Criminal justice reform is education policy. A 2016 report by the Economic Policy Institute outlines how children of incarcerated parents are — apart from developing health problems — more likely to drop out of school, develop learning disabilities and misbehave in school.
The Star
September 25, 2019
“While the administration may be trumpeting this rule as a good thing for workers, that is a ruse,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “In reality, the rule leaves behind millions of workers who would have received overtime protections under the much stronger rule, published in 2016, that Trump administration abandoned.”
Common Dreams
September 25, 2019
Obama’s rule would have made 5 million more workers eligible, but it also falls short of expert figures. Using the 1975 overtime salary limit of $8,060 as a baseline, the Economic Policy Institute says workers should be eligible for overtime if they make under $50,440 today.
Courthouse News Service
September 25, 2019
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