A new report shows minimum wage increases have had little effect on the number of jobs in Maryland and nationwide.
While the rhetoric around increasing the minimum wage often comes with the caution it will reduce low-wage employment, a new review of decades of research showed most studies found no job losses after the state or local minimum wage is raised.
Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute and the review’s co-author, said raising the minimum wage has unquestionably benefited workers.
“Minimum wages very consistently have ended up raising the incomes of low-wage workers,” Zipperer pointed out. “They have done so in a way that doesn’t cause any big negative employment shocks or big disruptions in their local economy.”
Public News Service
September 23, 2024
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said he would guess “it’s a very, very small slice of people who would recognize this kind of symbolic importance of the cut” for the economy and the administration’s stewardship of it.
It is possible, he added, that the Fed waited so long to cut rates that it has “denied the Harris campaign this advantage for a long enough time that its force now is almost totally eroded.”
New York Times
September 23, 2024
As an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found, in recent years, the number of minors discovered working illegally increased more than threefold, from a little more than 1,000 in 2015 to more than 3,800 in 2022. As Nina Mast, one of the report’s authors, told Fortune, fast-food franchises constitute the largest group of violators by far.
Jacobin
September 23, 2024
Minimum Wage: The survey calculated minimum wages for all cities as of January 1, 2024, with local adjustments above federal levels. Data was sourced from the Economic Policy Institute and UC Berkeley.
Santa Monica Daily Press
September 23, 2024
Since the late 1970s, the share of Latinas with a job has grown. Specifically, the employment-to-population ratio for the group has surged from 41.6% in December 1978 to 56% in December 2023, per data from the Economic Policy Institute.
By comparison, the ratio for Black women — who alongside Latinas experience the most severe wage gaps relative to white, non-Hispanic men — has advanced 11.9 percentage points. The metric for women overall has climbed by 8.8 percentage points in that period.
“Some of this is an expansion of opportunities for women,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI. Part of this is also due to a lack of wage growth for typical workers over the past few decades, she said. “Because it can be hard to get ahead, households may have had to put in more work hours to do better.”
CNBC
September 23, 2024
For Black Americans, the situation is particularly concerning. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute revealed a stark 2:1 unemployment ratio compared to white Americans. This means there are twice as many unemployed Black Americans as white Americans, highlighting the persistent racial disparities in the job market.
Houston Defender
September 23, 2024
This failure to compensate teachers adequately is even more egregious when comparing teacher pay to other professionals with similar levels of education. In their 2023 report, the Economic Policy Institute concluded that, on average, teachers made 24.6% less than other similarly educated professionals, the lowest level since the 1960s.
Dallas Weekly
September 23, 2024
Trump previously claimed that migrants were taking “Black jobs.” However, economists said that he was wrong.
“The claim is absolutely not true,” Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute Action told ABC News.
Raw Story
September 23, 2024
By that point, CEO pay had risen more than 1,200 percent since 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, compared to only 15 percent for workers. Closing that gap might appear to align neatly with the Business Roundtable statement, in which CEOs pledged to “invest in our employees,” in part by “compensating them fairly and providing important benefits.”
American Prospect
September 23, 2024
A 2023 study by the Economic Policy Institute revealed that one in two workers over age 50 work in unhealthy or hazardous conditions, or have jobs that are physically draining. If this is the case, you may no longer be willing or able to work, and instead of remaining on the job, may choose to draw Social Security early.
Kiplinger
September 23, 2024