Wage theft has serious financial consequences for workers and businesses who are trying to play by the rules. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that American workers are shorted as much as $15 billion in wages each year due to minimum wage law violations. Michigan has the 5th highest total of unpaid wages in the country due to minimum wage violations. According to EPI, from 2013 to 2015, roughly $430 million in wages were improperly withheld from Michigan workers. Misclassifying workers as ‘independent contractors’ also negatively impacts law-abiding taxpayers. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, millions of employers nationwide have failed to pay more than $45 billion in employment taxes. These practices deprive the federal government of billions of dollars in unpaid employment taxes that are used to fund Social Security, Medicare and other benefits. In Michigan alone, a study released in 2008 found that Michigan loses tens of millions of dollars annually from misclassification practices – depriving the state of dollars for projects like highway and infrastructure upgrades, educational programs, or public hospitals.
Public
August 5, 2019
Whatever the academic history of Neoliberalism may have been, the context within which it blazed the world’s path into the 21st century contained hardly any mechanism to limit income gaps from growing. And so they grew to the shocking size they are today. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s report from November 2018, the situation worldwide was this:
The bottom 90% earned 69.8% of all earnings in 1979 but just 60.9% in 2017. In contrast, the top 1.0% increased its share of earnings from 7.3% in 1979 to 13.4% in 2017, a near doubling. The growth of wages for the top 0.1% is the major dynamic driving the top 1.0% earnings as the top 0.1% more than tripled its earnings share from 1.6% in 1979 to 5.2% in 2017.
The Edge Markets
August 5, 2019
Looking at hourly wage growth, it’s easier to see the state of the labor market is a bit more mixed. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wage growth has been below the target set by the Federal Reserve for more than a decade. Weak wage growth is bad for all workers, but can signal deeper challenges for workers of color. While the Black unemployment rate is routinely twice the white unemployment rate, wage growth for typical white workers is four times the rate for typical Black workers.
Forbes
August 5, 2019
Robert E. Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, said that the tariffs are a bad idea.
“I’m not a fan of these tariffs… there’s no strategy behind it and it’s unlikely to lead to an improvement in our trade relations, or that it’s going to help workers or American production,” said Scott.
ThinkProgress
August 5, 2019
Imagine giving 33.5 million American workers a raise, helping 6.2 million ease the pinch of poverty, and increasing the total annual wages for minimum-wage workers by $92.5 billion. All that and more is made possible by increasing the federal minimum wage to $15, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank conducted research to see which Americans would be affected by the Raise the Wage Act — legislation recently passed in the House of Representatives that aims to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. EPI found that the bill would impact almost every working American, although in different ways.
Who. What. Why
August 5, 2019
While the CBO report’s headline result still links the minimum wage to job loss, its estimates of those losses range from no significant job loss to 3.7 million job losses. Economic Policy Institute economist Ben Zipperer says the low-job-loss scenario is an acknowledgment that raising the minimum wage hasn’t proven to be as dangerous as researchers once feared. But he still found the CBO’s median estimate overly pessimistic.
The Washington Post
August 5, 2019
This is a trend that King believes will only increase as younger generations age into the working class. As a 2016 report from the Economic Policy Institute points out, people of color are expected to make up the majority of the U.S. working class by 2032. Likewise, the working class is becoming increasingly female. In 1960, just a third of working-class laborers were women, but now their numbers are equal to men. Both of these changes should be good news for millennials and Gen Z, as both report workplace diversity is among the single most important qualities a potential employer could have.
MEL Magazine
August 5, 2019
Wage gains have been strongest this year for workers earning $12 to $14 an hour and those at the top end of the pay scale who earn more than $60 an hour, according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
August 5, 2019
While black unemployment levels are low, they are twice as high as white unemployment rates at the national level and in 14 states and the District of Columbia, according to data available from 21 states and Washington, D.C., analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in April.
ABC News
August 5, 2019
While serving on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, Bahr was active on the International Affairs Committee, the Industrial Union Council and the committees on Capital Stewardship, Community Partnerships, Political Education, Public Affairs, Women Workers, Political Funding and more. He also served on the boards of the National Labor College and Union Privilege, as well as secretary-treasurer for the Economic Policy Institute.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka (UMWA) mourned the loss:
Morty was a brother, a friend and a first-class leader. All workers are better off for his service and solidarity. The best way to honor his legacy is to confront the challenges of our time, from inequality to technology, with poise, purpose and passion.
AFL-CIO
August 5, 2019