In December 2017, Trump’s NLRB reversed the decision when ruling that a group of 100 welders at an Oregon company can’t legally organize without the participation of the other employees. “[Corporations] simply want to make it easier for employers to defeat an organizing campaign, by manipulating who is in a bargaining unit,” wrote the Economic Policy Institute’s Associate labor counsel Marni von Wilpert at the time. “By overturning this rule, the Trump administration has once again shown that it wants to make it harder for workers to organize and join unions.” This May, an NLRB regional director in Seattle ruled that the welders can establish a union after all, despite the Specialty Healthcare reversal.
Salon
June 15, 2018
California ranked a dismal 49th in social and economic well-being and in median family income in this year’s report. It also has one of the highest unemployment rates (4.31 percent) among dads with children ages 17 and younger, and it ranked 43rd in the category of lowest childcare costs. Recent figures from the Economic Policy Institute reveal that, despite the state’s overall economic recovery, things are still tight for many residents in Southern California. A family of two adults and two children in L.A. County, for example, needs to earn $92,295 a year to meet all of its living expenses, according to the institute’s Family Budget Calculator. That far outstrips the county’s median family income of $66,203 per year.
The Mercury News
June 13, 2018
Subcontractors often fold to avoid wage theft claims, and typically neither the subcontractor nor the contractor is held accountable, according to Marni von Wilpert, an analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “What happens so often is the bigger company is off the hook,” she said. “The smaller companies committing the violations, which are kind of fly-by-night, are much harder to track down.” … Texas has a wage theft problem. In 2017, analyzing just one form of wage theft, the Economic Policy Institute found that around 11 percent of low-income Texans are effectively paid less than minimum wage — a collective theft of almost $1.2 billion a year. Texas is also unique among the country’s five most populous states in requiring employers to pay only the federal minimum of $7.25, so when the Lone Star State’s poorest workers are robbed, it hurts them more than a poor Californian or New Yorker. (EPI chart included)
The Texas Observer
June 13, 2018
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009, but state and local governments have enacted higher wage floors in recent years. Typically, they include specific annual raises for the first few years and then increases annually in amounts tied to inflation. “2013 is really when the current wave started,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “There were already seven states that had automatic adjustments for inflation, primarily on the west coast.” Cooper’s organization general supports minimum wage hikes.
Bloomberg BNA
June 13, 2018
Many places have already gotten rid of the subminimum wage for tipped workers, including California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and Nevada, and a number of cities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, poverty rates for servers and bartenders are much lower in states that don’t allow a subminimum wage.
Think Progress
June 13, 2018
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit, has published an explanation of the case and why it matters, saying: “If the court rules for Janus, it will likely have the most significant impact on workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively in 70 years.” Here is that piece, published on the website of the institute, which gave me permission to publish it.
The Washington Post
June 13, 2018
(U.S. Edition) President Donald Trump is preparing to meet with North Korean President Kim Jong-Un in Singapore. We’ll look at how much the area is spending to host the two leaders, and what both countries are hoping to get out of this meeting. Afterwards, we’ll recap this weekend’s G7 summit between various world leaders, which includes the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Germany. According to Ian Bremmer, founder of political risk consultancy the Eurasia Group, this was the geopolitical equivalent of Trump firing Comey. Plus: We talk with the Economic Policy Institute about new data showing the gig economy isn’t actually taking over the workforce. Today’s podcast is sponsored by Battelle (battelle.org/campaign/qi), Indeed (Indeed.com/marketplace), and Michigan Economic Development Corporation (planetm.michiganbusiness.org). (06/11/2018)
Marketplace
June 12, 2018
“What’s at stake with Janus is state and government workers’ ability to effectively collectively bargain,” said Celine McNicholas, the director of labor law and policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). As the law stands now in 22 states, state and local government employees who aren’t dues-paying members of a union are compelled to pay “fair-share” or “agency” fees for the union benefits they receive. (The other 28 states have “right-to-work” laws, which allow workers to decide whether or not to buy into unions.) (Celine, Julia and EPI data cited throughout)
CityLab
June 12, 2018
Arbitration has a long history, but its prevalence in the workplace is new. In 1995, only 7.6% of employers had instituted mandatory arbitration, according to a survey by the Government Accountability Office. Today 53.9% of nonunion companies have done so, per a survey last year commissioned by the Economic Policy Institute. This figure is sure to rise given the Supreme Court’s decision.
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2018
David Cooper is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has spent years studying the tipped minimum wage. “I don’t claim to be able to see the future and to say definitively what would happen if this should pass, but it’s not like there aren’t any other places that have done away with their lower tipped minimum wage,” he noted. “In those places, there still are restaurants, customers still tip when they go into those restaurants, and in fact, servers in those states make on average about 17 percent more per hour than tipped workers in states that have a lower minimum wage.”
The Intercept
June 12, 2018