Shockingly, individual consumers seeking relief in arbitration win just 9% of the time, and in an arbitration against a financial company, a consumer ends up paying the company $7,725 on average, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.
Public Citizen
November 14, 2019
Our teachers remain underpaid, undervalued and undersupported. Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that when adjusted for inflation, average weekly wages of public school teachers decreased $21 from 1996 to 2018 — from $1,216 to $1,195 in 2018 dollars — even as weekly wages of other college graduates rose by $323 in the same period. This wage penalty has grown considerably in the past 30 years, from 5.3 percent in 1993 to 21.4 percent in 2018. In a 2019 Phi Delta Kappa poll of 2,000 teachers, just 10 percent said their community values them a great deal. Only 42 percent said their community values them a good amount, and 16 percent of teachers felt they are valued a little or not at all.
The 74
November 14, 2019
Afew weeks ago, the Economic Policy Institute released a report based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that illustrated a troubling finding: the United States is experiencing a 307,000 job shortfall in public education positions. The extreme shortfall in public education jobs first took hold when the recession hit in 2007. Not only do we have 60,000 fewer public educators than before the recession, but the teacher shortage is also not keeping up with increasing enrollment sizes as population grows, meaning that fewer educators are teaching larger classes with less pay. Given the last year and change of widespread teacher strikes over poor pay, low quality school conditions, and lack of funding, it’s clear that there’s a massive school-funding problem in public education.
Fatherly
November 14, 2019
America is facing a serious shortage of teachers. U.S. schools are missing roughly 112,000 teachers, according to the Learning Policy Institute. The shortage is predicted to get worse, with the Economic Policy Institute predicting a shortfall of 200,000 by 2025. In some states, teachers are being brought in from overseas to fill the gaps.
The Hill
November 14, 2019
The answer to “The Democrats are moving left. Will America follow?” is no, because America is already there. Poll after poll shows that the large majority of progressive policies are already deeply popular.
The Washington Post
November 14, 2019
The current strike wave is certainly not limited to teachers. About two dozen sanitation workers for Republic Services in Marshfield, Massachusetts, have been on strike since August 29. They’re demanding affordable health care and a living wage. Teamsters 25, the union that represents the employees, cites Economic Policy Institute data which shows that the workers with one child are making 40% less than the state’s living wage. Republic Services’ biggest single shareholder is billionaire Bill Gates, who makes $100 million annually off dividends from his shares. Last month, two dozen of the striking workers protested outside of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gala in New York City, holding signs that read, “Bill Gates treats kids like trash.” Striking employee Bernard Egan-Mulligan told New York Daily News, “We’re here because Bill Gates is a 32% stockholder in our company. We figure our shareholders would like to know what’s going on.”
In These Times
November 13, 2019
According to a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the average Uber driver makes $9.21 per hour after expenses. For most jobs in Los Angeles, the workers make a minimum wage of $14.25 per hour.
Daily Bruin
November 13, 2019
In fact, some people — including those from the Economic Policy Institute — have posited that a minimum wage increase will actually lead to an increase in employment because of the effects of giving low-wage workers a raise. Other advantages to restaurants may include lower turnover rates and better job performance.
UPI
November 13, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute, Hallet notes, argues that the wage increase will actually create more employment. According to the NELP, restaurant sales increased an average of 6.6 percent every year from 2014 to 2018. The next front in this conversation, Hallet notes, is the tip credit, through which restaurants can only pay their staff $10 if they make $5 or more an hour in tips. Officials are currently considering whether to abolish the credit, and there are all kinds of problems with tipping including that it allows for racism, sexism, and classism to factor into compensation of workers.
New York Magazine
November 13, 2019
Of course, we have long associated teaching with low salaries, which itself says a lot about what we think of teachers, the majority of whom are women. The average gap in compensation between public-school teachers and workers with similar levels of education and experience is at a new high—11.1 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In real-dollar terms, teacher pay has eroded significantly over recent decades, but especially in Republican-led states, where years of tax cuts for high-income individuals and corporations have starved funding for public education. The red-state teacher strikes of 2018 helped draw attention to long-standing disparities and basic unfairness, but across the country the combination of persistently low pay and long hours continues to make teaching ever less appealing as a career.
Commonweal Magazine
November 13, 2019