior. Unfortunately, however, despite the business-friendly environment the administration has bended over backward to create, the U.S. is still not immune to cheats that try to game the system. This is not the fault of the administration; it’s always an inevitability. Even if the president lowered the corporate rate to 0-percent, there would still be bad actors looking to capitalize on unclosed loopholes.
The Tennessee Star
January 21, 2020