Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit, said it is a “baseless conspiracy theory that nonpartisan BLS employees are committing fraud.”
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Rubio’s claims are “deeply corrosive because of the trust put in [BLS] numbers,” said Shierholz, who is also a labor economist.
“They’re used to set policy, including the Federal Reserve’s incredibly impactful decisions about interest rate policy,” she said. “We need people to know they’re doing good work and that they should answer correctly to the surveys.”
The Washington Post
October 7, 2024
A 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that Florida had the highest rate of minimum wage violations among the country’s 10 most populated states, beating out other populous states like New York, California and Texas.
Orlando Weekly
October 7, 2024
Instead of fighting to bring back a more rigorous duties test, the Department of Labor chose the “brighter line” of raising the salary threshold, said Heidi Shierholz, the Economic Policy Institute’s president. Before the July bump, only 8.5 percent of salaried workers fell under the threshold. By January, that proportion could rise to 30 percent—covering plenty of those assistant bingo managers—and the threshold will update every three years, rising in tandem with wage data.
In the short term, the benefits are clear. If your employer decides to “bump you up to the new salary threshold, then you get that wage increase,” Shierholz explained. If not—if you remain below the cutoff— “then now you’re in the world where your employer has skin in the game when they ask you to work a gajillion hours,” since that extra labor will no longer be free. “You either get more money,” she said, “or you get your time back.”
The Nation
October 7, 2024
Between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has famously documented, the median wages of American workers rose at the identical rate that productivity rose. Since then, as the rate of unionization declined and as companies shifted more revenues to profits and less to wages, that has ceased to be the case.
American Prospect
October 7, 2024
Progress for many workers’ rights issues was stagnant leading into 2016, and Trump tapped into that frustration, Celine McNicholas, policy director at nonpartisan research organization Economic Policy Institute Action, previously told USA TODAY.
“He was maybe the first Republican in a long time to kind of, like actually give some voice to that outrage,” she said. “But I think it stops there.”
She said he proposed cuts to worker protection agencies, and Economic Policy Institute called moves under his administration to overturn worker protections “unprecedented.”
USA Today
October 7, 2024
Regarding those wage gains, it’s worth noting that the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan but liberal-leaning research organization in Washington, found that wage gains for lower- and middle-wage workers outpaced those of higher-wage earners through 2023.
Detroit Free Press
October 7, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 24% of Latina mothers live in poverty compared to 12% of white, non-Hispanic mothers. The stark reality is that without significant changes, this pay gap will continue to affect the livelihoods and futures of millions of Latino families.
Our Latinx Magazine
October 4, 2024
Fiscal Times
October 4, 2024
This trend, particularly among the building trades, Ascher said, followed the 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement — a pact among the United States, Mexico and Canada — that the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think tank affiliated with the labor movement, says led to the loss of thousands of union jobs.
Capital News Service Maryland
October 4, 2024