According to the Economic Policy Institute, minimum wage is indexed in 18 states and in Washington, D.C., meaning it is “automatically adjusted each year for increases in prices.” Economic analyst David Cooper says that by indexing minimum wage, the hourly salary never loses its value — and it’s written into law that the wage will rise by a certain amount depending on a specific formula, so politicians are not arbitrarily deciding the number.
Click on Detroit
October 20, 2023
“It confirmed that a lot of this is really just a choice,” said Kyle Moore, an economist who studies inequality for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “We had programs in place that demonstrably cut poverty, particularly child poverty. We allowed those programs to expire. And poverty went back up — a lot.”
Capital and Main
October 20, 2023
CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978, with CEOs being paid 399 times more than a typical worker in 2021, the Economic Policy Institute reports. So what is behind the stagnation of worker pay in America and what part did our economic system play?
Detroit Today
October 20, 2023
“The simplest way to address unequal access to retirement benefits is to expand Social Security benefits, especially for lower-income workers,” says Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy.
AARP
October 20, 2023
In 2022, the state stood at 35th in per-student funding and last among all states in teacher pay when compared to similarly educated professionals, according to separate reports by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and the Denver-based Bell Policy Center.
Aspen Daily News
October 20, 2023
Fewer college graduates feel compelled to head into public education, a profession whose workers experience stress and burnout at twice the rate of the general workforce. “It is essentially like there is a potential pool of teachers that are not willing to accept jobs given the compensation and working conditions,” says Hilary Wething, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Last year, an EPI report revealed the so-called “teacher pay penalty” is higher than at any time in the past quarter-century, when economists first began tracking this data. Today, for every dollar that someone in the private sector makes, “teachers are earning about 73.6 cents on that dollar,” Wething says. In the mid-1990s, it was about 94 cents.
American Prospect
October 20, 2023
A report from Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, found the pay penalty for teachers and comparable college graduates who are working was at a record large gap in 2022 — a pay penalty of 26.4%.
Business Insider
October 20, 2023
The Fed survey says wages increased the most for higher-paid workers, widening inequality. Last year, average earnings didn’t keep up with inflation. But wages have actually outpaced price increases over the past seven months, per Economic Policy Institute chief economist Josh Bivens.
“I think we’re set for some pretty good years for income growth especially for sort of the bottom half,” he said.
If wages can keep outpacing inflation, Bivens said there could be some incremental improvement in inequality.
Marketplace
October 20, 2023
The report uses a model created by researchers at the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute to estimate how many workers would benefit from raising the minimum to either of the hypothetical new rates, $15 or $20. They counted both workers who currently make less than that rate, and workers who currently make just over that mark and who they anticipate would get raises “as pay scales adjust upward.”
The Cap Times
October 20, 2023
The most recent teacher pay analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that Arizona teachers earned 33.2% less last year than other workers with college degrees did, placing the state just behind Colorado’s 37.4% gap. That’s a jump from 2021, when Arizona ranked 4th worst and the cause, according to the report’s authors, has a lot to do with the economy.
AZ Mirror
October 20, 2023