The Star Tribune missed an opportunity to achieve balanced reporting in “Worker pay stagnates as it soars for CEOs” (August 19). The article amounted to an uncritical summary of a report produced by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute, without any alternative research or viewpoints.
First, the piece failed to reveal the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is largely funded and run by labor unions and left-wing academics. EPI is described as a nonprofit think tank “that focuses on low- and middle-income Americans,” language lifted almost word-for-word from their website.
Star Tribune
August 23, 2019
If you are an average American worker, you’ve seen the buying power of your wages remain flat since 1973, while earners in the top 10% have seen their wages grow at five times the rate of those in the bottom half. Since 1978, in actual dollars (not inflation-adjusted), the average American worker has seen wages increase by just 12%. CEOs, meanwhile, have seen their compensation grow by 940% in the same period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Enid News & Eagle
August 23, 2019
Generous stock options have helped boost CEO pay by a whopping 940 percent since 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while wages for a typical worker grew only 12 percent during the same period.
Houston Chronicle
August 23, 2019
Valerie Wilson, director of Economic Policy Institute’s Program of Race, Ethnicity and the Economy says Black women are experiencing a pay gap on the basis of both gender and race.
“We know that there is a racial wage gap that exists on average between Black workers and white workers, but then on top of that, Black women have the added penalty imposed by gender. There is also a gender gap,” she said.
The Philadelphia Tribune
August 23, 2019
According to a study by The Economic Policy Institute, union membership is one of the key factors that can help determine if black women are paid fairly for their work:
“Black women have traditionally faced a double pay gap—a gender pay gap and a racial wage gap. EPI research has shown that black women are paid only 65 cents of the dollar that their white male counterparts are paid. However, unions help reduce these pay gaps. Working black women in unions are paid 94.9 percent of what their black male counterparts make, while nonunion black women are paid just 91 percent of their counterparts.”
UFCW
August 23, 2019
Average CEO pay in the U.S. in 1978 was $1.7 million. Adjusted for inflation, it was $17 million last year, a 10x increase, according to a new report by Lawrence Mishel and Julia Wolfe at the Economic Policy Institute (h/t Ian Bremmer).
Axios
August 23, 2019
At the same time, the number of teacher vacancies have exceeded 100,000 jobs in the past four years, said Elaine Weiss of the Economic Policy Institute. She said school budgets had been slow to recover from the last recession, while a relatively robust economy today offers better paying career options that have deterred many would-be teachers.
“It helped exacerbate the teacher shortage and put more pressure on states,” Weiss said.
AP
August 23, 2019
As students, parents, and educators enter the start of a new school year, the think tank Economic Policy Institute published an analysis Thursday that American K-12 public school teachers spend an average of $459 on classroom supplies for which they are not reimbursed.
“This figure does not include the dollars teachers spend but are reimbursed for by their school districts,” EPI economist Emma García wrote in a blog post. “The $459-per-teacher average is for all teachers, including the small (4.9 percent) share who do not spend any of their own money on school supplies.”
Common Dreams
August 23, 2019
— The Economic Policy Institute says in a new analysis that teachers in at least one state spend more than $600 on average of their own money on classroom supplies.
PAYING FOR CLASSROOM SUPPLIES: Are teachers pulling out their checkbooks as the school year gets underway? New data out today by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute suggests that’s likely the case. The state-by-state analysis finds that teachers in North Dakota spend on average $327 of their own money on classroom supplies — the lowest, on average. In comparison, California teachers, who are on the high end, spend $664.
Politico
August 23, 2019
The growing shortfall is well documented. The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., reports that the shortage of teachers nationwide from preschool through high school worsened from 64,000 in the 2015-2016 academic year to 110,000 just two years later. The agency projects the shortfall will reach at least 200,000 by 2025.
EdPrepMatters
August 23, 2019