We pretend that hard work automatically equals wealth, but while the Economic Policy Institute reports that productivity increased by 69.6 percent between 1979 and 2018, hourly pay only increased by 11.6 percent. That doesn’t seem quite right, especially when you consider that CEO compensation has grown by 940 percent since 1978. Someone’s benefitting from the current economic conditions, but it’s not most ordinary Americans.
Post Register
November 14, 2019
According to David Cooper, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to just $10.10 would annually reduce government expenditures on current income-support programs by at least $7.6 billion.
The Urban News
November 14, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute claims that if we were to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15, it would benefit workers, companies, and the economy. But the minimum wage isn’t the only workplace financial issue affecting employees: Wage theft is widely prevalent across all industries, from minimum wage work to upper-level executives.
Martindale
November 14, 2019
In fact, Arizona would be among the hardest hit if Obamacare is repealed: 160,456 Arizonans would lose the health-care coverage they now access via the ACA marketplace. And 41,982 Arizona jobs would be lost, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
AZ Central
November 14, 2019
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