According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a national $15 minimum wage by 2025 would raise the incomes of tens of millions of workers, including servers in restaurants, grocery store employees, and essential health care workers as well as two million direct care workers who provide long-term services and supports.
The Hill
September 1, 2023
Chasing the Dream of equity: How policy has shaped economic racial disparities, delves into how public policy and economic conditions have failed to heed the 1963 call for justice. Published by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the report reveals a disturbing economic landscape despite the enactment of a series of laws intended to bring economic parity for all.
EurWeb
September 1, 2023
Part of the problem is teachers’ low pay compared with that of other workers with similar education levels, according to a 2022 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that advocates for lower- and middle-income workers. Median pay for high-school teachers was $61,820 a year in 2021, according to the most recent Labor Department data, with 10% of them earning less than $46,090.
Wall Street Journal
September 1, 2023
“If you look at women’s labour force participation, it’s really bounced and it’s back on track as if Covid hadn’t happened,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor who is now director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “But it is still way below peer countries who have better childcare policies, better leave policies, better support for part-time work — all these things that provide support in the world we live in where women still shoulder disproportionate responsibility for caregiving . . . there’s still a long way to go,” she added.
Financial Times
September 1, 2023
US Labor Department wage investigations on farms have dropped by more than 60% over the past 22 years, and have largely focused on violations of the H-2A visa program for seasonal migrant farmworkers, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute study found.
“Federal labor standards enforcement efforts to protect farmworkers have in fact slid backward, with the number of investigations falling even further behind the already record-low levels during the years of the Trump administration,” Daniel Costa and Philip Martin wrote for EPI.
Bloomberg Law
September 1, 2023
We have made great strides towards fulfilling the core of the promissory note regarding job, educational and entrepreneurial opportunities. This is evident as data from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the overall poverty rate for African Americans decreased by more than 12% between 1968 and 2016. The gap in educational attainment between Blacks and Whites has also declined. In a recent interview with The Hill, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, chief of Race, Wealth and Community for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, explained that whites now have 1.7 times “the four-year college attainment level of Blacks,” down from 2.4 in 1962. Yet, disparities still exist for Blacks in homeownership and wealth equity, areas that civil rights organizations will continue to address.
Winchester Star
September 1, 2023
“When thinking about the minimum wage, earnings, income and wealth, we still have a long way to go,” said Adewale Maye, policy and research analyst with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
EPI is a non-partisan, non-profit. Maye’s report called “Chasing the Dream of Equity” used a quantitative lens to examine how much progress has been made and where disparities remain. Maye spent one year gathering and reviewing federal data.
“Some of the things that we found was that a lot of these indicators have grown more disparate over time. The inequities have broadened,” Maye said.
ABC 7 News DC
August 29, 2023
…violations on farms, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute that found the number of such probes reached a record low…[Paywall].
Agri-Pulse
August 25, 2023