The Alabama Department of Labor is out with the State’s latest unemployment report. Communities in the State’s region known as the “Black Belt” are ranked as having the highest number of residents without jobs. However, quarterly figures from the Economic Policy Institute indicate that African American workers in Alabama have had better employment levels than much of the nation.
Alabama Public Radio
August 20, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-union persuaders each year, although due to lackluster enforcement of reporting requirements, not all of it is publicly reported. Employers, by law, must also file reports, known as LM-10s, detailing how much they’ve spent on this persuader activity.
Orlando Weekly
August 20, 2024
In April, California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour—the culmination of a long campaign by fast food workers across the state. Even in the state’s rural inland counties, where the cost of living is lowest, the new rate isn’t enough for a single adult without children to survive working forty hours per week, every week, for the entire year, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s cost of living calculator.
The Progressive Magazine
August 20, 2024
But energy prices do impact the cost of consumer goods. In a report last year, the Federal Reserve said “higher oil prices drive up production and transportation costs throughout the economy, which are then passed through to food and core prices.” Economists are also making the connection between energy and economywide inflation elsewhere in the world — for instance, in France.
“Energy is important. It goes into so much of what we consume and produce,” said Adam Hersh, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s estimated that about 40 percent of the rise in inflation that we saw through the [coronavirus] pandemic were due to spiking energy prices.”
When Biden was the candidate, it was clear that voters still held him responsible for inflation. It’s too early to say if that blame will shift to Harris.
“It almost doesn’t matter what they had done,” said Hersh, referring to the Biden administration. “People are being squeezed by inflation, [so] they’re going to take the blame for it fairly or unfairly. I think in this case, it’s really unfairly.”
E & E News
August 20, 2024
We’ve all noticed how tipping has spread like wildfire; it seems like almost every purchase you make is now accompanied by a request for a tip, even when you received nothing resembling “service” at all. More importantly, tipping is a practice that has deeply racist roots; as an Economic Policy Institute report notes, “Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, formerly enslaved Black workers were often relegated to service jobs (e.g., food service workers and railroad porters). However, instead of paying Black workers any wage at all, employers suggested that guests offer Black workers a small tip for their services.”
MSNBC.com
August 20, 2024
Failing to raise the minimum wage has kept millions of low-wage workers, mostly restaurant and service industry employees, from meeting basic financial demands, according to a 2023 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on economic trends and policies affecting workers.
Jacobin
August 20, 2024
Project 2025 proposes taxing employers on any non-wage benefits that exceed $12,000 per worker annually. This policy, which has received little public attention, could impact health insurance, retirement plans, and other employer-provided benefits that many workers rely on. According to an analysis by EPI Action, a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization affiliated with the Economic Policy Institute, this proposal could affect more than 15 million workers, resulting in an additional $12 billion in taxes if employers reduce or eliminate these benefits.
Nation of Change
August 20, 2024
“This wouldn’t help very many workers, and it could actually be very harmful to millions more, with the real benefits of this policy change going to employers and the wealthy at the expense of working people,” says David Cooper, researcher from EPI Action, a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization.
NerdWallet
August 20, 2024
What Democrats can point out in defense is rising wages relative to inflation. According to the Economic Policy Institute, average wages have beat the rise of inflation for the past year. Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that in a recent post.
Washington Examiner
August 20, 2024
Though he has positioned himself as pro-union, Trump is no stranger to complaints about his labor policy and approach to worker rights. In 2020, the Economic Policy Institute released a report listing 50 ways the first Trump administration eroded worker rights and expanded corporate power.
Business Insider
August 20, 2024
The inflation-adjusted wage spike early in the pandemic was somewhat misleading, both because 20 million low-wage service workers left the workforce temporarily and because prices for some things such as gasoline temporarily plummeted, noted Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
As the economic recovery has progressed, workers are doing slightly better, Bivens said.
“On the one hand, all else equal, you’d want better wage growth over four and a half years,” Bivens said. “On the other hand, we suffered a horrible economic shock in that period. Relative to other recessions and recoveries, this is superb wage performance, even with the inflation.”
Stateline
August 20, 2024
Zoom out. With this law, Illinois is joining more than a dozen states that are considering or have enacted laws allowing workers to opt out of workplace speech that’s considered to be coercive, according to tracking by the Economic Policy Institute. A similar law in Hawaii went into effect on July 2.
HR Brew
August 20, 2024
Regardless, new immigration laws will have a deep impact on labor availability in agriculture and will need corresponding prioritization of worker programs and securing a consistent and law-abiding workforce for farms. Trump may need to address the growing farmworker wage gap as well, as detailed by the Economic Policy Institute.
GO Banking Rates
August 20, 2024
- The idea of “school choice,” where proponents claimed for years that poor families can “escape failing public schools” has been proven false. Instead, the Economic Policy Institute determined that “vouchers benefit the wealthy at the expense of low-income and rural communities.” Moreover, the EPI study found that “… since vouchers typically do not cover the full cost of private school, low-income families are still unable to afford private school education — even with a voucher — and few rural students have access to private schools.”
Ohio Capital Journal
August 20, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, “RTW laws — and the phrase “right to work” itself — are intended to deceive and confuse. The misleadingly named policy is designed to make it more difficult for workers to form and sustain unions and negotiate collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.”
GO Banking Rates
August 20, 2024
Relying on customers to pay the bulk of tipped workers’ wages exposes workers to tremendous instability of income, as pay can vary dramatically day-to-day and week-to-week. Employers are legally required to ensure that on a weekly basis tips (the “tip credit”) cover the gap between the tipped minimum wage and the regular minimum wage.
If they do not, employers are responsible for making up the difference. In practice, this requirement is exceptionally difficult to enforce. As a result, tipped workers — who are already paid low wages — are particularly vulnerable to wage theft.
From low pay to high poverty rates, to wage theft, sexual harassment, and workplace discrimination, the injustices tipped workers face are not equally shared across demographic groups but are concentrated among workers of color and women.
Inequality.org
August 20, 2024
Mandatory arbitration is now the norm in corporate America, The Post has reported. Because a majority of nonunion jobs in the country require arbitration, 60 million workers can’t sue in court, according to a 2018 report from the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
August 20, 2024
It’s an industry that’s seeing less and less action. According to the Economic Policy Institute, there were more than 192,000 bus drivers across the country in 2023. That’s down more than 15% from 2019 and nearly 100,000 from a decade before.
WVLT-TV
August 20, 2024
Nearly 30 percent of US workers, roughly 44 million people, make less than $17 per hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Independent
August 20, 2024
Michigan and Ohio are both relatively expensive places to raise children compared to the fastest growing states in the U.S. The average cost for infant care in Michigan is $10,881 or $905 per month, according to the Washington, D.C., think tank Economic Policy Institute. Infant care for one child in the state accounts for 19% of a median family’s income. Infant care costs $9,697 in Ohio, or about $808 per month.
Crain's Detroit Business
August 20, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute found that states with voucher programs spent $2,800 less per student than those without in 2021.
WKYT
August 20, 2024
Stunning stat: Fewer than 1% of agricultural employers are investigated annually, but WHD finds wage and hour violations in 70% of its investigations, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Axios
August 20, 2024
The liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute has also argued that the merger would reduce the number of outside employment options available to workers, lowering grocery store workers’ annual wages by a total of $334 million — about a $450 loss in annual wages per worker.
Dayton Daily News
August 20, 2024
Though Economic Policy Institute’s class of 2024 report notes that young high-school graduates experienced a “faster rebound” in job prospects and strong wage growth through the pandemic recovery, many young people are grappling with jobs that pay low wages or have inconsistent scheduling, an affordable housing crisis, and student debt. These crises, among others, have shaped coming of age for young people, bringing up questions of what it means to support people during a transitional period of life.
Dame Magazine
August 20, 2024
Fiscal Times
August 20, 2024
EPI Action, a nonpartisan research and advocacy organization affiliated with the Economic Policy Institute, published an analysis of a proposal that appears on page 7 of Project 2025’s section on the Treasury Department—whose authors include at least two people who served on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign and transition team for his term in office.
The proposal calls to tax employers on workplace benefits that exceed $12,000 per worker annually—which would undoubtedly “lead to employers cutting back on these benefits,” wrote Josh Bivens, chief economist for EPI Action.
Based on health insurance benefits that are provided to more than 150 million Americans through their employers, Bivens found, more than 15 million workers would see their benefits taxed under the Project 2025 plan.
Those workers would collectively pay over $12 billion more in taxes if their employers shifted away from providing benefits as a cost-cutting measure.
Common Dreams
August 20, 2024
“While the administration may be trumpeting this rule as a good thing for workers, that is a ruse,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank partly funded by labor unions, wrote in a statement issued the same day. “In reality, the rule leaves behind millions of workers who would have received overtime protections under the much stronger rule, published in 2016, that Trump administration abandoned.”
“It’s worth noting that if the rule had simply been adjusted for inflation since 1975, today it would be roughly $56,500,” Shierholz wrote. “This is more than $20,000 higher than the Trump administration’s level! I estimate that roughly 8.2 million workers who would have benefited from the 2016 rule will be left behind by the Trump administration’s rule.”
FactCheck.org
August 20, 2024
Teachers nationally earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022 – or 26.4% less than comparable college graduates – according to a report by Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute. The educator pay gap in Pennsylvania in 2022 was 15.8%, according to the institute.
Lancaster Online
August 20, 2024
What’s more, as this Economic Policy Institute analysis outlines, union election petitions were up by 53 percent in 2022, and a further 3 percent in 2023. The first half of 2023 also saw an election win rate of 80 percent, as compared to 66 percent in 2020 or less than 60 percent in the 2000s.
American Prospect
August 20, 2024
Corridor Business Journal
August 20, 2024