In a statement, officials from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank, criticized the NLRB’s rule for narrowing the circumstances under which a firm can be found to be a joint employer and said it would enable firms to avoid responsibility and liability under the NLRA. In a public comment on the proposed rule, EPI estimated the regulation would cost subcontracted and temporary U.S. workers $1.3 billion in lost wage increases due to its potential impact on collective bargaining.
“Weakening the joint-employer standard has serious adverse consequences for working people, such as depriving workers of the ability to bargain with the employer contracting for their services through an intermediary, who in most cases is the employer with ultimate control over wages, hours, and working conditions,” Celine McNicholas, EPI director of government affairs, and Heidi Shierholz, EPI senior economist and director of policy, wrote.
WasteDive
March 3, 2020
“This far into an expansion, with unemployment as low as it is, we shouldn’t be seeing incomes for low-income households falling in over a dozen states, and growth slowing down in a dozen more,” says Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, which conducted the analysis in partnership with Capital & Main. “Stock market highs may be great for wealthy households at the top, but they don’t help families at the bottom put food on the table.”
Fast Company
March 3, 2020
Keep scrolling to read why Trump’s regulatory relief numbers shouldn’t be taken “at face value,” according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy and an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, and why Labor needs to act fast if it wants to wrap up a fiduciary rule reboot proposal this year.
The question is, however, “even if you take those numbers at face value, which I don’t think we should,” Shierholz opined, “what kinds of regulating and deregulating are they [the administration] doing? Is it actually good for the American people? The answer is a huge no” when it comes to the Labor Department.
ThinkAdvisor
March 3, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Balint noted, “most of these workers are over 20 years old. In other words, they are not teenagers trying to make a little cash for pocket money, as opponents of minimum wage increases sometimes claim. Rather, 40% of minimum wage earners are the head of their household. We also know from the data that the majority of these workers are not working just part-time. … The majority of minimum wage workers are also women. Among female minimum wage earners, 60% are over 30 years old.”
Rutland Herald
March 3, 2020
Others such as the Liberal Economic Policy Institute released a report arguing that increasing the national minimum wage to $12 by 2020 would reduce public-assistance spending by $17 billion. However, Schoellkopf believes those arguments make little sense.“That logically doesn’t hold. People lose their benefits and they are worse off than when they started. It increases a cycle of people being on and off benefits. It doesn’t actually save money—it costs more.”
Dame Magazine
March 3, 2020
“There’s a lot of turnover in a low wage labor market,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told Yahoo Finance. “So if we have an employment decline in a labor market like that, it doesn’t necessarily mean people are getting pink slips. You have people going in and out of jobs, so there are fewer jobs. It just means that people spend a little more time looking for jobs than they otherwise would have. But then when they do get the jobs, they make a lot more money.”
Yahoo Finance
March 3, 2020
Research shows about 684,000 South Carolina workers — or one third of the state’s workforce — would see their wages increase if a $15 federal minimum wage were adopted by 2025, according to David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
The Post and Courier
March 3, 2020
Overall, American parents with children under the age of five are forking over a total of $42 billion for early child care and education, such as preschool programs, according to a recent report from the progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
March 3, 2020
The average cost of infant child care in Florida is $9,238 annually, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For an infant and a 4-year-old it’s closer to $11,185. That’s 22 percent of the maximum NWSL salary for 2020, a price point deemed unaffordable by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services guidelines.
Yahoo Sports
March 3, 2020