Cites EPI’s Company Wage Tracker.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
November 22, 2023
Quotes David Cooper [paywall].
Boston Globe
November 22, 2023
There’s much sympathy today among Americans for the issues unions have raised around corporate greed and the ever-increasing disparity between CEOs’ salaries and those of average workers; many people feel it in their own lives. CEOs earned 344 times the salary of the average workers in the United States in 2022, up from 21 times in 1965, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
In These Times
November 22, 2023
Not everybody thinks the chipmakers visa is a good idea. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who is also a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, pointed me to Bureau of Labor Statistics data that U.S. employment in manufacturing of semiconductors and electronic components had fallen 49 percent from its 2001 peak by January 2021, when Biden took office. Despite the hubbub about a manufacturing renaissance, it has risen only 5 percent since, indicating to Hira that there are plenty of Americans with industry experience available for hire.
“I think it’s a bad approach to create just another alphabet soup visa program instead of fixing the ones we have,” such as the H-1B, the L-1 and the E-2, he said. Daniel Costa, an attorney who is the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, added that the figure of 10,000 visas appeared to be plucked from the air.
New York Times
November 22, 2023
He said one study by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that in the realm of agriculture employment, employers have a roughly 1 in 100 chance of being investigated, although more than 70% of those who are investigated are found to have committed violations.
Iowa Capital Dispatch
November 22, 2023
Overall, the retail industry appears to be healthy with employment having remained steady since January though softer than last year. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said, “We have recovered more than the number of jobs that were lost in the pandemic when millions of people lost their jobs.”
Gould said one explanation for the hiring this year may be that employers, particularly in retail, are more likely to keep staff on in this tighter labor market because it has been harder to attract and retain employees.
“It’s possible that employers over the last few months and over the last year are holding on to workers because they don’t want to have that business of trying to find workers when they need them. And so it’s possible that you’re not seeing that same pickup because they’re already staffed up to some extent in some of those jobs,” she said. “… It’s too early to tell really.”
States Newsroom
November 22, 2023
When low-wage workers get sick and miss a day of work, they might have trouble covering their electricity bill. If they miss five days of work, that cuts into their food budget. And eight missed days could be the equivalent of a month’s rent.
That’s according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute looking at access to paid sick leave among low-wage workers. The share of low-wage workers who can earn paid sick leave has doubled over the last decade, largely thanks to state- and local-level paid sick leave mandates, according to the report. These policies typically grant workers an hour of paid leave for every 30 to 40 hours worked, according to the report’s co-author Hilary Wething.
Paid sick leave mandates ensure workers “don’t have to make the impossible choice between showing up to work sick or losing pay,” Wething said.
Route Fifty
November 22, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the 7% rule would save the average Minnesota family with an infant $10,401 per year, freeing up 32,444 more Minnesotans to work to support their family, and generate $3.7 billion in new economic activity.
Minnesota Reformer
November 21, 2023
It’s estimated between 27.8% and 46.5% of workers in the private sector are subject to noncompete clauses in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Spectrum News NY 1
November 21, 2023