In some cases, companies have exploited seasonal workers, according to Daniel Costa, an immigration expert with the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The way the visa works, the employer owns and controls the visa, they apply for it. The worker is really tied to that employer, some would say ‘indentured’ to that employer, for those six or seven months,” said Costa, who advocates for reforms to the H-2B system to improve wages and conditions for workers.
Marketplace
April 28, 2023
Also Wednesday, members of the California Federation of Teachers were at the Capitol, alongside Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, to support his bill that intends to raise teacher and other school employee salaries by 50% over the next seven years. The Democrat from Torrance cited a 2022 Economic Policy Institute report, which found that teachers earned 23.5% less than their similarly educated peers nationwide. (In California that gap shrinks to 17.6%.)
Cal Matters
April 28, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute calculated the living wage in Hawai’i to be $28.45 per hour, and by some estimates, farmers in Hawaii make $20 or less per hour. The data we have is typically for legal farm workers on farms owned by big companies and does not take into account undocumented workers who are paid far less and have less legal security.
Civil Beat
April 28, 2023
Every year, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) updates its Family Budget Calculator, an online tool that measures the income a family needs to maintain a decent standard of living in all counties and metro areas of the United States. Using this data, NEA recently determined that, on average, ESPs do not earn enough to support a family in the nation’s most affordable metro area—Brownsville, Texas.
NEA
April 28, 2023
“I’d definitely say 2011 was a step forward in how aggressively the debt ceiling was weaponized to secure partisan policy goals,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), previously told Vox. “I’d say 1995 was also important; [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich threatened this but didn’t take it as far as the GOP did in 2011.”
VOX
April 28, 2023
To move away from the Supreme Court for a moment, we can see this pattern of leniency for some and the stiff arm of the law for everyone else wherever we choose to look in American society. Take the workplace. A 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in the 10 most populous states, an estimated 2.4 million people lose a combined $8 billion income to unscrupulous employers. If this is representative of national trends, the institute contends, then American workers lose more than $15 billion a year to wage theft. For comparison’s sake, the total losses attributed to all property crime in 2018 amounted to $16.4 billion.
New York Times
April 20, 2023
But even in “places that have successfully, to their credit, raised minimum wages substantially over the federal level,” says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, “they’re still in many cases not a living wage.”
CNBC
April 20, 2023
Others see a payroll tax increase as a relatively straightforward solution. “We could either raise revenues modestly, as I prefer, or we could cut benefits by about a fifth,” or even more if action is delayed, Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said at the AEI event Friday. “In my mind, this isn’t a difficult decision,” she said, because Americans “across the political spectrum oppose benefit cuts and are willing to contribute more” to preserve Social Security.
MarketWatch
April 20, 2023
The result is eye-popping inequality between the boardroom and the factory floor. According to a survey of 350 of the largest US quoted companies by the Economic Policy Institute, realised CEO pay, including proceeds from equity shares and stock options, rose 1,460 per cent from 1978 to 2021. This compares with 18 per cent growth in typical worker’s pay over the same period.
Financial Times
April 20, 2023
DeRose said that despite state law already requiring minor employees to obtain permits and parental permission to work, many employers hire children without going through those necessary steps. Minors are supposed to have work permits prior to starting employment; however, DeRose said cases of child labor violations in the state have been rising in recent years, a fact corroborated by a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute that found that child labor violations have been going up across the nation.
WTAP
April 20, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute found that a year of infant care can cost Wisconsinites more than tuition at a public college. Families have started to plan pregnancies around the availability of care, as they encounter years-long wait lists at child care centers.
NPR
April 20, 2023
Ten states launched efforts to weaken child labor protections in the last year, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Several states have already passed laws weakening or lowering restrictions. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law this March eliminating age verification and parental consent requirements for kid workers. Iowa passed a separate pro-child labor law in 2022 and is considering another bill that would allow parents to lie about their kids’ ages to get them jobs.
Gizmodo
April 20, 2023
Between 2001 and 2021, the share of 16- to 19-year-olds not working increased by 22.4 percentage points, according to an analysis of federal data by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
Governing
April 20, 2023
“It’s the perfect storm of a few different developments that the pandemic has brought to bear,” says Dave Kamper, a senior policy coordinator with the Economic Policy Institute. “One is that inequality is even more obvious than it’s ever been. The CEO pay gap is higher now than it’s ever been.”
NPR
April 20, 2023
“Far too often working families are robbed of their hard-earned tax refunds by unscrupulous private tax preparers,” said David Kass, Executive Director of Americans for Tax Fairness. “Passing the Tax Refund Protection Act is a critical step in ensuring that Americans receive their full tax benefit through increased transparency and accountability from tax preparers.”
The bill is endorsed by Americans for Tax Fairness, Consumer Action, the Economic Policy Institute, and Prosperity Now.
Sen. Cory Booker
April 20, 2023
Episode locked. Features Jen discussing child labor violations.
All in with Chris Hayes
April 20, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, these discriminatory practices continue to affect not only Black Wisconsinites but all Wisconsinites of color to this day. The state and local governments are responsible for correcting these wrongs, particularly because the government perpetuated — and partially still perpetuates — this history of racial discrimination.
The Badger Herald
April 20, 2023
These are not isolated events. A March 2023 report by the Economic Policy Institute identified over 600 active Labor Department investigations into violations of child labor laws — described in some cases as “systemic” — against a backdrop of an over 283 percent increase in child labor employment between 2015 and 2022. Arkansas is just one of 10 states where bills have been enacted or introduced to lift a variety of restrictions on children’s employment, often at ages and in jobs long considered hazardous to their health and development, undercutting protections that have been in place at the federal level since Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.
The Washington Post
April 20, 2023
“Weak recoveries churn out racial inequality and lost opportunity,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Washington Post
April 14, 2023
In Georgia, the unemployment rate for Black workers is also higher than the overall rate. In the fourth quarter of 2022, the most recent figures available, the Black unemployment rate in Georgia was 5.1% according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that specializes in labor and wage issues, better than the national rate at the time. The jobless rate for all Georgians was 3.1% at the end of the year.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
April 14, 2023
“The top 30 H-1B employers hired 34,000 new H-1B workers in 2022 and laid off at least 85,000 workers in 2022 and early 2023,” said an April 11 report by the left-wing Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Breitbart
April 14, 2023
Quite the contrary. Despite employers’ claims that the H-2A program is too “expensive” and “bureaucratically complex,” the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that American employers prefer to utilize the H-2A program over hiring U.S. workers because they see foreign workers as “exploitable.” The H-2A program has exploded over the last decade, but increased growth has not translated to increased resources to the DOL, the agency primarily responsible for overseeing the program. According to EPI, the government’s woefully inadequate oversight allows “frequent and extreme” violators of H-2A regulations to continue hiring guest workers with impunity.
Prism Reports
April 14, 2023
Features interview with Heidi Shierholz.
Bloomberg TV
April 14, 2023
Employers spend over $400 million per year in “union avoidance” consultants, according to a recent study of US Department of Labor data by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But the figure may actually be higher, as Amazon disclosed March 31 that it spent over $14 million in 2022 alone on such expenses, and Starbucks—which also is experiencing high organizing activity—has yet to reveal how much it spends on consultants.
Bloomberg Law
April 14, 2023
A 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute think tank reported that the decline in unionization has translated to a loss of earnings equivalent to $3,250 for a median full time worker.
VICE
April 14, 2023
Workers’ wages have lagged productivity for decades, as the Economic Policy Institute has faithfully reported. This is because employers have power to set wages. They aren’t the passive agents you learned about in baby economics class operating on a knife edge to keep prices at a minimum and forced to pay market wages.
Forbes
April 14, 2023
But to lure them back employers had to increase wages, even after Covid benefits had expired. Why was this so? Writing in The American Prospect in January, Josh Bivens of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute suggested that a major driver was something he called “severed monopsony.” Monopsony is the tendency of monopoly (in practice, oligopolies) to drive down prices by reducing competition for workers.
New Republic
April 14, 2023
The speed and scope of the recovery is due to many factors, but chiefly to the stimulus Biden and Democrats in Congress pushed through in the spring of 2021. Progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute and elsewhere had warned during Obama’s first term that the 2009 stimulus was woefully inadequate to the task of restoring the economy. Fortunately, a critical mass of President Biden’s economic advisers, unlike Obama’s, came from those very same progressive circles that had predicted the molasses-slow pace of the post–Great Recession recovery.
American Prospect
April 14, 2023