Teachers are paid less than comparable workers with similar education levels, according to the Economic Policy Institute. More teachers also report frequent job-related stress and symptoms of depression than similar workers. On average, teachers work 10 more hours per week than comparable professionals.
Education Week
April 21, 2025
The Economic Policy Institute has a piece about the letter, written by former NLRB member Lauren McFerran and AFL-CIO general counsel Lynn Rhinehart, explaining how unusual such a move would be. The CDW letter and a summary of it can be found here.
Jacobin
April 21, 2025
Federal education dollars are now at risk thanks to President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, which could significantly hurt Minnesota public school districts — the majority of which receive at least 10% of their budgets from the feds, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
Tribal nations within Minnesota’s borders would be even more impacted, as a larger share of their budgets comes from the feds. The Red Lake Public School District received nearly 40% of its revenue from federal funding in fiscal year 2022, according to EPI.
Minnesota Reformer
April 21, 2025
“The question becomes, if you want to use them as like a really important revenue source for the federal government, can you raise a lot of money with them without either affecting economic growth or imposing sort of undue burdens through their distributional effects,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“They do raise revenue. I think they do it badly,” he said. “They do it badly in the sense that they hurt low and moderate income people more, and they have worse growth effects than other ways of getting that money.”
The Hill
April 21, 2025
First-time jobless claims have held pretty stable since the start of March.
“That is perhaps surprising when we think about what’s going on with policymaking. There’s a lot of chaos,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute. And chaos, she said, is not ideal for businesses.
Marketplace
April 21, 2025
In Maryland, lawmakers raised taxes by about $1.6 billion and cut spending by $2.3 billion to close a deficit that widened as the session progressed and federal layoffs shook the state economy. About 7% of Marylanders worked for the federal government in January, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C.
Pluribus News
April 21, 2025
Making matters worse, the gap between productivity and a typical worker’s compensation has been widening for nearly a half century, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with productivity growing nearly three times as much as hourly pay.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
April 21, 2025
“Bringing back a manufacturing job is far from a panacea for job quality in the US,” said Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a …[paywall].
Business Insider
April 21, 2025
That’s where the final and most maddening real-world factor comes into play: your wages. In the U.S., wages have not kept up with inflation or productivity at all over the past several decades. In 2022, the Economic Policy Institute found that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour was worth less than it had been at any point in nearly 70 years. The EPI also found in 2015 that hourly worker productivity had risen by 74 percent in the prior 40 years, while wages for hourly workers had risen by only 9 percent in that same timeframe. Contrast that to the 30 years following World War II, when wages and productivity rose at a nearly 1:1 level.
Mashable
April 21, 2025
According to a fall 2024 study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, there are 12.2% fewer school bus drivers…[paywall].
Tulsa World
April 21, 2025