Directors & Boards
June 24, 2024
“What people don’t realize is how widespread it is,” said Helen Gerhardt, a benefits advocate at Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, a nonprofit that helps people with unemployment claims. It impacts customer service workers, truck drivers, janitors, retail workers, landscapers and security guards, according to a 2023 study from the Economic Policy Institute.
90.5 WESA
June 24, 2024
Speakers this week will tackle each of these issues and offer policy recommendations for narrowing the wage gap. Guest Speakers – Dr. Michelle Holder, Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York – Dr. Michael Reich, Professor of Economics and Chair, Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California at Berkeley – Dr. Heidi Shierholz, President, Economic Policy Institute – Dr. Austin Clemens, Senior Fellow, Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Ethnic Media Services
June 24, 2024
Nearly 1 in 5 Black Pennsylvanians was unemployed as 2020 ended, according to a report published by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). At the time, that was the highest rate of unemployment for Black workers in any U.S. state. However, by the end of the 2023, Black unemployment in the Keystone State had dropped to 5.7%, a record low and below the national average of 6.1%.
WHYY
June 24, 2024
Zoom out: The NLRB has streamlined the rules around union elections — cutting the time between petition and voting.
- The agency also withdrew a Trump-era proposal that would have excluded private college and university student workers from unionizing — driving a wave of graduate student organizing. These elections tend to have very high win rates, a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute finds.
Axios
June 24, 2024
Wage theft affects every aspect of our economy, none more than the workers that directly feel its effects, most often low-wage earners, disproportionately women, immigrants and people of color. The crime takes many forms: not paying minimum wage or overtime, denying meal breaks, unpaid sick leave, tip theft and bounced paychecks. The costs add up, no matter how you look at them. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average worker lost an equivalent of a month and half of rent, or money to cover critical household costs, such as child care and groceries.
San Jose Spotlight
June 24, 2024
In 2017, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a change to the minimum wage regulations that would have allowed employers to pool workers’ tips and then keep the tips, if they wanted. One estimate from the Economic Policy Institute found that if the Trump proposal had gone into effect, employers would have pocketed $5.8 billion of workers’ tips.
MSNBC.com
June 24, 2024
The national average price of childcare for 2023 was $11,582, according to Childcare Aware of America, which requires 10% of a couple’s median income to be able to afford. The city of Washington D.C. and states like California, Massachusetts and New York are among the highest overall in costs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with the average in Massachusetts being $20,913 and in California, $16,945.
GO Banking Rates
June 24, 2024
You’ll need to earn around $25 per hour to live on your own in the United States’ 25 largest cities.
That’s a median figure: You’ll need more in cities like San Francisco or Boston, and less in San Antonio or Detroit. The money covers a single person’s basic expenses like housing in a studio apartment, food, health care and transportation, based on estimates from the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute’s Living Wage Family Budget calculator.
CNBC
June 24, 2024
Research by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute showed that between 1978 and 2021, CEOs at the top 350 public firms in the U.S. saw their average compensation package grow by 1,460%, adjusted for inflation. For comparison, the S&P stock market grew by 1,063% in that time; the top 0.1% of U.S. earners’ growth was a healthy 385%, and a typical U.S. worker’s wages rose 18.1%.
Study after study has shown that large companies’ performance, including stock price, bore almost no relation to how much the companies paid their CEOs, said Josh Bivens, the EPI’s chief economist.
“The research on that just gets stronger and stronger,” Bivens told Capital & Main. “You look at the highest-paid CEOs versus the lower-paid ones, then look at returns to shareholders 10 years later. You just get no relationship at all between more pay and higher return to shareholders — and that is assuming that all anyone cares about with CEO pay is the return to shareholders.”
Capital & Main
June 24, 2024