Across the country, districts, parents and students are struggling with similar issues. While the number of bus drivers have increased since pandemic lows, employment has not fully recovered. An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows a 15 percent drop in school bus drivers employed in k-12 public schools from September 2019 to 2023. During that time, 1.4 million more students enrolled in public schools. School bus workers tend to be older and paid less than the average worker, EPI notes.
PBS Newshour
October 1, 2024
‘[T]he use of AI in the healthcare setting is exacerbating long-standing issues that healthcare professionals have bargained over, including staffing ratios and discretion in patient care.’
—Analysts Patrick Oakford, Josh Bivens and Celine McNicholas. (Source: “Federal AI legislation: An evaluation of existing proposals and a road map forward.” Economic Policy Institute, Sep. 25)
AI in Healthcare newsletter
October 1, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average cost of infant care in Montana is more than $9,000 a year.
Montana Public Radio
October 1, 2024
School bus driver numbers have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. There were 192,400 school bus drivers in September 2023, down 15.1% from September 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Ohio Capital Journal
October 1, 2024
In the past few years, America’s business lobby has sort to reverse that progress and roll back protections, according to the Economic Policy institute. This year alone, six states—Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, and West Virginia, enacted legislation to weaken child labor protections, despite an increase in child labor violations.
Common Dreams
October 1, 2024
Ben Zipperer, a low-wage labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the early fears around automation and robots threatening jobs in the foodservice industry are not being realized. Automation has shown to make workers more productive and effective, he said.
Robots have also been shown to make businesses more efficient and profitable, Zipperer siad, which creates an “offsetting demand factor.” That increased demand and profitability can actually help keep the cost of food for customers more affordable, he added.
States Newsroom
October 1, 2024
Around 900,000 workers — nearly a third of Missouri’s workforce — would either get automatic raises or likely get raises because they already make just above that new minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And with one in five private employees nationwide lacking paid sick time, organizers say that this proposition would especially benefit poor Missourians.
Kansas City Beacon
October 1, 2024
The meme claimed real weekly wages increased 8.2% under Trump and fell 3.9% under Biden. The data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and charted by the St. Louis Fed showed that, indeed, real wages rocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a historical height of $393 — a number based on 1982-84 inflation-adjusted dollars — in the second quarter of 2020.
This is due to the fact that low-paying jobs disappeared during the height of the pandemic while workers with higher-paying jobs adapted to remote work, pushing the average up, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Snopes
October 1, 2024
…between employers and unionized employees to take time; the Economic Policy Institute and the Department of Labor both say it often takes…[paywall].
Salt Lake Tribune
October 1, 2024
In an August 2023 blog post, he argued that the estimate of indirect and induced jobs in the API report was derived using “exaggerated multipliers” and “double counting.” In an email to us, O’Leary — using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the partially labor union-funded Economic Policy Institute — estimated that there were 55,509 fracking-related jobs in Pennsylvania in 2023, of which 18,636 were direct jobs and the rest were indirect and induced jobs.
FactCheck.org
October 1, 2024