According to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank that put this research together, the pay raises will contribute to a $5.7 billion pay increase for minimum wage workers nationwide.
Consumer Affairs
January 8, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, there were 85,000 U.S. workers laid off from 2022-23 by the top 30 companies which use the H-1B program. In that same timeframe, 34,000 guest workers were hired, largely at lower wages. It is simply cheaper for tech companies to exploit foreign labor.
Daily Tar Heel
January 8, 2025
The minimum wage increases will benefit three million employees across the country, and indirectly raise the pay of 6.2 million better-paid workers, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute. Wage increases help low-paid employees keep pace with inflation, which has run rampant since 2021, only cooling to 2.6 percent recently. There is no state minimum wage law in five Southern states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, or Tennessee.
Daily Mail
January 8, 2025
According to the nonpartisan think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI), more than 9.2 million workers saw a raise in their minimum wage paychecks starting on Jan. 1. They will receive a total of $5.7 billion more pay in 2025.
Investopedia
January 8, 2025
Still, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute noted that the supply-demand imbalance for workers in the tech industry has been overstated. Other EPI research shows tech companies continue to hire H-1B workers in large numbers while shrinking their US workforces. They conclude that some tech companies are turning to cheaper foreign workers rather than hiring US workers. Other employers have brought over foreign tech workers and leased them out to other US companies, which lay off their IT departments made up of local, more expensive workers, according to EPI.
Yahoo Finance
January 8, 2025
But not everybody is convinced. Shortly before Sanders entered the fray, I spoke with Ronil Hira, a political scientist at Howard University who has been studying the H-1B program for more than two decades and writing about it at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, and elsewhere. Hira has frequently testified before Congress about what he sees as the program’s tendency to depress wages, promote outsourcing, and pad the profits of tech companies. The political fractures exposed by the MAGA blowup weren’t surprising to him. “This isn’t really a left-right issue,” he told me. “It’s a worker-corporations issue.”
The New Yorker
January 8, 2025
Features interview with Ron Hira.
Lever Times Podcast
January 8, 2025
Vermont, Connecticut and Maine are among 20 states that have their minimum wages tied to the inflation rate, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New Hampshire Union Leader
January 8, 2025
Over 9.2 million workers across the U.S. will see their paychecks grow as the minimum wage rises in 21 states. The change — effective Jan. 1, 2025 — represents an overall pay increase of $5.7 billion per year, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit think tank.
Quartz
January 8, 2025
In a 2020 paper on the system, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute described it as an important but “deeply flawed” program for attracting skilled workers, saying it enables U.S. companies to “legally underpay” foreign workers relative to their U.S. counterparts.
Huffpost
January 8, 2025