For example, the Economic Policy Institute reported that, based on 2016 data, only 41% of black families and 35% of Hispanic families had retirement account savings, compared with 68% of white, non-Hispanic families.
Investopedia
February 2, 2024
“In this report, we dispel some really persistent myths,” Claire Kovach, a senior research analyst for the Keystone Research Center, told reporters through a call with the press on Thursday.
“One of which is that only teenagers stand to benefit from a $15 minimum wage, which is far from reality shown in our data drawn from the US Census Bureau and the Economic Policy Institute.”
Keystone Newsroom
February 2, 2024
According to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, school vouchers do not improve the academic performance of low-income students despite Republican talking points. Instead of the legislature directing surplus funds to build new public schools across Tennessee, the bill would give private school vouchers to low-income children in poor neighborhoods.
The Tennessean
February 2, 2024
The Atlantic
February 2, 2024
Zoom out: Tens of thousands of people is indeed a lot of people, “but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of people who get laid off every month even in a very strong labor market,” says Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department and the current president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
- There just aren’t any big concerning signs right now in the data, she says. “It’s just not there.”
Axios
February 2, 2024
Dollar figures are in 2022 dollars.Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of Social Security Administration data
Bankrate
February 2, 2024
It is always a good sign when productivity is rising.
“When you think about what productivity is, it is the total amount of goods and services produced in our economy, divided by the total hours worked in the economy,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Another way to think about it is the total amount of income the economy is generating per hour, she said.
“And when that goes up, that’s good for the economy,” she said. “That actually is what makes rising living standards over time possible.”
All sorts of different factors can contribute to productivity growth, she said. But “in general, over the long run, changes in productivity are really about changes in technology.”
Marketplace
February 2, 2024
According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzed the 2023 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), overall union membership went up even as overall union density went down. In other words, even though 191,000 more workers were represented by a union in 2023, the overall percentage of unionized workers dropped from 11.3% to 11.2%.
…
So if there’s that much interest in unionizing, why haven’t the numbers gone up? What’s holding those 60 million people back? As the EPI explained, “Decades of policy decisions have made it harder for workers to form unions and bargain collectively.” Over the years, various Republican administrations and state politicians have managed to chip away at important labor rights by embracing anti-worker policies, implementing “right-to-work” laws aimed at weakening unions, creating barriers or outright bans on public-sector workers’ rights to organize, and exploiting loopholes to get around our already rickety federal labor laws and safety regulations. (And it must also be said that Democrats have by and large allowed them to get away with it.)
Fast Company
February 2, 2024
First, to your question about how many and what sort of workers will benefit from these minimum wage increases: An excellent resource for understanding the basic facts of who will benefit from these minimum wage increases is the Economic Policy Institute.
Truthout
February 2, 2024
More than 30% of employers who use forced arbitration include class action waivers in their arbitration agreements, according to a 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Fast Company
February 2, 2024
(According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, 61% of the lowest-wage workers do not have access to paid sick days.)
Time Magazine
February 2, 2024
Meanwhile, a typical Black employee is paid about 23% less per hour than a typical white worker, and a typical white family has eight times as much wealth as their Black counterparts, according to an August report from the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
February 2, 2024
With the federal wage remaining so pitifully low and decades out of date (according to the Economic Policy Institute, its relative value is at a 66-year nadir), it’s no coincidence that, as the API’s proposal notes, “Many of these job openings are in the retail and food services industries” — i.e. jobs that pay minimum wage or potentially less, in the case of waitstaff.
Truthout
February 2, 2024
West Virginia AFL-CIO president Josh Sword says that the law has had a negative effect on local unions and will hurt workers’ long-term ability to organize and advocate for better benefits; research from left-leaning groups like the Economic Policy Institute have found that employee wages are lower in states with “right-to-work” laws.
Mountain State Spotlight
February 2, 2024
“We’re getting a lot of stories about a specific chunk” of the labor market, said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC. By and large, blue-collar jobs have been in good shape — it’s the white-collar, professional services jobs in areas such as finance and technology that have been struggling. “But that level of layoffs is actually a normal part of our labor market,” she said.
Shierholz also explained that layoffs and unemployment insurance claims have been lower than they were before the pandemic.
Bloomberg
February 2, 2024
When Bernal was hired for the curatorial position in August 2022, her hourly wage equaled just a bit more than $46,000 before taxes, barely squeaking past the Economic Policy Institute’s estimated livable wage for metro Denver at $45,554. “It’s kind of this open secret that people leave not because they don’t like their work, but because they simply are not paid enough to continue doing it,” she said.
Colorado Sun
February 2, 2024
“The H-1B program has many flaws that have become especially evident in
light of recent mass layo!s in the tech sector,” wrote researchers from the
Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank. “Instead of being used to fill
genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting
U.S. workers’ wages and working conditions, the latest data show that the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have laid off tens of thousands of
workers in 2022 and the first quarter of 2023.
News & Observer
February 2, 2024
The teacher shortage isn’t just a Nevada problem, it is nationwide. Even Vermont is still looking for teachers. The Economic Policy Institute projects it will only get worse. They project the US will be roughly 200,000 public school teachers short by the 2025-26 school year.
Fox 5 Las Vegas
February 2, 2024
Last year, more than 60 million employees who wanted to join a union were unable to do so, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Fortune
February 2, 2024
“As an economist, I totally approve of the Biden admin’s decision to not tout stock market gains as evidence of their general approach to policymaking. As everybody says — and they’re right about this — the stock market isn’t the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Hill
February 2, 2024
“As we continue on this road, you would expect job growth would slow because you’re getting closer and closer to full employment,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “The reserves of workers are getting smaller because more people have jobs.”
There were more job openings a few years ago because of the high turnover. Employers were constantly hiring because employees were frequently quitting and getting hired elsewhere, Gould said.
“There was just a lot more churn and that certainly slowed down pretty dramatically,” she said.
CNBC
February 2, 2024
State of play: The number of federal, state and local government employees covered by a union contract fell by 70,000 workers in 2023; it rose slightly — by 261,000 — for private sector employees, according to BLS data out last week.
- For the private sector, “it was a ‘swimming upstream’ situation,” says Heidi Shierholz, president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute, “a resurgence of interest in unions that was so strong it was able to overcome how enormously stacked private sector labor law is against organizing.”
Axios
February 2, 2024
“Misclassification is a problem that affects many low-paid industries like construction, transportation, home health care,” Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at NELP, told CNBC. But “people in every occupation at all types of pay levels” can be vulnerable to it, Samantha Sanders, director of government affairs and advocacy at the Economic Policy Institute, told CNBC.
GO Banking Rates
February 2, 2024
“The level of job openings, hires, and quits are much closer to pre-pandemic labor market conditions than in the height of the Great Reshuffling of 2021-2022,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, in reaction to the data. “The faster churn at the height of the pandemic is behind us. The labor market is strong but not overheating.”
Quartz
February 2, 2024
Southern politicians tout the region’s “business-friendly” economic development policies, but a new study finds those policies are rooted in racism and have failed most people who live here.
The October study is from Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank focused on “the needs of low-and-middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.” The study looks at job growth, wages, poverty, and state GDP. The data, EPI said, “show a grim reality.”
The group characterized the Southern economic development model as one with “low wages, low taxes, few regulations on businesses, few labor protections, a weak safety net, and vicious opposition to unions.”
Memphis Flyer
February 2, 2024
As for Trump’s claim that the transition to mostly EV sales will result in the loss of 100,000 jobs, a Trump spokesman did not respond to repeated queries asking for the source of this claim. We think Trump may be referring to a 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute, which said that in the transition to EV sales, the auto industry could lose 75,000 jobs without sufficient government investment.
“In terms of setting up the U.S. auto sector to thrive in the EV transition, I’d argue that the IRA has absolutely done a lot to move us well away from the ‘base case’ scenario in 2021 that would’ve seen a large number of jobs lost,” said Josh Bivens, co-author of the report and chief economist at the institute. “The Biden administration is indeed on track to prevent those job losses.”
The Washington Post
February 2, 2024
A report released by the Economic Policy Institute found that between 2016-2019, 62% of corporations in Tennessee paid no taxes.
Tennessee Lookout
February 2, 2024
“Earned sick days are particularly important for low-wage workers who, absent sick leave, lack the savings, access to credit or assets needed to buffer against lost earnings if they need to take time off,” wrote Hilary Wething, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute who co-authored a report on state paid sick leave policies, in an email to New York Focus.
Chalkbeat
February 2, 2024
In 2021, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that the Trump regulation would have reduced worker compensation (transferring it to employers) by at least $3.3 billion annually.
Centre Daily Times
February 2, 2024
According to Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-union think tank which focuses on policy for lower-income workers, this lack of progress in the numbers seem at odds with the growing prominence of unions on the labor landscape.
It’s not a lack of support from the public that’s holding unions back from making more progress in growing their ranks. Even before the big wins of 2023, polling conducted in recent years showed rising union popularity, with support at its highest level since 1965, according to 2022 data from Gallup.
…
“Even though there is this huge popularity of unions, a great deal of interest in them, and rising union activity, we still have just extremely weak labor law that makes it really, really easy for employers, or state lawmakers to really crush union organizing,” Shierholz said.
CNBC
February 2, 2024