Half of low-wage workers are married or have children, and low-wage workers are more likely to be at or near poverty and consequently dependent on public assistance programs. The Labor Center researchers mined these statistics and other data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Economic Policy Institute and the California Employment Development Department, creating an online data explorer that describes the low-wage workforce in California.
Sacramento Bee
October 28, 2024
Jennifer Sherer, director of the State Worker Power Initiative with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, left-leaning think tank, told the Michigan Advance the data confirms increasing support for collective bargaining among workers.
“The steady uptick in NLRB petitions for union elections in the Midwest reflects what we are seeing across the country: the labor movement is in the midst of a resurgence and workers are organizing at a pace not seen in recent decades. Worker organizing is taking place in all sectors of the economy from health care and manufacturing to nonprofits and higher education,” said Sherer.
Michigan Advance
October 28, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, estimates that the US lost 682,000 jobs due to Nafta, which largely eliminated tariffs between the US, Mexico and Canada.
The Guardian
October 28, 2024
“The literal prices that people see on goods make them think that they’re not doing as well because they feel that they are higher than they think they should be,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute But, those prices are actually lower as a share of their wages than they were four years ago.”
States Newsroom
October 28, 2024
Labor economists dispute the notion that the changes will harm the economy. “Whenever a labor standard is increased, there is always a chorus of business that says the sky will fall and it never does,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based progressive think tank, told Stacker. “Somehow we have labor standards that improve over time.”
Stacker
October 28, 2024
Another ding against pensions is the fear the employer-sponsor will go belly up. Monique Morrissey at the Economic Policy Institute said that concern is overblown.
“In the private sector, benefits are guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation,” Morrissey said.
In the public sector, pension funds come from government coffers, and Morrissey said one way to balance the budget “is by not contributing the full amount to the pension.”
Marketplace
October 28, 2024
Trump once deemed himself “a Tariff Man” on Twitter—a name that could backfire. His proposed tariffs could increase costs for American households by $2,500 to $3,000 every year, Adam Hersh, a senior economist at nonpartisan advocacy group EPI Action, told NBC.
Fortune
October 28, 2024
According to Josh Bivens, Ph.D., Chief Economist at the nonpartisan research-based Economic Policy Institute [EPI], the Trump administration squandered the economic strength he inherited from Obama–even before his mismanagement of the pandemic completely devastated it.
NewsOne
October 28, 2024
Globalization and trade impacts also hit the Iron Range and rural America disproportionately along educational lines. Americans without college degrees lost nearly $2,000 a year in wages due to trade policies, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Broader research showed, as of 2008, that “international trade tends to make low-skilled workers in the United States worse off – not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.”
Public News Service
October 28, 2024
In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations and total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans. Business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans; average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats; and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth almost twice as fast under Democrats than under Republicans.
Nevada Appeal
October 28, 2024