In some cases, companies have exploited seasonal workers, according to Daniel Costa, an immigration expert with the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The way the visa works, the employer owns and controls the visa, they apply for it. The worker is really tied to that employer, some would say ‘indentured’ to that employer, for those six or seven months,” said Costa, who advocates for reforms to the H-2B system to improve wages and conditions for workers.
Marketplace
April 28, 2023
Also Wednesday, members of the California Federation of Teachers were at the Capitol, alongside Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, to support his bill that intends to raise teacher and other school employee salaries by 50% over the next seven years. The Democrat from Torrance cited a 2022 Economic Policy Institute report, which found that teachers earned 23.5% less than their similarly educated peers nationwide. (In California that gap shrinks to 17.6%.)
Cal Matters
April 28, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute calculated the living wage in Hawai’i to be $28.45 per hour, and by some estimates, farmers in Hawaii make $20 or less per hour. The data we have is typically for legal farm workers on farms owned by big companies and does not take into account undocumented workers who are paid far less and have less legal security.
Civil Beat
April 28, 2023
Every year, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) updates its Family Budget Calculator, an online tool that measures the income a family needs to maintain a decent standard of living in all counties and metro areas of the United States. Using this data, NEA recently determined that, on average, ESPs do not earn enough to support a family in the nation’s most affordable metro area—Brownsville, Texas.
NEA
April 28, 2023
“I’d definitely say 2011 was a step forward in how aggressively the debt ceiling was weaponized to secure partisan policy goals,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), previously told Vox. “I’d say 1995 was also important; [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich threatened this but didn’t take it as far as the GOP did in 2011.”
VOX
April 28, 2023
To move away from the Supreme Court for a moment, we can see this pattern of leniency for some and the stiff arm of the law for everyone else wherever we choose to look in American society. Take the workplace. A 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that in the 10 most populous states, an estimated 2.4 million people lose a combined $8 billion income to unscrupulous employers. If this is representative of national trends, the institute contends, then American workers lose more than $15 billion a year to wage theft. For comparison’s sake, the total losses attributed to all property crime in 2018 amounted to $16.4 billion.
New York Times
April 20, 2023
But even in “places that have successfully, to their credit, raised minimum wages substantially over the federal level,” says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, “they’re still in many cases not a living wage.”
CNBC
April 20, 2023
Others see a payroll tax increase as a relatively straightforward solution. “We could either raise revenues modestly, as I prefer, or we could cut benefits by about a fifth,” or even more if action is delayed, Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said at the AEI event Friday. “In my mind, this isn’t a difficult decision,” she said, because Americans “across the political spectrum oppose benefit cuts and are willing to contribute more” to preserve Social Security.
MarketWatch
April 20, 2023
The result is eye-popping inequality between the boardroom and the factory floor. According to a survey of 350 of the largest US quoted companies by the Economic Policy Institute, realised CEO pay, including proceeds from equity shares and stock options, rose 1,460 per cent from 1978 to 2021. This compares with 18 per cent growth in typical worker’s pay over the same period.
Financial Times
April 20, 2023