The Mountain Express reports that Blaine County workers, who sustain the multimillion-dollar mansions and glitz of Ketchum and Sun Valley, have seen wages fall to their lowest point since 2005, even as rent has continued to increase. And the Economic Policy Institute calls Blaine the “most unequal county” in the state.
Idaho Mountain Express
January 3, 2020
Economic Policy Institute: A July 2019 report from the institute puts the average cost of infant child care in Wisconsin at $12,597 a year. The report states that care for one infant would take up 18.5% of a median family’s income in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is ranked 20th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia for most expensive infant care.
Politifact Wisconsin
January 3, 2020
Ben Zipperer at the Economic Policy Institute said there could be new limits on who can join a union.
“The Trump administration has proposed that graduate student workers — teaching assistants and research assistants — shouldn’t be counted as employees with protected bargaining rights,” he said.
Marketplace
January 3, 2020
The new year has been ushered in by increases in the minimum wage in 21 states, stretching from Alaska to Florida and from California to Vermont. As a result, nearly 7 million Americans are earning more money in 2020, according to an estimate from the Economic Policy Institute.
MoneyWise
January 3, 2020
Minimum wage increases in 2020 (starting at 12:15:15)
MSNBC Live
January 3, 2020
Workers of color — specifically, black workers, Hispanic workers, and Asian-American workers — are more likely to get paid poverty-level wages than white workers, according to a 2018 analysis by the liberal-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute.
Business Insider
January 2, 2020
While certain programs that Johnson proposed (like Medicaid) have been expanded over time, other major policies that he saw as central to fighting poverty have deteriorated. Most notably, the value of the minimum wage has declined by more than 30 percent since 1968, when it reached a still record-high value of $10.54 or about $22,000 per year in today’s dollars. Similarly, as the Economic Policy Institute has documented, union membership density has declined steadily since the 1950s, from 33.2 percent in 1956 to 10.5 percent today, while the share of income going to the top 10 percent has increased. The top marginal tax rate has been cut from 91 percent in 1963 to 37 percent today. Other policies that are important today, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, have helped offset declines in the minimum wage and other labor standards (at least for parents), but these were never part of LBJ’s vision for fighting poverty.
CEPR
January 2, 2020
Indeed, the source of the “teacher pay gap” statistic is an annual report by the energetically progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI). To determine that teachers are paid 21.4 percent less than their peers, the EPI report compares income with years of education and basic demographic information (such as age and marital status), and then attributing any salary differentials to the profession. Yet, as noted above, applying the same methodology to other professions yields some pretty bizarre results. Using the EPI model, for instance, analysts Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine calculate that nurses are “overpaid” by 29 percent, firefighters by 25 percent, and aerospace engineers by 38 percent — while telemarketers are “underpaid” by 26 percent.
The Hill
January 2, 2020
According to estimates by the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the increase will impact 609,000 workers directly and indirectly, and increase incomes by nearly $500 million.
Pennsylvania Capital-Star
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