The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, called arbitration agreements an “epidemic”, depriving workers and consumers of their rights. As one judge opined, these agreements give corporations a “get out of jail free” card for all potential transgressions.
Denver Post
March 17, 2025
The law says H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage for their job, based on the Department of Labor statistics. In reality, the Economic Policy Institute found that 60 percent of H-1B positions were assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation.
The American Conservative
March 17, 2025
The town with the most unequal income in the US has long been a billionaire hideout. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1% of residents in the metro area earn 132 times the income of the bottom 99% of residents. The average income of the top 1% sits above a cool $16 million.
Business Insider
March 17, 2025
The federal workforce in the Oklahoma City region represents nearly 4% of all jobs there, one of the highest levels for any big city beyond metro Washington, according to a review of federal data by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
March 17, 2025
In an effort to disseminate facts about labor market trends more broadly, the Economic Policy Institute has constructed the State of Working America Data Library, which allows users to easily browse and collate detailed data on wages, incomes, and employment. We hope this tool fosters a broadly shared understanding of the labor market changes we need to achieve a fairer society.
The Briefing Book (Substack)
March 17, 2025
It’s tricky math. To make up the difference, and “to beat Social Security’s quote-unquote return, you’d have to be investing in the stock market,” said Robert Brokamp, a senior adviser at The Motley Fool.
And the stock market is notoriously mercurial, as events of recent days have reminded us.
“So, it’s pure gambling — and really dumb for most people — to assume they’ll beat this high, guaranteed return by investing in the stock market,” said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “I would not encourage anyone to do this, except Elon Musk.”
USA Today
March 17, 2025
HR 1968 gives the “Trump administration significantly more leeway to spend federal dollars without Congressional approval,” according to the Economic Policy Institute, as well as preventing any member of Congress from attempting to terminate Trump’s recent declaration of national emergencies over immigration and the U.S. border.
UPI
March 17, 2025
Child care costs more than public college tuition in 38 states, including California, Florida and Texas, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research nonprofit.
“Child care is one of the largest expenses in a family’s budget partly due to early care and education requiring long operating hours for better access and a low student-to-teacher ratio for better quality,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Gould said that government-funded programs are necessary because “care costs cannot be made less expensive without sacrificing quality.”
Consumer Affairs
March 17, 2025
Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, tells BI that different parts of the economy, like the job market, won’t recover from a recession at the same rate.
“You can have job losses that persist quite a bit after an official recession ends — and you can certainly have unemployment rise well after the end of a recession,” he says.
Business Insider
March 17, 2025
“The administration seems determined to squander and wreck the strong economy,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote earlier this week. “Each of the individual policies they are pursuing—illegal layoffs of federal workers, mass deportations, constant threats and retractions of broad-based tariffs, and Medicaid spending cuts—would be bad for the economy. But each policy is also being pursued with maximum levels of chaos and incoordination, creating unprecedented levels of economic uncertainty. This uncertainty is itself a serious economic threat.”
Common Dreams
March 17, 2025