What Works podcast
September 23, 2024
As USA Today reports, Trump “slashed” funding for the National Labor Relations Board while in office, while the Economic Policy Institute “called moves under his administration to overturn worker protections ‘unprecedented.‘”
Bring Me The News
September 23, 2024
“There is every reason for these to be bipartisan policies,” Bernstein said during a presentation at EPI Action in July. “I don’t care if you’re in a red, blue or purple state, you need a lot more affordable housing and child care.”
The Washington Post
September 23, 2024
“It’s not only that there aren’t enough homes, there aren’t enough affordable homes in the places where people want to live,” said economist Kyle Moore with EPI Action, pointing out that many new luxury units that developers build are unaffordable for many renters.
USA Today
September 23, 2024
In California, child care fees can rival mortgage payments and exceed in-state university tuition. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, California families pay an average of $11,475 a year for a 4-year-old. For an infant, the average annual cost is $16,945.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
September 23, 2024
CEO compensation declined significantly in 2023 when compared to the stock market’s relative steadiness, according to a recent report.
Findings from the Economic Policy Institute, published Sept. 19, analyzed average CEO pay from the 350 largest publicly owned firms in the U.S., using data from Compustate ExecuComp and The Wall Street Journal.
Becker’s Hospital Review
September 23, 2024
Tipped workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation in the form of wage theft, according to the Economic Policy Institute. A recent analysis by the left-leaning think tank found that U.S. workers who earn tipped wages are 2.3 times more likely to live in poverty than non-tipped workers.
CBS Moneywatch
September 23, 2024
The privileges our richest enjoy at tax time extend neatly to the generous annual compensation that our top corporate executives pocket. Major corporate CEOs, the Economic Policy Institute has just reported, last year realized $22.1 million in compensation, 290 times the pay that went to typical U.S. workers.
Inequality.org
September 23, 2024
Relying on customers to pay the bulk of tipped workers’ wages exposes these workers to “tremendous instability of income,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Across the country, the Institute also found poverty rates for tipped workers are more than twice as high as for non-tipped workers. Horsford called that unacceptable.
Public News Service
September 23, 2024
In addition, the Economic Policy Institute reported that many companies have sunk money — $340 million in 2019 alone — into programs and consultants that use union-suppressing tactics.
New Jersey Herald
September 23, 2024
We surveyed nine areas that, according to the Economic Policy Institute, have a lower cost of living, to measure the price of an acrylic gel manicure.
The Wall Street Journal
September 23, 2024
Automotive News
September 23, 2024
Democrats, unions, and the Biden administration say that such agreements lead to fewer disruptions to federal projects, and lead to better outcomes for the communities where the projects are located, because they allow for negotiating higher wages and benefits, child care opportunities, and job training.
“Through President Biden’s executive order on project labor agreements, the federal government is promoting effective mechanisms for controlling costs, ensuring efficient completion of projects, and establishing fair wages and benefits for all workers on those projects,” said Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Law
September 23, 2024
Chief executive officers at the largest companies in the United States saw their compensation surge by 1,085% from 1978 to 2023, compared with only a 24% increase for typical worker pay, according to an annual report published Thursday.
The Economic Policy Insitute (EPI) analysis focuses on the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. firms by revenue.
Common Dreams
September 23, 2024
Features interview with Kyle on Harris/Trump economic policies.
BS-TBS "Hodo (Report) 1930" (Japan)
September 23, 2024
If American voters regard the U.S. economy to be a factor in the 2024 presidential election, it may be instructive to consider just how the two parties stack up, especially in a historical sense.
In April, the Economic Policy Institute released the results of a study comparing the performance of the economy under Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. It concluded that, since 1949:
Lancaster Online
September 23, 2024
The document is also full of numerous labor-related ideas long espoused by the Republican Party, including many that bubbled up during the Trump administration. Even so, the laundry list of priorities would harm large numbers of workers if enacted, experts said. It’s still “shocking when you look at it compiled in its entirety,” said Lynn Rhinehart, senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s not new, but it is radical.”
Below is a list of 10 proposals from Project 2025 that labor experts say will harm working people.
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There’s already some indication of what they might try to do. Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee have all passed laws banning employers who voluntarily recognize unions from receiving state economic development funds. (Those laws could be struck down by a court because they are preempted by federal labor law, said Jennifer Sherer, acting director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network.) Since 2021, 31 states have introduced bills to weaken federal child labor laws. Five states don’t even have a minimum wage, while two have lower wages than $7.25 an hour, so the federal standard is the only way workers in those states are guaranteed at least $7.25 an hour.
Capital & Main
September 23, 2024
The current effective federal funds rate sits between 5.25% and 5.5%, according to the Economic Policy Institute. To put that number in perspective, the rate was between 1.5% and 1.75% in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
GO Banking Rates
September 23, 2024
Teachers in the U.S. are earning less money compared to similar professions than ever before, according to a report written by Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, think tanks based in Washington, DC. The report found that, in 2023, teachers on average earned 73.4 cents for every dollar relative to the earnings of “similar professionals,” far less than the 93.6 cents they made in 1996.
Salon
September 23, 2024
A report from the National Education Association indicates that this problem is widespread and shows that teacher salaries, when adjusted for inflation, have decreased by 5% over the last decade, reducing their buying power significantly. In 2020, Teachers spent an average of $459 out of their own pockets on supplies each year, on top of the unaccounted fees of cleaning supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with zero reimbursement.
Raleigh News and Observer
September 23, 2024
The pay gap between the weekly wage of teachers and other college graduates working in other professions grew to a record 26.4% in 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
FOX 32 Chicago
September 23, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute estimated the income a family needed in 2024 for a “modest yet adequate standard of living,” which does not include costs such as paying for student loans or for homeownership as well as for any form of entertainment, ranged from $72,501 to $94,597 for a household with two adults and one child, depending on where they lived in New Hampshire.
Business NH Magazine
September 23, 2024
It’s been a confusing time for the labor market. The labor market is extraordinarily strong when judged by any historical benchmark, economists Elise Gould and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute wrote in a blog post last week. Yet recent signs of softening have raised concerns that the Fed is moving too slowly to lower rates.
“There is no reason why the Fed should be looking to generate a weaker labor market, but recent months have seen signs of a slight softening at the labor markets on the margin,” the two economists wrote. “Continued contractionary monetary policy will exacerbate this labor market weakening, even as the last two years have shown that such weakening is clearly not needed to get the last bit of excess inflation wrung out of the system.”
The Washington Post
September 23, 2024
A new report shows minimum wage increases have had little effect on the number of jobs in Maryland and nationwide.
While the rhetoric around increasing the minimum wage often comes with the caution it will reduce low-wage employment, a new review of decades of research showed most studies found no job losses after the state or local minimum wage is raised.
Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute and the review’s co-author, said raising the minimum wage has unquestionably benefited workers.
“Minimum wages very consistently have ended up raising the incomes of low-wage workers,” Zipperer pointed out. “They have done so in a way that doesn’t cause any big negative employment shocks or big disruptions in their local economy.”
Public News Service
September 23, 2024
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said he would guess “it’s a very, very small slice of people who would recognize this kind of symbolic importance of the cut” for the economy and the administration’s stewardship of it.
It is possible, he added, that the Fed waited so long to cut rates that it has “denied the Harris campaign this advantage for a long enough time that its force now is almost totally eroded.”
New York Times
September 23, 2024
As an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found, in recent years, the number of minors discovered working illegally increased more than threefold, from a little more than 1,000 in 2015 to more than 3,800 in 2022. As Nina Mast, one of the report’s authors, told Fortune, fast-food franchises constitute the largest group of violators by far.
Jacobin
September 23, 2024
Minimum Wage: The survey calculated minimum wages for all cities as of January 1, 2024, with local adjustments above federal levels. Data was sourced from the Economic Policy Institute and UC Berkeley.
Santa Monica Daily Press
September 23, 2024
Since the late 1970s, the share of Latinas with a job has grown. Specifically, the employment-to-population ratio for the group has surged from 41.6% in December 1978 to 56% in December 2023, per data from the Economic Policy Institute.
By comparison, the ratio for Black women — who alongside Latinas experience the most severe wage gaps relative to white, non-Hispanic men — has advanced 11.9 percentage points. The metric for women overall has climbed by 8.8 percentage points in that period.
“Some of this is an expansion of opportunities for women,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI. Part of this is also due to a lack of wage growth for typical workers over the past few decades, she said. “Because it can be hard to get ahead, households may have had to put in more work hours to do better.”
CNBC
September 23, 2024
For Black Americans, the situation is particularly concerning. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute revealed a stark 2:1 unemployment ratio compared to white Americans. This means there are twice as many unemployed Black Americans as white Americans, highlighting the persistent racial disparities in the job market.
Houston Defender
September 23, 2024
This failure to compensate teachers adequately is even more egregious when comparing teacher pay to other professionals with similar levels of education. In their 2023 report, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that, on average, teachers made 24.6% less than other similarly educated professionals, the lowest level since the 1960s.
Dallas Weekly
September 23, 2024