In the midst of this rising thrum of worker activism, what are many of America’s business leaders doing? In high-profile corporations like Amazon and Goldman Sachs, they’re demanding that workers get back to their desks. Leaders of multiple massive corporations, many in tech and finance, are emphasizing that they’re getting tough about return-to-office this time: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told workers that if they didn’t get on board, they should consider working elsewhere, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in July said he understood why people didn’t want to commute an hour and a half each day, but it ”doesn’t mean they have to have a job here either.”
CNN Business
September 15, 2023
Quality child care is expensive. “Right now, child care costs are unaffordable for many families,” says Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “And yet what they want is high quality child care, and you have to pay for that.”
Workers are “undervalued and underpaid in that sector,” Gould adds in an interview. “It just doesn’t add up.”
Wisconsin Examiner
September 15, 2023
Economic Policy Institute, which sources employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Local Area Unemployment Statistics and Current Population Survey, shows that in the second quarter of 2023 Florida’s Black unemployment rate was 3.6 per cent.
Pink News
September 15, 2023
Less than 1% of all U.S. farms are audited for labor law compliance each fiscal year, according to a 2023 Economic Policy Institute report co-authored by Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research. Even though this figure accounts for all U.S. farms — not just those who hire H-2A workers — more than half of investigations uncover H-2A violations.
“(The wage and hour division of the Department of Labor) is underfunded and understaffed,” Costa said. “Employers can pretty much do whatever they want, and there’s a very low likelihood they’ll ever be investigated.”
Investigate Midwest
September 15, 2023
Twenty states, including Utah, set their current minimum wage at or below the federal level, or have no state minimum wage.
The minimum wage is at its lowest value since 1956, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis from last summer.
KSL.com
September 15, 2023
Adam Hersh, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the Big Three can afford to pay workers more. In a blog post Tuesday, Hersh noted that the Big Three saw combined profits of $250 billion between 2013 to 2022 and expect to bring in more than $32 billion in additional profits for 2023. Hersh said in the post that the Big Three is arguing that paying workers more would jeopardize their efforts in producing more electric vehicles.
“Despite all the company tricks, there is more than enough money for them to make EV investments, to pay their workers a fair share, and to maintain healthy profits,” Hersh wrote in the post.
CBS Moneywatch
September 15, 2023
Nationally, CEO pay has risen significantly in the last four decades. A 2022 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, projected that a CEO at one of the top 350 companies in the U.S. was paid paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021 — a new record high from the last peak — a 372-to-1 ratio — in 2000.
According to the report, CEOs are getting paid more because so much of their pay is stock-related, widening the income gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%.
San Francisco Chronicle
September 15, 2023
The signers of the letter include high-profile liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, the Service Employees International Union, the Communication Workers of America, the Economic Policy Institute and the Quaker group Friends Committee on National Legislation, as well as newer groups like the Working Families Party, Groundwork Collaborative and the Economic Security Project.
Huffpost
September 15, 2023
Roughly half of all U.S. employers utilize non-competes in their contracts, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute in 2019.
Sacramento Bee
September 14, 2023