A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute discovered 50 percent of U.S. businesses ask at least some of their employees to sign noncompete agreements. Such agreements put constraints on the positions employees can take or companies they can work for down the road, if they’ve left their current employer.
Buffalo Business First
January 2, 2020
The unions also now employ significantly more minority workers than they did 10 or 15 years ago, largely thanks to training and apprenticeship programs developed by Coletti and others. In 2015, black, Latino and other minority workers made up 55 percent of union construction employees, according to data collected by the Economic Policy Institute. On the non-union side of the construction industry, minority workers comprised 75 percent of those employed on job sites.
Commerical Observer
January 2, 2020
“This is a terrible way to do tax policy,” said Hunter Blair, tax and budget analyst at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “If any of these provisions are supposed to be good tax policy, they should be made permanent.”
The Wall Street Journal
January 2, 2020
Mandatory arbitration agreements require employees to submit claims of harassment to private — and typically secret — arbitration. Such clauses have played a key role in shielding workplaces where employees have made high-profile allegations of sexual harassment, such as Fox News, from public accountability. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that more than half of all nonunion private-sector employers now have mandatory arbitration procedures. More on mandatory arbitration from Bloomberg Law.
Politico
January 2, 2020
Corporations frequently require workers to sign arbitration agreements, citing its speedier method of resolving workplace disputes. Their use has steadily increased since a series of Supreme Court cases dating back to the 1990s. More than half of workers are subject to binding arbitration, according to a 2018 study from the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Law
January 2, 2020
“Broadly speaking, the economy is continuing to move along. We seem to mostly be on track to move towards full employment, but there is still some slack,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said in a phone interview.
Courthouse News Service
January 2, 2020
New research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute finds that the shift to defined contribution plans—401ks—from defined benefit pension plans has increased retirement inequality for U.S. families, based on their income, race, ethnicity, education, and marital status.
EPI economist Monique Morrissey claims that this shift has placed the responsibility of saving on workers, “allowing policymakers to avoid fixing a broken retirement system.”
401K Specialist
January 2, 2020
Part of the answer is likely that employers are doing everything they can to stifle workers’ efforts to unionize, and they’re getting away with it. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute highlights the breadth of the wrongdoing, noting that employers are charged with violating federal law in four out of every 10 union elections, and of illegally firing workers in one out of every five union elections.
AFSCME Now
January 2, 2020
A new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that in 2016 and 2017, employers were found to have violated federal law in 41 percent of all union elections supervised by the National Labor Relations Board; those violations include retaliating, threatening, disciplining, and even firing those involved in union activity. Hearst’s tactics so far have been standard fare among employers wary of unions, but there’s little disincentive for them to go even further.
Report co-author and EPI economist Ben Zipperer said that one reason union-busting employers break federal law so much is that the penalties are essentially nonexistent. “For example, if the NLRB determines that you shouldn’t have been fired, what is offered is back pay, minus any wages you’ve earned in the meantime, because you had to have another job in order to survive,” Zipperer told The Outline. “So there aren’t punitive measures you find in civil or criminal proceedings that are used as a way to disincentivize employers from pursuing these illegal tactics in the future.”
The Outline
January 2, 2020
A joint report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Popular Democracy details how Republicans’ 2017 tax legislation “delivered big benefits to the rich and corporations but nearly none for working families” in the almost two years since President Donald Trump signed the bill into law.
Common Dreams
January 2, 2020