In the Legislature, in the courts and potentially on the November ballot, Massachusetts lawmakers, justices and voters are confronting the latest big-dollar campaign by Uber, Lyft, InstaCart, DoorDash and other platform-based rideshare and delivery corporations to rewrite the rules governing their business practices.
Worcester Telegram and Gazette (Massachusetts)
June 10, 2024
By analyzing data from 1953 to 2020, William Chittenden, a finance professor from Texas State University, found that inflation rose 3.35% per year under Democratic presidents and 3.5% under Republican presidents.
A similar study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found much the same. Looking at inflation rates from 1949 to 2024, prices rose 2.91% under Democratic presidents and 3.29% under Republican ones.
Money
June 6, 2024
“Most of the new farmworkers who are coming in are coming through the H-2A visa program,” Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at Economic Policy Institute said in an email.
Politico
June 5, 2024
Collective bargaining rights could be crucial in narrowing the pay gap among local government workers and improving staff recruiting, according to a March 2022 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit think tank.
Axios Denver
June 5, 2024
“Since the peak in March 2022 when churn was high as employers scrambled to find workers after massive layoffs and many workers quit in search of better opportunities, job openings are now more than 80% of the way back to ‘normal’ (and the job openings rate is 90% back to normal),” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
U.S. News & World Report
June 5, 2024
It’s possible that Equilar in fact underestimated the pay gap. Some researchers have found a higher ratio, including the Economic Policy Institute, which found it to be 344-to-1 in the most recent year studied—compared to just 21-to-1 in 1965—using a standardized methodology to determine median worker pay, rather than letting a firm declare its median salary. EPI found that CEO pay soared an astonishing 1,209.2% from 1978 to 2022 while worker pay increased just 15.3% over the same period.
Common Dreams
June 4, 2024
In Florida, both the average teacher salary and the average teacher starting salary fall below the state’s minimum living wage gap, which according to the report, is the “income needed for (a) family of one adult and one child to have a modest but adequate standard of living in the most affordable metro area.” NEA attributed Florida’s minimum living wage to the Economic Policy Institute which defined it as $58,970.
Daytona Beach News-Journal
June 4, 2024
“During the pandemic, workers and their families benefited when the government acted quickly to protect workers from the threat of COVID and the threat of economic insecurity,” according to the report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Forcing people to come to work when they’re sick, the report states, is a public health hazard and harms the economy.
…
The changes have revealed yet another public-health inequity hidden in plain sight, according to Hilary Wething, the economist and researcher who wrote a report on the state of sick leave in the United States.
While about 14% of hourly-wage workers are people of color, “In 2022, 67% of Black workers [nationwide] had access to paid sick leave,” she says. “Black workers were more likely to have access to paid sick leave than Hispanic workers, but less likely than Asian and white, non-Hispanic workers.”
“This means that 1 in 3 Black workers still have to make an impossible choice between losing pay to stay home if they are sick or coming to work and risk infecting their coworkers and community.”
Word in Black
June 3, 2024
Reflecting on the initial outcome in Alabama, Dave Kamper, senior state policy strategist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote Wednesday that “while this result shows the power of corporations and state governments to smother worker efforts to unionize, even in defeat the UAW helped Mercedes workers win substantial improvements in pay and benefits.”
Common Dreams
June 3, 2024