Morgan Lewis’ services help companies like Amazon and Trader Joe’s discourage union organizing by dragging out the timeline to a collective labor agreement, even if workers at a location win a union election, according to a January 2025 report on corporate union-busting practices by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“Carey’s nomination as NLRB General Counsel is certainly another example of Trump’s attacks on workers and the right to organize,” EPI senior policy analyst Margaret Poydock told Sludge. “However, given the state of the agency, it hardly matters who is nominated to the GC role because Trump has already effectively destroyed the agency’s independence, which began when he fired Gwynne Wilcox from the Board for ‘disfavoring employers’ in her decisions. That decision is still working its way through the courts, but the justification he gave essentially means anyone who wins a nomination to serve at the agency, whether the Board or General Counsel, knows that they will be expected to favor employers to stay in Trump’s good graces and keep their job.”
Sludge
June 9, 2025
Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”
ProPublica
June 9, 2025
Along with the Institute for Policy Studies and the Economic Policy Institute, Barber’s organization, Repairers of the Breach, re-released an earlier report Monday on the proposed budget with additional information about communities that would be impacted if the budget is passed into law.
Common Dreams
June 9, 2025
DOGE’s unprecedented access to Americans’ data “is alarming, made worse by the complete absence of meaningful oversight,” according to Ben Zipperer, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “That unrestrained access to data will likely worsen the problem of identity theft in the United States, which could cost working families tens of billions of dollars annually.”
The Independent
June 9, 2025
This reluctance to leave an abusive worksite can be compounded by the fact that many H-2A workers arrive with debt they’ve accrued from paying recruiters to get here. Employers are required to pay all recruitment costs, but recruiters’ practices go largely unregulated since they operate internationally.
The D.C.-based liberal think tank Economic Policy Institute has said this amounts to a program that exploits and silences migrant workers, replacing year-round workers in the process. In some cases, U.S. prosecutors have accused farmers and recruiters of using the H-2A program to engage in forced labor trafficking.
AL.com
June 9, 2025
According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, workers lose over $15 billion each year due to minimum wage violations alone — a burden that disproportionately affects immigrant and undocumented workers.
MoneyWise
June 9, 2025
It’s no secret that CEO pay is out of control. A 2024 study from the Economic Policy Institute found that it’s risen an astronomical 1,085% since 1978, compared to a paltry 24% rise in typical workers’ pay.
Quartz
June 9, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2023, more than one in five Black households experienced food insecurity, more than Hispanics and whites, and lack of food hit the lowest for African Americans in 2019.
South Florida Times
June 9, 2025
While it remains popular, the program has not been without controversy. In 2019, a dozen former au pairs from multiple countries sued the companies that recruited them, alleging they had been overworked and that companies had kept hold of a share of the wages meant for them. A $65.5 million settlement was later reached.
At the time, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said that the federal government, including Congress, needed to act to make substantial changes to the program to protect workers and increase oversight.
Newsweek
June 9, 2025
Half a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists on Monday expressed their “grave concerns” about the sprawling budget reconciliation package passed last month by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, warning that slashing an already frayed social safety net and exploding the record deficit in service of massive tax cuts for the wealthiest households will worsen the nation’s economic woes.
“The most acute and immediate damage stemming from this bill would be felt by the millions of American families losing key safety net protections like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits,” Daron Acemoglu, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an open letter published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
Common Dreams
June 9, 2025