United Steelworkers (USW) International President Tom Conway issued the following statement in response to today’s Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report on the continuing need for Section 232 relief:
United Steelworkers
March 25, 2021
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute on farm labor enforcement trends over the past 20 years found that more than 70% of federal labor standards investigations of farms conducted by the department’s Wage and Hour Division detected violations — “things like wage theft and inadequate housing, as well as other violations of laws designed to protect farmworkers.”
In addition, about 11% of WHD agricultural investigations found violations of H-2A regulations.
Agri-Pulse
March 24, 2021
Features interview with Heidi Shierholz.
Washington Post
March 24, 2021
Panelist Rob Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has been pounding the table on this issue for a few years now. He sees this as a headwind for manufacturing, a sector that is famous for hiring blue-collar workers and paying good wages, giving them a chance to enter in and stay in the middle class. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times highlighting how Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Trump actually saw eye-to-eye on how an overvalued dollar was a major stumbling block for American manufacturing labor.
“The simplest way to make the dollar less attractive is to impose a tax on foreign purchases of US assets,” Scott said. “You can tax new purchases of US assets, so this is not a tax on US investors. We have lost 5 million manufacturing jobs over the last 20 years, which has led to the devastation of the industrial heartlands in the upper northeast and Midwest and Southeast. And it has been especially harmful for non-college educated workers.”
Coalition for a Prosperous America
March 24, 2021
At the same time, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, called on the administration to continue the duties. It hosted a call with representatives of United Steelworkers union and said that the duties helped boost output and create thousands of jobs. The industry is concentrated in politically sensitive swing states including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.
Bloomberg
March 24, 2021
The average wage grew so much, and so fast, because millions of the lowest paid workers lost their jobs.
A report analyzing the data, from the Economic Policy Institute, provides insight into a labor market with growing inequality among the highest and lowest paid workers, at a time of high union support and low union membership.
“All of the job losses are happening in the bottom half of the wage distribution,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the paper examining this phenomenon. “And the top half is actually seeing some wage gains.”
KTVU-TV
March 24, 2021
A new paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute showed that 80% of job losses in 2020 were concentrated among the lowest 25% of wage earners, while the workers in the top half of the distribution saw gains in employment.
“It is always true that recessions hit low- and middle-income people harder, but I have never seen anything like this,” said Heidi Shierholz, the institute’s policy director and a former chief Labor Department economist.
Bloomberg
March 23, 2021
A report by the Economic Policy Institute in December 2019 found employers are charged with violating federal law in more than 54% of union elections with large bargaining units and US employers spend roughly $340m annually on consultants who specialize in union avoidance.
The Guardian
March 23, 2021
El desempleo en California se disparó del 4.4 por ciento el 31 de marzo de 2020 al 15.9 por ciento a finales de junio, según el Economic Policy Institute, un grupo de investigación independiente de Washington D.C.
Los Angeles Times
March 23, 2021
A 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at how CEO compensation has grown in contrast to workers’ wages. Focusing on “realized” compensation for CEOs – which “counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in rather than when granted” – EPI found that, in 2019, the ratio between CEO pay and the typical worker’s pay was 320-to-1.
Markets Insider
March 23, 2021