Raising the minimum wage “speaks so clearly and directly to trying to resolve that problem, it is going to resonate even to folks who are going to be conservative on other issues,” said David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that studies how policy affects low and middle-income people.
CNBC
June 11, 2019
OLYMPIA, Wash.—The Washington Department of Labor and Industries proposed a rule change June 5 that would extend eligibility for overtime pay to more than 250,000 workers. The rule would gradually raise the minimum salary where administrative workers can be denied time-and-a-half pay from the current federal standard of $23,660 a year to 2.5 times the state minimum wage in 2026, or more than $75,000. “This is a long overdue update that will help tens of thousands of Washingtonian workers,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement. The new standard would be phased in over six years, going up faster at businesses with more than 50 employees. The Obama administration tried to raise the federal standard to $47,476 in 2016, but a lawsuit by Republican-governed states blocked it. The Trump administration is proposing a smaller increase, to about $35,000. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of salaried employees guaranteed overtime fell from 63% in the 1970s to less than 7% in 2016. The Washington proposal would cover roughly 44% of the full-time salaried workforce in the state, the EPI estimates. The final rule will be made this fall, after a period of public comment. Read more
LaborPress.org
June 11, 2019
Horan includes data that illustrates how ride-sharing services like Uber have made it harder for drivers to earn a livable wage. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Uber reduced US driver pay to between $9 and $11 per hour in 2018. But before Uber entered the market, taxi drivers in big cities made between $12 and $17 an hour.
Markets Insider
June 11, 2019
In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that 17% of low-income workers were earning less than the minimum wage due to skimming by their employers. A 2009 survey carried out in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago found that three-quarters of low-wage workers weren’t compensated at a higher rate for overtime. Though the vast majority of wage theft goes unreported, the $933 million recovered by workers in court settlements in 2012 amounted to three times the cost of all robberies combined.
Huffington Post
June 11, 2019
To date, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City have all enacted city-level fair scheduling laws. Last July, Oregon became the first state to pass predictive scheduling legislation, with an additional 13 states and 4 municipalities across the U.S. considering legislation in 2019 or 2020. As of mid 2018, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 740,000 workers were already covered by predictive scheduling laws at that point. Assuming this trend continues, we could very well see predictive scheduling laws become the rule rather than the exception by about 2025.
Industry Today
June 11, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute found that overall, American productivity rose 21.6% between 2000 and 2014. But while productivity has increased, Gallup reports that the average workweek has risen to 47 hours. Isn’t there a way to work smarter, not harder?
Chief Packaging Officer
June 11, 2019
This morning’s jobs report showed the economy added 75,000 jobs in May. As the country marks its longest expansion in history, May’s number is significantly less than April’s growth of 224,000. Downward revisions to March and April, meanwhile, subtracted 75,000 jobs from the total gains.
People’s World
June 11, 2019
“This is a noticeable slowdown from the pace we’ve experienced this year so far, which has averaged 164,000 a month, and slower than the average monthly growth for the last 12 months (196,000),” writes Elise Gould, a senior economist at The Economic Policy Institute. “While we would expect job growth to level off as the economy approaches full employment—and 75,000 jobs is about what we need to keep up with today’s population growth—the pace of the slowdown in recent months is troubling.”
PayScale
June 11, 2019
A high-pressure economy is especially important for those at the back of the hiring queue. People sometimes say that full employment is fine, but that it doesn’t help people of color, younger people, or those without college degrees. This thinking, however, is backwards. It is educated white men with plenty of experience whose job prospects depend least on overall labor market conditions; their employment prospects are good whether overall unemployment rates are high or low. It is those at the back of the hiring queue—Black Americans, those who have received less education, people with criminal records, and others discriminated against by potential employers—who depend much more on a strong labor market. The Atlanta Fed’s useful wage tracker shows this clearly: Wage growth for lower-wage, non-white, and less-educated workers lagged behind that of college-educated white workers during the high-unemployment years following the recession. Since 2016, however, that pattern has reversed, with the biggest wage gains for nonwhite workers and those at the bottom of the wage distribution. This pattern has been documented in careful empirical work by Josh Bivens and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute, who show that, historically, tight labor markets have disproportionately benefited Black workers and raised wages most at the bottom.
Roosevelt Institute
June 11, 2019
Monthly housing costs for a family of four average $3,121 in San Francisco, Hayward and Oakland — the highest in the country, according to a USA Today analysis in April. The newspaper used data from the Economic Policy Institute and Bureau of Economic Analysis measuring the 25 most expensive places to live in the nation.
Fox News
June 11, 2019