Across the U.S., nearly 40 million workers would benefit from raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, according to a new Oxfam America and Economic Policy Institute analysis. Here in Maine, that’s a third of our workforce, or 203,000 people. And these are not teenagers working summer jobs. In Maine, the vast majority of low-wage workers are at least 20 years old, and 45 percent are single parents.
Press Herald
March 19, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America. EPI proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-income workers and assesses policies with respect to how they affect those workers.
Black Agenda Report
March 19, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez cited statistics from nonprofit think-tank Economic Policy Institute, which say productivity grew 6.2 times faster than pay between 1973 and 2017.
Insider
March 19, 2019
Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a separate tweet , “In fact, wages are so low today compared to actual worker productivity that they are no longer the reflections of worker value as they used to be. Productivity has grown 6.2x more than pay,” and linked to an August 2018 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
ABC 15
March 19, 2019
The freshman congresswoman then cited data from the Economic Policy Institute claiming that the gap between productivity and a typical worker’s pay had increased dramatically since 1973 – around the time of the Arab oil embargo.
The Hilltop Monitor
March 19, 2019
Many young people can’t afford to buy their own homes. Yet, there was a time when people graduating from college could hold a reasonable expectation of home ownership. Since the bottom fell out of the housing market in 2009, home prices have been steadily increasing to a point where this expectation has become unrealistic. According to U.S. Census Bureau, home ownership rates for all age groups were lower in 2017 than in 2006, the year before the Great Recession; householders between 35 and 44 years of age showed rates 10 percentage points lower in 2017 than in 2006. Concurrently, the stagnation of wages in the U.S. over the last generation has told a bleak story, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Since 1979, while productivity has grown by 75 percent, the hourly median wage has grown less than 10 percent in real dollars, or an average annual raise of barely 4 cents per hour.
Forbes
March 19, 2019
While inflation-adjusted wages grew modestly for most workers last year, “large gaps by gender, race, wage, and education level remain,” according to new data released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — and some continue to get worse.
HR Dive
March 19, 2019
A 2017 analysis of data in the ten largest states in the US by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found 17 percent of eligible workers experienced minimum violations, accounting for $8 billion in lost income annually—the report projected losses of $15 billion nationwide. In Pennsylvania and Texas, the worst offenders, according to the analysis, the average cheated worker lost an estimated 30 percent of owed wages. A US Labor Department study of 9,000 restaurants cited by ROC United, the advocacy group, found over 80 percent had committed wage and hour violations. Another survey of restaurant workers in New York City earlier this decade also found 80 percent experienced wage theft.
VICE
March 19, 2019
“Nearly half of Americans incur essentially zero costs in a given year, while an unlucky few have staggering costs,” Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo Finance
March 8, 2019
Along with that, male teachers have a much larger wage penalty, which is teacher pay compared with the pay of other career opportunities for potential and current teachers, than female teachers. In 2017, female public school teachers made 15.6 percent less than comparable female workers, but male teachers made 26.8 percent less than comparable male workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
OU Daily
February 13, 2019