The lottery-based H-1B program issues 85,000 new visas each year. Intended for workers with specialized skills, the H-1B is commonly used to acquire talented foreign technologists, but data show it has also been widely used to hire cheaper labor, which is not the stated intent of the program. A 2020 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute concluded that 60% of H-1B jobs certified by the U.S. Department of Labor were assigned wage levels well below local median pay for the occupation.
“It’s incredibly profitable to hire an H-1B worker instead of an American because they’re cheaper,” said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who co-authored the institute’s report.
The Mercury News
May 5, 2023
Persistently high turnover rates also come with a significant financial cost for school districts. According to a report published in 2017 by the Economic Policy Institute, large urban districts spend approximately $20,000 on every new hire.
EdSurge
May 5, 2023
If it were so, then we wouldn’t see the rollback being pushed by lobbyists for home builders, supermarkets, restaurants and bars, or by Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-affiliated group. All those outfits have been behind the campaign for more child labor, the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute has shown.
LA Times
May 5, 2023
Home care workers are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, Asian American Pacific Islander and immigrants, according to a June 2022 report by the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank.
The Keene Sentinel
May 5, 2023
Low-wage workers experienced wage growth of 9% between 2019 and 2022. That’s a historically fast real wage growth over the three-year span, especially in a period of economic inflation, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
McKnight’s Senior Living
May 5, 2023
A minimum wage paycheck lost 27 percent of its purchasing power since 2009 and is now worth less in real wages than at any point in time since 1956, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Truthout
May 5, 2023
Plans to merge two of the biggest U.S. supermarket chains could blunt grocery-store workers’ bargaining power and lower their wages, according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
MarketWatch
May 5, 2023
Heidi Shierholz, the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said at the press conference that the economic impact of an increase to the federal minimum wage is one of the most-studied subjects in economics.
“The weight of that evidence shows that (when the) minimum wage increases, they raise the wages of our lowest wage-workers, they reduce inequality, they reduce poverty, they reduce child poverty, they reduce gender wage gaps, they reduce racial wage gaps because Black and brown workers, due to the broad impacts of structural racism on our labor markets, are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-wage jobs,” Shierholz said.
New Jersey Monitor
May 4, 2023