Heidi Shierholz, who was chief economist at the Labor Department under Obama and is now policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that “roughly 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the 2016 rule will be left behind by the Trump administration’s rule” and that workers’ wage gains will be $1.4 billion less than under the Obama rule.
Politico
September 25, 2019
An analyst for the Economic Policy Institute wrote in an email to the Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics in August that Colorado should raise its salary threshold for overtime eligibility to 2.5 times the state minimum wage.
Colorado Politics
September 25, 2019
“What we saw today was not unexpected,” Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under President Obama. “It is a doubling down of this administration siding with corporate executives instead of workers.”
The new rules are only the second update to the threshold since 1975, after the 2004 change.
Critics point out how far the United States has departed from historical norms. In 1975, the salary threshold covered 60 percent of salaried employees, while the current $23,600 standard represents about seven percent, according to data from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The Obama proposal would have have raised that percentage to 33 percent, while the Trump administration’s rule will represent 15 percent.
The Washington Post
September 25, 2019
In the 1970s, more than 60% of workers were eligible for overtime pay, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That figure fell to just 7% in 2016. The threshold hasn’t been increased since 2004.
AP
September 25, 2019
Heidi Sheirholz, the senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the Trump administration’s rule was “yet another example of this administration turning its back on workers and siding with their bosses.”
More than eight million workers will miss out under the new rules, according to Sheirholz, who worked in the Obama-era Labor Department. Some 3.2 million workers who would have earned overtime pay under the Obama rule, but not the Trump rule, will lose out on $1.4 billion in wages next year, said Sheirholz. Another five million workers won’t get stronger protections the Obama administration wanted on who counts as eligible for overtime.
MarketWatch
September 25, 2019
Economists and policymakers have increasingly become concerned with the domination of just a handful of highly successful companies controlling an outsized market share in a given industry. They fear these industry giants will influence pricing power and exert their ability to suppress industry-wide wages. Indeed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan and nonprofit think tank, the gap between productivity and wage growth has been increasing over the last 50 years with productivity outpacing wages by more than six times.
Investopedia
September 24, 2019
Using estimates from the Economic Policy Institute, the report determined what it would cost a month for a family of four to live comfortably in Urban Honolulu.
Pacific Business News
September 24, 2019
In five years, almost 83% country’s private, non-unionized workers, will be subject to mandatory arbitration, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That will be a rise from the 56% in 2017, it said.
MarketWatch
September 24, 2019
After leaving the department in 2003 and returning to his old firm, Scalia went on to expand his practice and take on more sophisticated administrative law cases challenging several worker-friendly Obama-era DOL regulations. His duty at Gibson Dunn to represent clients’ best interests in the courtroom doesn’t let him off the hook if senators grill him on his personal views, said Celine McNicholas, government affairs director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“It’s one thing to say I did the bidding of clients, but then I think it’s important to ask, ‘how do you view government regulation as a tool in promoting worker protections or does it have no place?’ I think those are all very fair questions that have very little to do with his record as a corporate management attorney,” McNicholas said.
Bloomberg
September 24, 2019