Workers have increasingly been speaking out on forced arbitration. Last year, a group of Google employees launched a social campaign to pressure their employer and other Silicon Valley companies to drop forced arbitration. The share of workers subjected to mandatory arbitration is now at least 55%, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Quartz
February 20, 2020
Companies use arbitration agreements to keep worker disputes out of court, a practice that has been bolstered by U.S. Supreme Court decisions. Nearly 54% of nonunion private-sector employers have mandatory arbitration procedures, according to an Economic Policy Institute study. Among companies with 1,000 or more employees, 65% have mandatory arbitration policies.
Bloomberg Law
February 20, 2020
Mandatory Practice: Over half of nonunion private-sector employers have mandatory arbitration procedures, according to an Economic Policy Institute study. Workers’ attorneys have filed thousands of individual claims, at once, against companies who say they prefer arbitration, Erin Mulvaney reports.
Bloomberg Law
February 20, 2020
For employers, these decisions were largely a windfall. As the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey explains, workers are less likely to prevail in arbitration than they are in litigation. And when workers to prevail in arbitration, they typically receive far less money than they would have if their case had been heard by a judge.
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VOX
February 20, 2020
His policy team, working with national political director Analilia Mejia, has instead consulted with environmental and immigration activist organizations such as the Sunrise Movement and the Center for Popular Democracy. It has also worked with labor-funded groups such as the Economic Policy Institute and the Democracy Collaborative, an international organization connected to leftist Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in Britain, and new think tanks such as the People’s Policy Project, which was founded in 2017 and is funded by small-dollar donations. These groups, regarded as marginal players among Washington insiders, could gain new prominence should Sanders run the table in the election.
The Washington Post
February 20, 2020
Sure, more people were ready to speak up — but that’s also a sign of their mounting frustration, said Heidi Shierholz, policy director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “If even this very tight labor market can’t deliver strong wage growth to me, I’ve got to try something else,” said Shierholz, who noted the country’s growing divide between the rich and everyone else.
That divide, she said, has been worsened by companies that are hostile to organized labor pressing for better wages. Employers spend almost $340 million every year hiring “union avoidance advisers” according to Economic Policy Institute estimates.
MarketWatch
February 20, 2020
Data from the Economic Policy Institute points to further issues: the average Michigan family pays more $10,861 a year for care for their babies, which rivals the same cost as in-state college tuition. The median family pays up to 19% of their yearly income.
9&10 News
February 20, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978 while a typical worker’s compensation has only risen 12%.
Yahoo Finance
February 20, 2020
It is worth noting this isn’t unique to Big Law. Business owners typically benefit from profit increases, and CEO compensation in the U.S. has vastly outgrown employee wages. CEOs of the 350 largest publicly traded companies made 278 times their average employees’ salary in 2018, up from 58 times in 1989, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Law
February 20, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, an independent economic think tank, recently released a primer that digs into the realities of what Trump’s regime meant for working people in 2019. One of the first sections I want to highlight concerns an assertion he made at the SOTU that “the unemployment rate for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans has reached the lowest levels in history.” As usual when it comes to Trump and race, he is lying; the EPI found that black workers are still twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Furthermore, they are more likely to be unemployed than white workers at every education level, and only those black workers with some college or a higher educational level have an unemployment rate lower than the overall unemployment rate of white workers. Unlike the president, these graphs don’t lie.
The Baffler
February 20, 2020