Guest: Richard Rothstein, Distinguished Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, Author of “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America”
A school desegregation policy that’s been over for decades is suddenly showing up in the national media because of this moment at the Democratic presidential debate two weeks ago. Courts stopped requiring districts bus black students into segregated white schools almost 20 years go. But the debate over school “busing” is more relevant today than you might expect.
Top of Mind
July 12, 2019
As Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, DeLauro held one of her first subcommittee hearings on wage theft—bringing in experts to discuss the issue. The House-passed Labor-HHS-Education Appropriations bill increased funding the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Wage and Hour Division WHD by $69 million, which will help add 500 new inspectors for a total of approximately 1,300. WHD’s mission is to look out for working people and make sure they are receiving their wages, yet it has been shortchanged over the last few decades. As a result, the number of cases investigated by WHD decreased by 63% between 1980 and 2015. The Economic Policy Institute estimates up to $50 billion as the total cost of wage theft each year; WHD was only able to recover $308 million in 2018.
U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro
July 12, 2019
Wage theft affects millions of people, particularly women, people of color, and immigrants. Low-wage workers are acutely vulnerable to wage theft, and when wages are low to begin with, any amount the employer withholds can have dire consequences for the worker. The average low-wage worker loses $3,300 a year to wage theft, according to a survey by the Economic Policy Institute.
Teen Vogue
July 12, 2019
The president is oblivious, but otherwise almost nobody likes the job Acosta’s been doing. People who care about workers are naturally outraged that he’s been trying to water down everything from mine safety regulations to the rules that prohibit restaurant managers from grabbing a piece of the waiters’ tips.
The New York Times
July 12, 2019
Last week, more than 30 groups including the Economic Policy Institute and US PIRG also asked asked Congress and regulators to impose a moratorium on Libra until “profound questions” are answered
CNET
July 9, 2019
On June 25, 2019, the Institute for Policy Studies co-produced a conference with our allies at the Economic Policy Institute that was truly ground-breaking, thanks in part to its title: “Taxing the (Very) Rich: Finding A Cure for Excessive Wealth Disorder.” Over 21 organizations joined us in co-hosting the sold-out conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Note this conference was aligned and inspired by the April 2019 conference “Taxing the Rich,” hosted by the Patriotic Millionaires. You can watch their entire April gathering here.
Resilience
July 9, 2019
The post below looks at past busing experiments and the long-term effects, written by a renowned researcher on segregation in the United States. He is Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Washington Post
July 9, 2019
In fact, teachers make an estimated 19% less than workers with a similar level of education, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Even when those figures are adjusted to account for benefits, which teachers typically get, educators still earn 11% less than their comparably qualified counterparts.
The Motley Fool
July 9, 2019
Supporters of the legislation answered that the benefits would outweigh the job losses. Heidi Shierholz of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said in an online post that CBO overstated the latter and that anyway, “an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off. For a wide variety of reasons, a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment; each quarter, more than 20 percent of the lowest-wage workers leave or start a job.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was more blunt: “Every time momentum builds for lifting wages, conservative ideologues say it will cost jobs. Every time they’ve been dead wrong.” (Studies of minimum-wage hikes over the past two decades have tended to find little or no job loss, but the increases studied were usually of much smaller magnitude.)
Politico
July 9, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan, liberal think tank, took issue with the way the report characterized some of the negative effects of wage increases.
“The crucial fact is that an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off,” Heidi Shierholz, the institute’s senior economist and director of policy, said in a statement. “For a wide variety of reasons, a sizeable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in an out of employment… This means that even if employment does decline as CBO predicts, workers who work less can still come out ahead because they earn much more when they are working.”
Newsweek
July 9, 2019