Media clips

---

• Little-Known Project 2025 Policy Would Tax Benefits for More Than 15 Million Workers

  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
• Trump’s Overtime Pay Rule

  “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
• Teacher salaries on the rise as Lancaster County schools compete for dwindling educator pool

  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
• In Defense of Bidenomics

  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
• Iowa’s youth labor law leaves small businesses and teen workers in hot water

  Paywall.

  Corridor Business Journal August 20, 2024
• The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for 15 years. How the election may change that

  Raising today’s federal minimum wage would help low-wage workers who are trying to earn a living and have a sense of economic security, said Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that provides economic research.

  “The minimum wage has basically lost, 29%, 30% of its purchasing power over the last 15 years, simply because Congress has failed to update it,” Zipperer said.

  Lifting the minimum wage threshold to $15 per hour would increase the incomes of about 20 million workers, Zipperer said. That would include people who are low-wage workers who may be earning hourly pay that is slightly more than the federal minimum wage threshold.

  “Changes in wages don’t necessarily result in big changes in employment,” Zipperer said.

  “When you raise wages at a particular workplace, that makes it a lot easier to recruit and retain workers,” he said.

  CNBC August 20, 2024
• Mixed bag of news on joblessness in Alabama

  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
• Kansas districts facing bus driver shortages as school year begins

  Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that school bus driver employment continues to be far below pre-pandemic levels. In September 2023, nationwide, about 192,400 bus drivers were working in K-12 schools, down 15.1% from September 2019.

  KWCH-TV August 20, 2024
• Fast Food’s Automation Problem

  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
• ‘Not tipping 20% makes you look like a fascist’: Why has tipping, once branded as ‘un-American’ and ‘anti-democratic,’ become such a hot political issue?

  Taxing tips is a double-whammy for underpaid workers. In fact, Nina Mast, economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, sees tips as a modern tool of racist oppression in the South. “Tipped workers are more likely to be people of color, women, women of color, or single parents, and are disproportionately born outside of the U.S.,” she wrote in a paper published last June.

  Tipped workers experience high rates of poverty, and are vulnerable to wage theft and sexual harassment, she said. “The South has the largest tipped workforce of any region. Tipped workers in the South are paid the second lowest median wage of any region, and most Southern states allow employers to pay tipped workers as little as $2.13 an hour,” Mast added. In that context, the culture of tipping is toxic and taxing tips seems punitive.

  MarketWatch August 20, 2024