All in all, the true cost of wage theft amounts to something substantially north of chump change: A 2017 study from the Economic Policy Institute “estimated that low-wage workers lose more than $50 billion annually to wage theft.”
The New Republic
September 8, 2023
Yet according to the Economic Policy Institute, while more jobs were unionized last year, nonunion jobs were added at a faster rate — so the share of union membership remains low.
NC Newsline
September 8, 2023
“I’ve never seen this big of a disconnect between how the economy is actually doing and key polling results about what people think is going on,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
New York Times
September 8, 2023
Elise Gould, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute, said in a report following Friday’s announcement that she was “not particularly concerned about the uptick in unemployment” because of the other positive indicators like reports that wages are up, and increases in key sectors like health care and construction.
Military Times
September 8, 2023
The monthly unemployment data can be “notably volatile,” Elise Gould, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute wrote in commentary Friday.
“I’m hopeful that those upticks were statistical blips,” she wrote. “The unemployment drop was accompanied by an increase in employment, though participation softened as well.”
CNN Business
September 8, 2023
“I am relieved that the Black unemployment rate is coming down; it had been a little elevated a couple of months earlier,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Hopefully that’s a positive trend.”
CNBC
September 8, 2023
Though the United States has tragically seen a large-scale decline in labor power since the 1980s, workers today are more militant and mobilized than they have been in some time. According to the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. strike activity increased by nearly 50 percent last year—even as the percentage of workers represented by a union dropped one-third of a percentage point.
Dissent Magazine
September 6, 2023
Cites EPI study on merger. [Paywall].
Anchorage Daily News
September 6, 2023
The challenges in organizing retail workers are compounded in the South by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, said Jennifer Sherer, a senior state policy coordinator at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Southern industry interests’ successful push to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from federal labor relations law had an outsized impact on Black people in the South, Sherer said.
That meant those workers were excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections. While domestic workers now must be paid at least minimum wage, live-in home workers still don’t have overtime protections.
Politico
September 6, 2023