The lawmakers said in their new letter that “this industry argument ignores the fact that the primary problem appears to be that nurses in nursing homes are not being paid enough.”
On average, nursing homes turn over half their staff within a year, the Economic Policy Institute think tank noted in its public comment on the proposed rule last November, cited by the lawmakers.
The Hill
September 16, 2024
The yellow school bus, once an American staple for getting kids from point A to point B and a tool that helped ensure equal access to schools, is now so difficult to access that some parents are using rideshares and cutting back on work so they can get their kids to school. The number of bus drivers decreased by 15% between September 2019 and September 2023, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
September 16, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning D.C. think tank, released a report last week on teacher wage penalties across the U.S. On average, teachers get paid about 27% less than similar college graduates in other professions, the study found.
That penalty is growing as teacher pay stagnates. Back in 1993, for instance, teachers were paid just 5% less than their similarly educated peers.
Minnesota’s penalty is 31%, the sixth highest in the nation. That number provides some heft to union arguments that disproportionately low pay is one of the reasons Minnesota student achievement is lagging behind other states in recent years.
Minnesota Reformer
September 16, 2024
Americans working jobs in retail, leisure and hospitality and food services were also more likely to have lost their jobs during the pandemic, making it hard to say whether they’re truly better off today, says Elise Gould, senior economist at the independent Economic Policy Institute.
“Even if their wages have risen, it has been very hard for people to make ends meet on the kinds of wages that our labor market has been delivering over the last 50 years,” Gould says. “But the fact that people are struggling doesn’t mean that they didn’t experience real wage growth. Both things can be true.”
Bankrate
September 16, 2024
In March of 2022, the hourly earnings of American non-farm employees were rising at a rate of 5.9 per cent on a year-over-year basis, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. By this summer, the rate of wage increases had fallen below four per cent.
The New Yorker
September 16, 2024
It’s also possible that management could say all workers were paid hourly, letting high-up staff avoid income taxes on their compensation.
“It is not unreasonable to imagine that this policy would lead to a world where corporate CEOs earn $4,000 an hour plus $6 million in overtime,” wrote Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning EPI Action.
MarketWatch
September 16, 2024
The Harris campaign’s take was echoed by economist Heidi Shierholz, who leads the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank.
“Trump’s new playbook is to claim he won’t tax the earnings of the very groups of workers whose earnings he already has a clear record of undermining,” noted Shierholz, who was formerly chief economist at the Department of Labor.
…
Further, Trump’s proposal could wind up mostly benefiting the highest-paid Americans, according to Shierholz.
“To allow their salaried, overtime-exempt workers to get the tax cut, employers could easily switch them to hourly,” she noted. “It is not unreasonable to imagine that this policy would lead to a world where corporate CEOs earn $4,000 an hour plus $6 million in overtime.”
CBS Moneywatch
September 16, 2024
Other critics noted that the proposal would be easy to abuse. “Trump’s claim that he would exempt overtime from taxes is deeply unserious. This policy would be incredibly easy to game,” said Heidi Shierholz, who heads the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Employers could (and would) easily switch salaried, overtime-ineligible workers to hourly—and set the hourly wage so that, with overtime, they are paying no more than they paid before—and allow their workers to get the tax cut.”
Shierholz added that the winners from the plan would likely be high-income. “[A] huge share of the expenditures on this tax exemption would go to very highly paid workers,” she said. “And good lord, big-firm lawyers would love this.”
Fiscal Times
September 16, 2024
“Trump has a long anti-overtime record,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at EPI Action, a labor-oriented advocacy group, said in a statement. “While president, he stripped overtime protections from millions by refusing to defend the Obama-era overtime rule in court and instead publishing his own, much weaker rule.”
By shifting the income eligibility level at which the Labor Department requires workers be paid overtime, Trump helped push an estimated 3.2 million workers out of the category designated to get the extra pay, usually at time-and-a-half, Shierholz’s analysis showed.
An additional 5.2 million workers were subject to losing overtime payments from businesses that could misclassify them as managers or executives, a frequent maneuver employed by businesses, Shierholz said. And rules proposed by Project 2025 — written for a new Trump administration by Trump allies and former aides, but which the former president insists he will not follow — “would strip overtime protections from at least 8 million [additional] workers,” Shierholz said.
LA Times
September 16, 2024
“The vast majority of hourly workers are automatically overtime eligible, regardless of how much money they make,” said Heidi Shierholz, who was the chief economist at the Department of Labor under the Obama administration.
The relative ease with which hourly employees can earn overtime could create a huge tax incentive for more Americans to reclassify themselves as hourly workers. The cost of the tax cut would depend on whether such legislation limited the ability of corporate executives or high-paid lawyers to modify their own compensation and make a chunk of it tax free.
New York Times
September 16, 2024