Some members of the European parliament have cited calculations by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington that up to 3.5m jobs could be lost in the EU. The commission sharply rejects such claims and estimates that some 211,000 jobs would be at risk if there were no mitigating measures.
Financial Times
February 5, 2016
Democrats Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Bill Nelson of Florida, senators from states with some of the most high-profile accusations of H-1B abuse, have cosponsored the legislation. “Fixes are so easy,” says Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “Require that the market wage be paid and require employers to prove they recruited US workers first.” “Have a Labor Department database that requires you post the job for 30 days [in the US],” he continues. “If you really can’t find anybody, you get your worker. If that is going to destroy the program, that means it really is just a tool for exploitable labor.”
Christian Science Monitor
February 4, 2016
According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the guestworker labor force provides US employers jobs on the cheap, offering less in wages and virtually nothing in terms of labor rights or benefits. EPI’s analysis of a decade of data on guestworkers under the H-2B visa program, which pipes immigrants into temporary low-wage service-industry jobs, shows that the visa allows bosses to employ guestworkers at “hourly wage rates that are far lower than state and national averages in the overwhelming majority of cases.” For example, in the most popular H-2B industry, landscaping and groundskeeping, “employers saved on average between $2.59 and $3.37 per hour by hiring an H-2B worker instead of a worker earning the national average wage.”
The Nation
February 4, 2016
Demographically, tipped workers are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as the rest of the workforce, according to numbers from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. They’re nearly twice as likely to rely on food stamps, and among those who have families, 40% of their children qualify for free lunches. Of the 10 lowest-paid jobs in America, seven are in the restaurant industry, according to the Department of Labor.
Buzzfeed
February 4, 2016
The authors used what’s known as the United Nations Global Policy Model, which unlike the classical model does not assume TPP trading partners are at full employment. “From the starting gate, they’re beginning from two very different assumptions,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, also based in Washington.
International Business Times
February 4, 2016
Two-thirds of people on needs-based public assistance are either working or have a family member who’s working, a briefing paper published Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute states. Additionally, about half of all recipients of public assistance are working full-time. Indolence and apathy aren’t driving up the welfare rolls, according to the research. Low pay is the more likely culprit. “As corporations achieve extraordinarily high profit levels and executive pay reaches new heights, it is appropriate to question whether employers are effectively passing off a portion of their societal responsibilities on to taxpayers,” wrote the paper’s author, David Cooper.
International Business Times
February 4, 2016
A third way of looking at it comes from a 2015 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Their data show the Midwest had the slowest income growth among the top 1% of earners over nearly three decades.
Quartz
February 4, 2016
Flint was also victim to these practices: maps from that era show heavily African-American neighborhoods shaded in red, which made them far less likely to attract loans. The result was both an ease of entry for whites who wanted to move to the suburbs, plus subsidies for their home purchases from the federal government, and the concentration of black people stuck inside the city limits. “Whites were able to leave because the federal government financed the suburbs,” explained Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute. “African-Americans couldn’t leave because they were prohibited by federal policy from moving out of the city.”
Think Progress
February 3, 2016
Over the past 35 years, with the exception of a few golden years in the late 1990s, the wages of low- and middle-income American workers have taken a beating. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute highlights an often-overlooked consequence of this trend: Low-income workers are increasingly reliant on government assistance to get by. “Arguably the largest economic challenge facing the United States right now is the problem of wage stagnation,” says David Cooper, the report’s author. “For the vast majority of workers, wages have basically barely budged since the late 1970s, and, in the case of low-wage workers, their wages have actually fallen when you adjust for inflation since the late 1970s.”
Pacific Standard
February 3, 2016
Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, appeared to agree, and said “continuing economic weakness” was likely causing slow productivity growth. He recommended that the Federal Reserve refrain from making further interest rate hikes.
Politico
February 1, 2016