Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute says she’s skeptical of that number. “There is a new consensus among economists that minimum wage increases have raised wages without substantial job loss.”
WVTF
July 9, 2019
The CBO report examined the impact of raising the federal minimum wage from its current point of $7.25. It was last raised in 2009, and last month marked the longest period in the nation’s history without any increase, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Other research from the Economic Policy Institute also shows that a single parent making $7.25 an hour to support their family through full-time work will come up around $1,815 short of crossing the 2017 federal poverty line of $16,895 for a single-parent family.
Business Insider
July 9, 2019
The current $7.25 minimum hourly rate was set in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession. Since then, America’s lowest-paid workers have lost about $3,000 a year when you consider the rising cost of living, according to calculations from the Economic Policy Institute.
Another meta-analysis comes in a highly anticipated study forthcoming in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by economists at the University of Massachusetts, University College London, and the Economic Policy Institute. They studied data from 138 cities and states that raised the minimum pay between 1979 and 2016. The conclusion is that low-wage workers received a 7 percent pay bump after a minimum wage law went into effect, but there was little or no change in employment. The study also showed that it would not cost jobs, even in states with large shares of minimum wage workers. The latest study by Godoey and Reich, which expands the analysis to the county level, supports those findings.
VOX
July 9, 2019
“As a group, low-wage workers would be just unambiguously better off,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that has long pushed for minimum wage increases. “The bottom line is the benefits exceed the costs.”
NY Mag
July 9, 2019
“As a group, low-wage workers would be just unambiguously better off,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that has long pushed for minimum wage increases. “The bottom line is the benefits exceed the costs.”
Ms. Shierholz and other liberal economists also questioned the budget office’s methodology, saying it overlooked recent academic research that has found substantially less job loss from minimum-wage increases than many economists previously expected.
The New York Times
July 9, 2019
“We don’t see the negative scare stories that people are worried about, that for a big enough minimum-wage increase, employers cut back on hiring and people lose their jobs,” said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute and one of the paper’s authors. “There wasn’t any downside to the increase. There was only an upside,” he said.
CBS News
July 9, 2019
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute pointed out that the decision still undercuts unions’ collective bargaining because they will now have fewer resources specifically dedicated to collective bargaining (i.e., no more fair share fees).
Inside Sources
July 8, 2019
Unscrupulous businesses stole an estimated $429 million in wages and overtime pay from Michigan workers between 2013 and 2015, impacting more than 2.8 million workers, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, Michigan taxpayers are shortchanged $107 million a year in revenue through tax fraud when businesses misclassify workers by reporting employees as self-employed independent contractors or paying them off the books as a way to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, a Michigan State University study found.
UP Matters
July 8, 2019
Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., has criticized that proposal as excluding 8.2 million workers from extra pay, many of them in retail and service jobs.
“We have a 40-hour workweek so people can spend time with their families,” said Ms. Shierholz, who was the Labor Department’s chief economist when it rolled out the Obama-era rules.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
July 8, 2019
If wages for those at the bottom are high, you may naturally expect low poverty rates. No matter how you define it, higher wages would most logically relieve poverty levels. This is also the argument made by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). An increase in the minimum wage may very well reduce poverty in the short-term. However, there will be adjustments. In reality, a higher minimum wage changes the types of people living in poverty rather than the overall number.
Foundation for Economic Education
July 8, 2019