Since 1938, we’ve had laws to protect workers from being forced to work overtime without getting paid for it. It’s a simple principle: Pay people for the all work they do. The problem we face now is that the people who these laws were designed to protect are no longer being protected – millions of Americans are working overtime and not getting paid for it. Hourly workers in most service and blue-collar jobs are guaranteed the right to overtime pay. If they work more than 40 hours in a week, their employers are required by law to pay them time and a half for the additional hours. For salaried workers, the story is more complicated. Whether they are eligible for overtime pay is determined by their salary and the nature of their work. Federal overtime rules are meant to exclude from overtime protections only workers who, because of their high pay and responsibilities, have enough authority and bargaining power within their workplace that they don’t need these protections
Tribune News Service
June 26, 2015
On World Refugee Day, The Hill published a Contributors piece by the libertarian Cato Institute’s immigration policy analyst, Alex Nowrasteh, headlined, “The US should be a home for refugees.” In it, he offers a brief history of refugee policy and flows into the United States over the past century and suggests that the United States “should … allow more to settle here.” That’s a noble sentiment, but the headline is misleading because it leaves out the substance of what Nowrasteh proposes in order to help make this happen. In short, Nowrasteh wants to welcome more refugees to the United States but proposes abandoning them and letting them fend for themselves once they get here.
The Hill
June 26, 2015
The hope is that the market’s recovery and the expected gradual rise in rates will help close the trillion-dollar-plus state pension gap. But for some states, the shortfall represents years of underfunding. “It’s the indirect effect of the very concerted political pressure to not raise taxes,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “People appreciate services; they want cops, firefighters; they want teachers and all that stuff. But if you’re in a budget crunch, the one way you live on credit and not raise taxes as a modern politician is just not pay your pension bill.”
CNBC
June 26, 2015
Many of the generous federal housing programs of the 20th century were for whites only — even in the North, as Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute has detailed. Through the Federal Housing Administration and other agencies, the United States government essentially ran a whites-only wealth creation program. Although this blatant discrimination has largely disappeared into history, it still has a large effect on family wealth, handed down from one generation to the next.
The New York Times
June 25, 2015
It’s difficult to know the exact number of misclassified workers nationwide, but state-level studies show that between 10 and 20 percent of employers misclassify at least one worker as an independent contractor, said a report published this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank based in Washington.
The Chicago Tribune
June 25, 2015
But remember Ross Perot warning in the 1992 presidential debate of a “giant sucking sound” caused by American jobs heading south? He was right. The liberal Economic Policy Institute has estimated that NAFTA alone has cost the U.S. at least 700,000 jobs and “strengthened the ability of U.S. employers to force workers to accept lower wages and benefits.”
New York Observer
June 25, 2015
Recent Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute show that Americans with four-year college degrees make an astounding 98 percent more per hour on average, compared to those without a degree. In addition, many occupations that previously only required a high school diploma are now demanding a bachelor’s degree .
Education Week
June 25, 2015
While some government reports show that NAFTA had a minor impact on the U.S. economy, others point to the wipeout of manufacturing jobs. The Economic Policy Institute estimates nearly one million net jobs lost from NAFTA, and another 2.7 million lost since permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) were established with China.
The American Prospect
June 25, 2015
Critics on the left might disagree with Baird’s and Zelikow’s emphasis on a skills shortage. Paul Krugman last year called “the belief that America suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ . . . a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.” He wrote, “If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills.” Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute has worked to debunk the skills gap as “mythical.”
Bloomberg
June 25, 2015
Decades removed from Jim Crow, many minorities still live in segregated ghettos in inner-city neighborhoods throughout the country. A housing expert from the Economic Policy Institute joins Kathleen to talk about the explicit and racially driven policies at all levels of government that created today’s ghettos, a word he argues should not be avoided or sanitized.
Wisconsin Public Radio
June 25, 2015