Both violations of child labor laws and proposals to roll back child labor protections are on the rise across the country, according to a March 2023 report from the Economic Policy Institute.
At least 10 states have introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections in the past two years. And the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37 percent in the last year, according to the report.
The Quad-City Times
May 5, 2023
In a blog post earlier this week, Josh Bivens and Samantha Sanders of the Economic Policy Institute dismissed as “laughable” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) claim that the Republican proposal “would put the United States on a path to ‘fiscal responsibility’ and lower inflation.
“The biggest driver of deficits for the last 20 years has been a steady trend toward ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the richest U.S. households,” Bivens and Sanders wrote. “No one who actually wants to reduce the federal deficit should be looking to do that on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans.”
Common Dreams
May 5, 2023
According to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, between 2001 and 2021, the share of 16- to 19-year-olds not working increased by 22.4 percent, which the think tank said is “almost entirely explained” by the higher share of young people prioritizing education during those years.
VOX
May 5, 2023
“I get by because my sixteen-year-old son and I live with my parents, retired nurses who own their home,” Baker says. “Although I supplement my earnings in the insurance industry by working as a tutor of Latin and a translator of French, it is impossible for me to take vacations or to save for my son’s college education or a master’s degree that would enable me to land a job in a better-paying industry.”
Baker’s experience is common, says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank that studies the impact of economic trends on workers.
“Unfortunately, low wages are widespread throughout the labor market,” he tells The Progressive. “It is not just a problem of a teenager working after school to earn spending money, but an enormous burden for adults working two or three jobs for substandard wages that barely keep food on the table.”
The Progressive Magazine
May 5, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute reports since 2009 the minimum wage has lost 27% of its purchasing power due to cost of living increases. The Institute adds, 23 states and Washington D.C. raised state minimum wage in 2023, including Sanders’ own Vermont. Starting January 1, 2023, Vermont raised its state minimum wage to $13.18 per hour. That is an increase of $0.63 from the previous minimum wage of $12.55.
Gray TV
May 5, 2023
Josh Bivens, the chief economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told me that there is hope. According to his research, while corporate profits’ contribution to inflation is still outsized, accounting for a third of inflation at the end of 2022, it’s finally normalizing — albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace.
“All this has definitely taken longer than I thought it would,” he wrote to me.
Business Insider
May 5, 2023
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that, as of January 2023, 21 million workers still make less than $15 an hour. Workers in states that still adhere to the federal minimum wage are 46% more likely to make under $15 an hour, according to EPI, showcasing the power that the federal standard still holds.
Business Insider
May 5, 2023
Additionally, a report by the Economic Policy Institute found that in 33 states and the District of Columbia, the cost of center-based care for an infant exceeds the cost of in-state tuition at a public four-year college.
WFLA-TV (Florida)
May 5, 2023
The CBPP and other policy groups are warning that — unless the Fed stops raising interest rates—the already shaky economy is likely to plunge into recession, putting millions of people out of work. Further rate hikes “pose a dire threat to what could be an excellent 2023 for the economic prospects of America’s working families,” Josh Bivens, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said in a blog post.
Unbossed with Nina Turner
May 5, 2023
A few weeks after Sanders’ hearing, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a study that found: “Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation.”
EPI’s chief economist Josh Bivens wrote that more than half of companies’ price increases since the start of the pandemic “can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8 percent of this increase,” adding: “This is not normal.”
The EPI analysis should have been definitive — but the corporate pundit class chose to ignore it.
The Lever
May 5, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute found that in states with a strong union presence, incomes are higher and more people have health insurance. Critically, these states also have fewer voter restrictions, greater civic engagement, less racial resentment, and increased support among white workers for policies that benefit Black people.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy
May 5, 2023
Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Department of Labor and current head of the think tank Economic Policy Institute, said the labor market isn’t too hot.
“Wage growth is generally trending down,” Shierholz tweeted Friday.5 “We can absolutely sustain the kind of labor market tightness we are seeing today, if the Fed doesn’t stand in the way (or hasn’t already).”
Investopedia
May 5, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute reported on one lawsuit in 2021:
Thousands of skilled migrants with H-1B visas working as subcontractors at well-known corporations like Disney, FedEx, Google, and others appear to have been underpaid by at least $95 million. Victims include not only the H-1B workers but also the U.S. workers who are either displaced or whose wages and working conditions degrade when employers are allowed to underpay skilled migrant workers with impunity.
Breitbart
May 5, 2023
“We were still in a pretty depressed economy and in recovery from the great recession when those cuts were instituted. They just made the recovery last far longer than it should have,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a leftwing thinktank. “Over the next six or seven years, really valuable public goods and services were not delivered because they were cut so sharply.”
Government spending tends to rise after recessions but per-capita federal spending fell after the debt crisis. Bivens argues that if government spending had continued at its normal levels, the unemployment rate would have returned to its pre-recession level five or six years before 2017, when the job market finally recovered its losses.
The Guardian
May 5, 2023
Lawmakers across eight states — including Minnesota and Missouri — have bills in progress that weaken youth labor laws, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
CBS News
May 5, 2023
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
Sanders made the announcement outside the U.S. Capitol where he was flanked by AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry, and Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz.
UPI
May 4, 2023
“Haven’t wages for low-wage workers naturally grown in the tight labor markets of the pandemic recovery?” asked Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist for the Department of Labor.
“Yes, they have,” she said. “But so has the cost of living.”
ABC News
May 4, 2023
In 2021, the average pay for CEOs was 399 times what a typical worker made, according to an analysis of publicly available data by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s an increase of 1,460% since 1978, the left-leaning think tank said.
MarketWatch
April 28, 2023
According to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, employers spend $433m per year on union avoidance consultants to bolster employer union-busting efforts.
The Guardian
April 28, 2023
According to a March 30 blog post from the Economic Policy Institute, OSHA data from 29 states (including Iowa) shows that, between January 1, 2015, and May 31, 2022, employers reported 74,025 workers with severe injuries — an average of 27 per day.
In These Times
April 28, 2023