“If you think they have any leverage, it is leverage to what end?” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank focused on labor issues. “Share matters because if profits have been so high, wages could have done even better.”
Reuters
October 13, 2023
“While [year-over-year] wage growth ticked down to 4.2%, the annualized three-month change dropped significantly to 3.4%,” tweeted the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould. Average hourly earnings growth peaked at 5.9% in March 2022. Finance executives in The CFO Survey projected their wage bills would grow 4% at the median in 2024.
CFO
October 13, 2023
State governments added 29,000 jobs in education and local governments, excluding education, added 27,000 jobs, which is good news considering how slow these jobs have been to return to pre-pandemic levels, economists said. State and local government employment is down 0.5% compared to its level before the pandemic, Economic Policy Institute analysis of BLS data shows.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the addition of healthcare jobs is not surprising given the aging population and demand for healthcare services. Despite concerns that leisure and hospitality wouldn’t bounce back from the economic harms businesses suffered in 2020, there are signs of a healthier sector in the report.
“Leisure and hospitality in particular is one where we saw the largest job losses and has been steadily sort of filling in that massive hole that happened in the spring of 2020,” Gould said.
States Newsroom
October 13, 2023
Despite being among the most educated professions—some states even require master’s degrees—teachers earn just three-quarters as much as comparable college graduates, according to research published by the Economic Policy Institute in 2022.
Stacker
October 12, 2023
Jennifer Sherer, director of the state worker power initiative for the Economic Policy Institute, said by looking at trends, workers across the country are increasingly looking to their right to organize and collectively bargain as a vehicle to address what she called “really deep inequalities in our economy.”
“The initiative and the discussion underway in a number of states about making sure every worker has full access to those rights is the origin of the initiative you are seeing in Arizona,” Sherer explained.
Public News Service
October 12, 2023
Data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the families of childcare workers are twice as likely to live in poverty (11.8%) compared to others.
Business Insider
October 12, 2023
According to the Economic Policy Institute, autoworker wages have fallen 19.3% since 2008 alone — due in large part to past concessions made by the UAW.
Detroit Free Press
October 11, 2023
In 2022, Dollar General became the first major retailer deemed a “severe violator” of federal workplace safety law, and has failed hundreds of government inspections. In addition to limited access to sick leave, most Dollar General employees make less than $12 an hour, and close to 1 in 4 make less than $10, according to an Economic Policy Institute study from 2021.
Bloomberg
October 11, 2023
Lack of standards has real ramifications. According to the Economic Policy Institute, domestic workers are three times as likely to live in poverty than other workers–typical wages for a domestic worker were $12.02/hour; for a non-domestic worker, $19.97. And 39 percent of nannies live twice below the poverty level; for non-domestic workers, the twice-poverty rate is 17 percent.
Marie Claire
October 6, 2023