CEOs earned 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021, the Economic Policy Institute reported in October.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
July 21, 2023
Public educators have long complained about stagnant wages. Adjusted for inflation, teachers’ average weekly pay has increased by only $29 between 1996 and 2021, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The wage problem has contributed to a public-school teacher shortage in some parts of the country.
The Wall Street Journal
July 21, 2023
The number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws has increased by 37% within the last year, according to a March report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The report identified 10 states that have introduced or passed bills within the last two years that would weaken child labor standards.
Huffpost
July 21, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute reports the number of workers involved in major strikes increased by nearly 50% last year, and that doesn’t include smaller-scale work stoppages.
NBC Boston
July 21, 2023
An analysis published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2021 suggests that while earners in all income levels experience wage theft, most are independent contractors and hourly workers.
Business Insider
July 21, 2023
But even as the number of platform gig workers soared, wages did not: A 2022 analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found that one in seven gig workers earned less than the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 an hour; just 38% made between $10 and $14.99 an hour, compared to over half of W-2 service workers. And 29% of gig workers made less than their state’s minimum wage.
Business Insider
July 21, 2023
State legislatures across the South are weakening child labor protections even as the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws is increasing. Violations were up in 2022 by 37% since 2021 and 283% since 2015, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of Department of Labor data
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The DLL is required to investigate employers only if they receive a complaint of a violation. And Act 687 is only effective if the state agency demonstrates its willingness to “proactively” use its enforcement authority, especially in industries where child labor is most prevalent, said Jennifer Sherer, senior state policy coordinator at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Passing the law itself gives them a new tool, but we don’t know yet whether they will actually use it,” Sherer said.
Facing South
July 21, 2023
The AFL-CIO, Communications Workers of America, National Employment Law Project and the Economic Policy Institute also have endorsed both bills, Casey’s office said.
NBC News
July 21, 2023
Employers struggled to attract and retain warehouse workers early in the pandemic, which caused a shift in spending from services to goods, said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Non-college-educated workers had found new leverage by quitting and moving to better-paying or easier jobs, forcing Amazon and its competitors to respond with sign-on bonuses and wage increases. White saw ads from Walmart and Target last year advertising warehouse jobs that started in the $20 to $24 range.
Jacobin
July 21, 2023
Income for low-wage workers — those in the 10th percentile of hourly earners — grew 9% from 2019 to 2022 despite inflation, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Economic Policy Institute attributes that growth to pandemic-era policy initiatives like enhanced unemployment insurance, child tax credits and protection from eviction. The labor shortage, especially in low-paid jobs, also forced employers to raise wages.
Minnesota Reformer
July 21, 2023
According to two Economic Policy Institute researchers, in 1979, the top 1 percent of wage earners received 7.3 percent of income, compared to 13.2 percent in 2019. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of wage earners saw their share fall from 69.8 percent to 60.9 percent—a nearly nine-percentage-point decline in earnings.9
Nonprofit Quarterly
July 21, 2023
Numerous studies published by liberal-leaning Washington think tanks have determined that, despite Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbyists’ insistence, the U.S. doesn’t have a labor shortage. After studying the top 15 H-2B occupations that include the leisure industry, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that persistently flat wages undermine the claim that labor shortages exist.
Highland County Press
July 21, 2023
Low-wage US workers have made gains in the last few years, with a 9% increase in real wages between 2019 and 2022, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Still, the federal minimum wage has remained fixed at $7.25 an hour since 2009, while the value of wages has dropped by more than 20%, according to estimates. The immobility of the federal minimum wage means that low-salary workers remain vulnerable to the pressures of a recession or depression, according to the think tank.
Bloomberg
July 21, 2023
The U.S. Department of Labor is supposed to enforce worker protections and keep H-2A workers from displacing local farmworkers. The protections are not always enforced, according to a 2022 Economic Policy Institute report on the H2 visa program’s impact on workers.
While the Washington state attorney general was able to charge Ostrom with discrimination against women within the state, it is not illegal for H-2A recruiters to hire only men.
Daniel Costa, who is the author of the report and the director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at EPI, noted that “an employer may select an entire workforce composed of a single nationality, gender, or age group” under the program.
The American Prospect
July 21, 2023
Still, hourly rates can ebb and flow, given the flexible nature of these jobs. In a 2022 Shift Project survey, nearly one in seven workers said they earned less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 on an hourly basis. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of the study, that hourly wage included tips.
Business Insider
July 21, 2023
Notwithstanding those ups and downs, executive pay in Hollywood has followed the pattern of the rest of corporate America. As tracked by the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute, the estimated ratio between CEO pay and the wages of average workers in their companies soared from about 20-to-1 in 1965 to about 388-to-1 in 2021, the most recent year EPI analyzed.
LA Times
July 21, 2023
Since 2021, lawmakers in 14 states have introduced bills to weaken rules governing what kinds of workplace tasks minors are allowed to perform and for what wages. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has argued that this deregulatory attack is driven by corporations’ desire to ramp up exploitation.
“The trend reflects a coordinated multi-industry push to expand employer access to low-wage labor and weaken state child labor laws in ways that contradict federal protections,” EPI researchers Jennifer Sherer and Nina Mast wrote earlier this year. “And the recent uptick in state legislative activity is linked to longer-term industry-backed goals to rewrite federal child labor laws and other worker protections for the whole country.”
Common Dreams
July 21, 2023
“It’s good news that women are finding jobs in this economy at a greater rate than they were previously,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. She noted that brisk hiring in health care and government has helped more women find jobs.
States Newsroom
July 21, 2023
Given that people of color and immigrants will make up a majority of the working class by 2032, according to the Economic Policy Institute, one might ask if they are not strategic in their own right. The organizing efforts of immigrant farmworkers, janitors, construction workers, and others are responsible for most of the actual growth of unions in states like California over the past three decades.
The Nation
July 21, 2023
Despite recent fluctuations in the job market, a gloomy economic situation, and the rising cost of living, 2023 is a great time to be in the graduating business school class.
That’s according to the Economic Policy Institute, which recently published a report suggesting this year’s graduating class is in better shape than the class of 2022, with a stronger labor market for younger workers, and lower unemployment and underemployment rates.
BusinessBecause
July 21, 2023
The math on teacher pay may not add up for college students. Teachers are generally paid less than their college-educated peers, a trend that has worsened over the last several decades, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Public school teachers now earn about 24% less than other college-educated professionals, the biggest gap since 1979, the a left-leaning think tank noted.
CBS Moneywatch
July 21, 2023
Employers struggled to attract and retain warehouse workers early in the pandemic, which caused a shift in spending from services to goods, said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Non-college-educated workers had found new leverage by quitting and moving to better-paying or easier jobs, forcing Amazon and its competitors to respond with sign-on bonuses and wage increases. White saw ads from Walmart and Target last year advertising warehouse jobs that started in the $20 to $24 range.
“No doubt Amazon had to prominently advertise an increase in pay in response to negative reports about the company’s poor working conditions and low wages,” said Morrissey.
Labor Notes
July 21, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the typical CEO of the 1960s made 20 times what one of his average employees did. In 2022, according to an AFL-CIO report, the ratio climbed to 324-1. That’s not inflation — that’s “greed-flation.”
LA Times
July 21, 2023
Regulators have so far been unwilling to fight powerful tech giants over worker classification, said Celine McNicholas, counsel at the Economic Policy Institute. She said gig companies should already be treating their drivers as employees, but have “decided they are unwilling to comply with the law.”
“That is the business model that they have employed out of the gate, and they have gotten away with it,” she added. “There hasn’t been federal enforcement. Where is the DOL lawsuit against these companies? That is how change is made in big companies that are skirting regulations or violating the law.”
Bloomberg Law
July 21, 2023
By breaking down the price increases into their three main components — labor cost, nonlabor inputs and profit markup — the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) provides much better evidence for how inflation came about during the pandemic. The EPI study looks at these three components from 2007 to 2019 and from the second quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021 across Non-Financial Sector industries (NFC), which form 75% of the entire private sector. The study shows that from the second quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%. It shows an acceleration of over 1.8% price growth compared with the 2007-2019 pre-pandemic business cycle.
Ventura County Star
July 21, 2023
In 2021, the top 10% of Americans held nearly 70% of US wealth, up from about 61% at the end of 1989, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The top 1% of earners in the United States now takes home 21% of all the income in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
That means a top-ranked university can charge whatever it wants and will still find wealthy families willing and able to pay each year.
CNN Business
July 21, 2023
Like many older Americans, they keep working because they can’t afford to quit. An April report by the Economic Policy Institute summed it up like this:
“No Way Out: Older workers are increasingly trapped in crummy jobs and unable to retire.”
Labor economist and New School professor Teresa Ghilarducci, co-author of that report, told me that as housing and other living costs have risen in the post-pension era, it’s tougher for workers, let alone retirees, to pay their bills. And that financial fragility is far more prevalent among Black and Latino people.
LA Times
July 21, 2023