This legislation appears to be the next natural step in outlawing racial discrimination. As has been the case with skin color, people have used hair texture and style to identify and categorize people based on race. At least 24 states have passed the CROWN Act, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
HR Dive
May 10, 2024
The first quarter’s steep compensation increase might be partly due to volatility in quarterly ECI data, said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. The bump could also be due to annual cost-of-living pay increases built into existing union contracts, she said.
MarketWatch
May 10, 2024
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, singled out a new regulation increasing standards for staffing nursing homes.
“It was also a big political fight against a pretty powerful industry,” Bivens said, adding that the White House gets “some real credit for not watering the rule down to irrelevance or even just dropping it.”
However, he said, more progress would need to come through legislation because the central challenge is financial. Americans need help at points where they’re strapped for cash, such as when they have young children or are elderly and no longer working.
“The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere to me is the public sector, financed by taxes,” Bivens said. Without legislation, “they are not going to move the dial a ton on this.”
Associated Press
May 10, 2024
Nationwide, colleges rely more on graduate student worker labor, said Celine McNicholas, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington D.C.
“Universities have increasingly shifted teaching duties away from those 10-year-track faculty onto graduate students, adjuncts and instructors,” McNicholas said. “That leaves a large portion of the research and teaching at some of the most prestigious universities really being done by folks who are there pursuing their own education.”
WHYY
May 10, 2024
The H-2B program is one of many temporary work visa programs in the United States, according to an Economic Policy Institute report in 2022. The program is commonly used for jobs in landscaping, construction, forestry, seafood and meat processing, traveling carnivals, restaurants, and hospitality.
The report noted that as the H-2B program continues to grow, migrants with H-2B visas are being “employed in industries in which there is extensive wage theft and lawbreaking by employers.”
USA Today
May 10, 2024
Trump’s NLRB also issued rules that prohibited individuals from wearing union insignia at work, allowed employers to treat temporary and contract employees differently than full-time workers, limited workers’ abilities to use workplace email systems to communicate about unions, and more, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The left-leaning and pro-union think tank released a roundup last week of how it claims Trump-era NLRB policies restricted workers’ rights and how the Biden administration — with mixed success — has tried to roll back those policies and replace them with ones that support unions.
Detroit News
May 10, 2024
Now, cover your eyes with scratch-off lottery tickets and homemade lemon bars: Both figures fall below Florida’s livable wage of $58,970 for one adult and one child. That’s per the Economic Policy Institute, but it’ll ring true for anyone who has dropped a cool hundred on a few bags of routine groceries at Publix. We’re not even talking anything exciting like chili crisp or bakery cheesecake.
Tampa Bay Times
May 10, 2024
“When the pandemic hit, we finally saw some real political will to solve the problem of not having federal paid sick leave,” said economist Hilary Wething.
Wething co-authored a recent Economic Policy Institute report on the state of sick leave in the United States. It found that 61% of the lowest-paid workers can’t get time off for an illness.
“I was really surprised by how quickly losing pay — because you’re sick — can translate into immediate and devastating cuts to a family’s household budget,” she said.
Wething noted that even a day or two of lost wages can be equivalent to a month’s worth of gasoline a worker would need to get to their job or the choice between paying an electric bill or buying food. Showing up to work sick poses a risk to co-workers and customers alike, Wething said. Many low-paying jobs that often lack paid sick leave — like cashiers, nail technicians, home health aides and fast-food workers — involve lots of face-to-face interactions.
“So paid sick leave is about both protecting the public health of a community and providing the workers the economic security that they desperately need when they need to take time away from work,” she said.
Marketplace
May 10, 2024
While many markers of adulthood such as homeownership feel out of reach, young adults are reaping the benefits from the current economic climate, says Monique Morrissey, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit economic-research and policy organization.
“Gen Z and younger millennials are experiencing tailwinds and may not realize that they’re benefiting from a tight labor market that has led to an unusually rapid increase in real wages for younger and lower-wage workers,” she says.
Wall Street Journal
May 10, 2024
CEO pay has soared 1,209.2% from 1978 to 2022, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, compared to a 15.3% rise in typical workers’ pay.
The Guardian
May 10, 2024