WOOD: Federal laws are weaker, but Florida already loosened some child labor laws last year, and the state isn’t alone. Nina Mast is a policy and economic analyst at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, which seeks to improve wages for working people. She says dozens of states have considered similar bills and several passed some last year.
NINA MAST: What we are seeing, especially coming out of the pandemic, is really just a push that is led by the business industry and some right-wing think tanks to be able to make it easier to hire young people at lower wages for longer hours and in more hazardous jobs under the guise of wanting to address a so-called labor shortage.
WOOD: Mast says the changes are intended to drive down wages that went up in lower-paying industries during the pandemic, meaning jobs like servers in restaurants and delivery drivers.
MAST: This is really a concerted, nationwide effort to essentially create a permanent underclass of disempowered, low-wage workers.
NPR
April 7, 2025
This move by the administration could be the second version of the 1981 PATCO strike where air traffic controllers were fired by then-President Ronald Reagan, which in turn strongly influenced the subsequent precipitous decline in the power of unions in the U.S. to raise wages and living standards for all, the Economic Policy Institute noted.
Forbes
April 7, 2025
Adam Hersh, senior economist, economic policy institute: “it’s getting more and more likely every day on this policy path that the president is pursuing that we’re going to have a recession this year. this is all and unforced error that the president has accomplished in, you know, a little over two months in office.”
GrayTV
April 7, 2025
Economic Policy Institute senior economist Adam Hersh wants to see improved trade deals for the United States, but believes that there could have been better ways to go about it…Tariffs can be an effective tool for promoting industrial development when they’re done in a targeted and strategic way, but when there’s broad base across the entire world, across everything that we trade. There’s no sense to this.
CBS News Radio
April 7, 2025
Lynn Rhinehart, a Senior Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and former General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, joined the America’s Work Force Union Podcast to discuss the dismantling of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), the broader implications of Trump’s executive orders on federal unions and potential consequences for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
America's Work Force Union Podcast
April 7, 2025
…billion in funding for Medicaid over the next 10 years. The Economic Policy Institutefound that these cuts to Medicaid could…[paywall].
Business Insider
April 7, 2025
In contrast to his first term, when he implemented levies on roughly $380 billion worth of goods over four years, Mr. Trump has imposed more than $3 trillion in tariffs in the less than three months since his return to power, according to the Economic Policy institute, a left-leaning think tank.
CBS Moneywatch
April 7, 2025
And those decades of high manufacturing employment witnessed exceptionally high rates of wage growth and economic mobility. Between 1948 and 1973, hourly compensation in the US climbed by 91.3 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Over the ensuing 50 years, by contrast, hourly wages grew by just 9.2 percent.
VOX
April 7, 2025
Michigan’s teachers are paid less than the national average, with an average salary of about $67,000 per year compared to more than $69,500 nationwide in the 2022-23 school year, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Lansing City Pulse
April 7, 2025
Trump’s tariffs were in effect well before shockwaves from the COVID-19 pandemic caused inflation to soar. The Economic Policy Institute estimated in January 2022 — a time when inflation was still skyrocketing — that removing the tariffs would have offset no more than 7.2% of the run-up in consumer prices.
Yahoo Finance
April 7, 2025