Labor advocates argue that over the years, both the classification rules and compensation levels of the existing overtime regulations have been dramatically distorted by legal manipulation and eroded by structural inequality. Denouncing the narrow ruling as “hostile” to the spirit of fair pay laws, Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), argues that the court “considers it a ‘harm’ that employers will have to pay millions of employees for overtime hours while dismissing the benefit of higher salaries and more humane workweeks for workers.”… In the meantime, Eisenbrey says that “employers will have to comply and workers will become familiar with and want to retain their new rights and pay.” Meanwhile, legislative action would hinge on whether the Democrats can block Republican deregulatory proposals.
The Nation
December 9, 2016
“The public overwhelmingly favors a much higher minimum wage and wants to expand overtime protections for salaried workers,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. Added AFL-CIO President Richard Trumpka: “The president-elect campaigned on standing up for working people, yet his actions thus far have undermined these claims.”
Wall Street Journal
December 9, 2016
“While it’s too soon to say what Puzder would do as Labor secretary — if he is confirmed — there is nothing in his record or his public statements to indicate that he would lead in developing policies and enforcement strategies to generate higher wages and better quality jobs for America’s workers,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute said in a statement.
USA Today
December 9, 2016
When Trump becomes president, the problem of part-time work lands in his lap. A study out this week shows how big a challenge that is – about 6 million employees who have to work part-time because their hours were cut or because they can’t find full-time work. They account for nearly 4 percent of all workers, and they earn less, receive fewer benefits such as health care and have to deal with sporadic hours, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And that number is nearly 2 million higher than in 2007, just before the Great Recession, because of structural shifts in the U.S. economy being driven mostly by the retail, food service and hotel industries.
Sacramento Bee
December 9, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute put out a big paper on Thursday laying out the economic promise of a sensible public-investment strategy and explaining how Trump’s plan (at least as it has been laid out now) is basically a joke. As the institute notesd, there is a tested, proven, straightforward infrastructure policy for boosting employment and economic growth: Have the government fund infrastructure projects. “Governments — federal, state, and local — have been financing infrastructure for decades, and it works.” The benefits of this straightforward approach are manifest. Governments will fund construction projects that, while necessary, may not provide sufficient profit incentive for private companies to take on. The short- and long-term economic return on these investments are generally quite high, both in terms of job creation and economic growth.
Salon
December 9, 2016
On Dec. 6, Ben Zipperer, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, published an article that argues parts of the UCSD researchers’ results don’t hold water. One key factor, he says, is the fact that for the South and eastern Mountain States, unemployment percentage increases were largely similar to states in the West. That’s important because while the latter states generally raised their minimum wage hardly or not at all to meet new federal standards, South and eastern Mountain States like Georgia (where the state minimum wage is still $5.15) had to make a bigger jump when meeting the federal law.
Next City
December 9, 2016
Nearly 100,000 single-parent households in Massachusetts could be affected by a raise to $15 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Most will end up with more assets, despite a loss of benefits, but some will fall over the cliff.
Boston Globe
December 9, 2016
Last year, average CEO pay, at $15.5 million, was 276-times more than what average nonsupervisory workers made in the private sector. That figure had been as high as 376-times average worker pay in 2000, during the dot-com bubble, but it had been as low as 30-times average worker pay in 1978, as the left-leaning Washington think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports.
The Christian Science Monitor
December 9, 2016
Richard Rothstein research associate, Economic Policy Institute; senior fellow, Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; author “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” to be published in 2017
Diane Rehm Show
December 8, 2016
Comparing such compensation with how much lower-level employees earn is likely to show a very wide gulf. A 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington, found that chief executive pay compared with the earnings of average workers had surged from a multiple of 20 in 1965 to almost 300 in 2013.
The New York Times
December 8, 2016