The prime-age labor force participation rate of U.S.-born men without a college degree “grew at a record pace in each of the last two years and is above its pre-COVID trend,” according to the Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, a left-leaning think tank.
In other words, the economy is both absorbing immigrants and generating job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, the institute said. The idea that immigrants are “taking all our jobs” is “deeply misguided,” EPI researchers wrote in a recent analysis.
CNBC
March 8, 2024
A long-running study by the Economic Policy Institute showed leaders of the country’s 350 biggest public companies made about 320 times more than their typical employee in 2019, up from 20:1 in 1965.
Bloomberg
March 8, 2024
Analysts with the Economic Policy Institute found that foreign-born workers account for around 50 percent of the labor market’s explosive growth, while the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that immigrant labor effectively closed the post-Covid gap in the job market by the middle of 2022.
The Nation
March 8, 2024
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, noted that external data could be helpful to flag unusual phenomenon occurring among contractors in the labor force or inform the BLS of how to structure survey questions they may not have asked otherwise.
“There’s clearly legislation, regulation around the issue of independent contracting,” Shierholz, who served as the chief economist at the DOL under Obama, said. “So really understanding the scope, and the nature of that kind of work just makes that kind of policy smarter.”
Bloomberg Law
March 8, 2024
“A lot of these rollbacks that we are starting to see really came in the wake of the pandemic,” Nina Mast, a state economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, said.
Since 2021, Mast says, “28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them.” Some of the states exploring or enacting such legislation include Florida, Iowa, Ohio, and Missouri, to name a few.
“As wages have increased, employers are realizing, well, we don’t want to raise wages to match what’s required by a stronger labor market. And so instead, they’re seeking to expand out to see young people who they can pay less and potentially exploit at lower wages,” Mast said.
Scripps National News
March 8, 2024
The White House pointed to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, showing that CEO pay averaged more than 300 times that of the typical worker in 2022.
The Washington Post
March 7, 2024
The Economic Policy Institute said in 2014 that wage theft costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year.
LA Times
March 7, 2024
Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported there were 8.9 million positions open at the end of January, roughly the same number as a month earlier.
“The labor market remains strong but is decidedly not hot,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Job growth continues to be more than enough to keep up with working age population growth and layoffs remain historically low, but the hires rate has softened over the last year and is lower than it was pre-pandemic.”
U.S. News & World Report
March 7, 2024
“I just don’t see a big fiscal stimulus coming out of a Biden second term,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
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A big question mark relates to the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is funding investments in clean energy. Republicans are attacking the law, which they argue reduces efficiency and increases costs by picking winners and losers, but undoing it may create a new set of economic problems.
“Right now the sector is proceeding under the impression that a build-out of clean energy will be subsidized and will be producing lots of our energy by the end of 2030,” Bivens said. “Clawing back subsidies and making energy producers scramble to figure out how they’ll be satisfying future energy demand in totally different ways could definitely lead to price spikes and volatility.”
Politico Morning Money
March 7, 2024