Child care costs are out of reach for too many Kansas families. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average annual cost of infant care in Kansas is $11,222 per child, which represents 18.1% of the median family income in Kansas.
Kansas Reflector
March 8, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute said in 2014 that wage theft costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year.
LA Times
March 8, 2024
For many Americans, the term “middle class” means having a certain amount of economic security, says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “It could mean having savings for a rainy day or saving for your children’s education,” she says. “That is very different from being in the middle of the wage distribution, which is how the middle class is technically defined.”
Fast Company
March 8, 2024
Child labor violations in Florida and across the country have risen in recent years, as have the number of industry-backed bills filed in state legislatures aiming to loosen child labor protections in states across the country.
Orlando Weekly
March 8, 2024
Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported there were 8.9 million positions open at the end of January, roughly the same number as a month earlier.
“The labor market remains strong but is decidedly not hot,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Job growth continues to be more than enough to keep up with working age population growth and layoffs remain historically low, but the hires rate has softened over the last year and is lower than it was pre-pandemic.”
U.S. News & World Report
March 8, 2024
“I just don’t see a big fiscal stimulus coming out of a Biden second term,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
…
A big question mark relates to the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is funding investments in clean energy. Republicans are attacking the law, which they argue reduces efficiency and increases costs by picking winners and losers, but undoing it may create a new set of economic problems.
“Right now the sector is proceeding under the impression that a build-out of clean energy will be subsidized and will be producing lots of our energy by the end of 2030,” Bivens said. “Clawing back subsidies and making energy producers scramble to figure out how they’ll be satisfying future energy demand in totally different ways could definitely lead to price spikes and volatility.”
Politico Morning Money
March 8, 2024
Salaries are losing their value, as a result of the “productivity-pay gap,” which is the difference between how much income the economy generates and workers’ wages. From 1979-2022, productivity increased 64.7%, while hourly pay only increased 14.8% — around 4.4 times slower — according to the Economic Policy Institute.
MoneyWise
March 8, 2024
Features interview with Jasmine Payne-Patterson on history of federal minimum wage.
Workers Rock podcast
March 8, 2024
The prime-age labor force participation rate of U.S.-born men without a college degree “grew at a record pace in each of the last two years and is above its pre-COVID trend,” according to the Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, a left-leaning think tank.
In other words, the economy is both absorbing immigrants and generating job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, the institute said. The idea that immigrants are “taking all our jobs” is “deeply misguided,” EPI researchers wrote in a recent analysis.
CNBC
March 8, 2024
A long-running study by the Economic Policy Institute showed leaders of the country’s 350 biggest public companies made about 320 times more than their typical employee in 2019, up from 20:1 in 1965.
Bloomberg
March 8, 2024
Analysts with the Economic Policy Institute found that foreign-born workers account for around 50 percent of the labor market’s explosive growth, while the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that immigrant labor effectively closed the post-Covid gap in the job market by the middle of 2022.
The Nation
March 8, 2024
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, noted that external data could be helpful to flag unusual phenomenon occurring among contractors in the labor force or inform the BLS of how to structure survey questions they may not have asked otherwise.
“There’s clearly legislation, regulation around the issue of independent contracting,” Shierholz, who served as the chief economist at the DOL under Obama, said. “So really understanding the scope, and the nature of that kind of work just makes that kind of policy smarter.”
Bloomberg Law
March 8, 2024
“A lot of these rollbacks that we are starting to see really came in the wake of the pandemic,” Nina Mast, a state economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, said.
Since 2021, Mast says, “28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them.” Some of the states exploring or enacting such legislation include Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Missouri, to name a few.
“As wages have increased, employers are realizing, well, we don’t want to raise wages to match what’s required by a stronger labor market. And so instead, they’re seeking to expand out to see young people who they can pay less and potentially exploit at lower wages,” Mast said.
Scripps National News
March 8, 2024
The White House pointed to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, showing that CEO pay averaged more than 300 times that of the typical worker in 2022.
The Washington Post
March 7, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute said in 2014 that wage theft costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year.
LA Times
March 7, 2024
Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported there were 8.9 million positions open at the end of January, roughly the same number as a month earlier.
“The labor market remains strong but is decidedly not hot,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Job growth continues to be more than enough to keep up with working age population growth and layoffs remain historically low, but the hires rate has softened over the last year and is lower than it was pre-pandemic.”
U.S. News & World Report
March 7, 2024
“I just don’t see a big fiscal stimulus coming out of a Biden second term,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
…
A big question mark relates to the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is funding investments in clean energy. Republicans are attacking the law, which they argue reduces efficiency and increases costs by picking winners and losers, but undoing it may create a new set of economic problems.
“Right now the sector is proceeding under the impression that a build-out of clean energy will be subsidized and will be producing lots of our energy by the end of 2030,” Bivens said. “Clawing back subsidies and making energy producers scramble to figure out how they’ll be satisfying future energy demand in totally different ways could definitely lead to price spikes and volatility.”
Politico Morning Money
March 7, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2022 there are roughly 2.4 million farmworkers in the U.S.
Scripps news
March 6, 2024
Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported there were 8.9 million positions open at the end of January, roughly the same number as a month earlier.
“The labor market remains strong but is decidedly not hot,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Job growth continues to be more than enough to keep up with working age population growth and layoffs remain historically low, but the hires rate has softened over the last year and is lower than it was pre-pandemic.”
U.S. News & World Report
March 6, 2024
Features interview with Jasmine Payne-Patterson on history of federal minimum wage.
Workers Rock podcast
March 4, 2024
The prime-age labor force participation rate of U.S.-born men without a college degree “grew at a record pace in each of the last two years and is above its pre-COVID trend,” according to the Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, a left-leaning think tank.
In other words, the economy is both absorbing immigrants and generating job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, the institute said. The idea that immigrants are “taking all our jobs” is “deeply misguided,” EPI researchers wrote in a recent analysis.
CNBC
March 4, 2024
A long-running study by the Economic Policy Institute showed leaders of the country’s 350 biggest public companies made about 320 times more than their typical employee in 2019, up from 20:1 in 1965.
Bloomberg
March 4, 2024
Analysts with the Economic Policy Institute found that foreign-born workers account for around 50 percent of the labor market’s explosive growth, while the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that immigrant labor effectively closed the post-Covid gap in the job market by the middle of 2022.
The Nation
March 4, 2024
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, noted that external data could be helpful to flag unusual phenomenon occurring among contractors in the labor force or inform the BLS of how to structure survey questions they may not have asked otherwise.
“There’s clearly legislation, regulation around the issue of independent contracting,” Shierholz, who served as the chief economist at the DOL under Obama, said. “So really understanding the scope, and the nature of that kind of work just makes that kind of policy smarter.”
Bloomberg Law
March 4, 2024
“A lot of these rollbacks that we are starting to see really came in the wake of the pandemic,” Nina Mast, a state economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, said.
Since 2021, Mast says, “28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them.” Some of the states exploring or enacting such legislation include Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Missouri, to name a few.
“As wages have increased, employers are realizing, well, we don’t want to raise wages to match what’s required by a stronger labor market. And so instead, they’re seeking to expand out to see young people who they can pay less and potentially exploit at lower wages,” Mast said.
Scripps National News
March 4, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, many are backed by state affiliates of industry groups like the National Restaurant Association, the Associated Builders and Contractors, Chambers of Commerce, and special interest groups like the Naples-based Foundation for Government Accountability, which has been a driving force behind child labor rollbacks across the country.
Orlando Weekly
March 1, 2024
At the federal level, data clearly show massive corporate tax avoidance – for example, in 2020, 55 of the largest corporations in the U.S. paid $0 in taxes. Information obtained by the Economic Policy Institute from seven states reveals that more than 60% of corporations operating in those seven states pay no state income tax. As it stands, we have no state-level data to know what is happening in Maine.
Portland Press Herald
March 1, 2024
Another piece of context that can be missing in immigration polling is the influx’s apparently positive impact on the economy. According to The Washington Post, an Economic Policy Institute analysis found that about 50% of the labor market’s strong recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024.
U.S. News & World Report
March 1, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 22 U.S. states increased their minimum wages on January 1 of this year, raising pay for an estimated 9.9 million workers. As such, operators are looking for ways to get the most out of their labor spend—and for many, that means turning to automation.
Restaurant Business Magazine
March 1, 2024