Skyrocketing executive pay packages are about to become more costly for corporate America
The Washington Post/Renae Merle
Instead of stopping the growth of executive pay, the law helped supercharge it, according to academics who have studied the issue. Companies that paid their chief executives less than $1 million a year often boosted their salary and many began looking for ways to take advantage of the loophole for deducting the cost of “performance-based” pay, they said. In 1989, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the median value of annual CEO compensation was $2.7 million. By 1995 it was $6.6 million, and it reached $13 million in 2016.
The Washington Post
January 4, 2018
A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that approximately 16 percent of private sector non-union employers, employing just under 25 million workers, already impose employment agreements that mandate arbitration and bar class relief. Supreme Court approval of such prohibitions will surely cause those already eye-catching figures to balloon.
The American Prospect
January 4, 2018
The Trump administration has already upended several of those policy changes and is currently working through the regulatory process to undo more. Marni von Wilpert, an associate labor counsel at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, sees it as a huge step backward for worker rights and protections. “A lot of workplace rights are being rolled back by the Trump administration,” Wilpert told InsideSources. “We see it across agencies from worker safety under OSHA to wage and hour under the Department of Labor, rescinding their joint-employer guidance at the National Labor Relations Board.”
Inside Sources
January 4, 2018
The federal minimum has not increased since 2009, remaining steady at $7.25 an hour, which labor activists from groups like Fight for $15 to Senator Bernie Sanders have called “starvation pay,” proposing instead, among other things, a nationally mandated $15 an hour wage. According to the Economic Policy Institute, once you account for inflation and cost of living, a sustainable living wage should be even higher, at $19 an hour.
Esquire
January 4, 2018
Mandatory arbitration clauses played a key role in keeping secret the sexual harassment settlements that piled up over decades at Fox News and elsewhere. Gretchen Carlson, who in 2016 settled a sexual harassment complaint against the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes for a reported $20 million, has made the elimination of mandatory arbitration clauses the centerpiece of a campaign against sexual harassment. “Certainly it leaves a lot of workers vulnerable to sexual harassment, because they have lost an essential tool to challenge sexual harassment,” said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “Imagine yourself in that situation. If you’re a woman who’s in a job and experiencing unwanted sexual harassment, you no longer have the ability to sue, because you gave that away.”
Politico
January 3, 2018
David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the wage increases that employers are offering have not been enough to substantially raise the living standards of the country’s lowest-paid workers. “Absent a minimum-wage increase most workers in the last decade have had trouble seeing their wages rise,” he said. “They haven’t had another mechanism to boost their wages.”
The Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2018
Workers across the country rang in the New Year with a pay bump after 18 states and 19 cities raised the minimum wage on Monday. The increases will impact an estimated 4.5 million workers across America. The federal minimum wage remains unchanged at $7.25 an hour, a rate last amended in 2009. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have a higher minimum wage than the federal rate. How significant are these raises for individuals? And where are we seeing the biggest jumps? For answers, The Takeaway turns to David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
WNYC
January 3, 2018
“If it had kept up with productivity since the late 1960s, the federal minimum wage would be worth about $19 an hour in 2018,” a December report by the EPI read. The inflation-adjusted minimum wage reached its highest point in history in 1968. In today’s dollars, it would equal $9.68 per hour, an EPI report shows. “Workers’ productivity (how much a worker produces for a given hour of work) has nearly doubled since then. So, if we had increased the minimum wage along with productivity, the federal minimum wage would be about $19 per hour,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the EPI, told Observer. Critics counter that the reference point of the 1960s is problematic for a capitalism society. “The Economic Policy Institute estimates begin with a Soviet-Maoist era premise that everyone is entitled to a ‘living wage,’” Panos Mourdoukoutas, an economics professor at Long Island University, told Observer. (EPI cited throughout)
New York Observer
January 3, 2018
Eighteen states and 19 cities, including the District of Columbia, will boost the statutory minimum wage effective in January, according to the National Employment Law Project. That will provide workers at the bottom of the income ladder with a combined wage increase of more than $5 billion next year, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
January 3, 2018
The federal minimum wage has stayed at $7.25 an hour since 2009, a figure the Economic Policy Institute estimates should be close to $19 today, factoring in inflation and cost of living.
Time Magazine
January 3, 2018