Specifically, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase the federal minimum wage over a four-year period from $7.25 to $15. It would also index future increases in the federal minimum wage to median wage growth in addition to phasing out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities. According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers.
Sen. Mark Warner
January 29, 2021
In 2017 the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at 2.4 million US workers. Based on their analysis, they reported wage theft as an $8 billion a year industry. Factor in the rest of the population the theft comes in closer to $15 billion, stolen by employers every year ($64/paycheque). It’s a lucrative and easy line of income for the bosses. Even though it’s against the law — it’s the type of law you can break without any consequences. It’s rarely prosecuted and if it does go to court, which happens, the thief gets to keep some of their stolen loot.
Medium
January 29, 2021
Read the Economic Policy Institute’s fact sheet on why we need $15 here.
SEIU
January 29, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said the proposed $15 per hour increase would lift the wages of 32 million workers, the majority of whom work in essential and frontline industries. EPI said raising the minimum wage helps narrow the racial and gender gap since 23 percent of workers who would benefit are Black or Latina women.
American Press
January 29, 2021
Este proyecto de ley serviría a más del 20% de la fuerza de la nación, estimó el Instituto de Política Económica (EPI), de los cuales más de la mitad de los que se beneficiarían son adultos en sus mejores años laborales entre las edades de 25 y 54.
Solo Dinero
January 29, 2021
The federal minimum wage is worth about 17 percent less than it was in 2009, when it was last raised, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would amount to a raise for approximately 28 million workers, the group said in 2019.
Washington Post
January 29, 2021
The program, which ties employees and their visas to the employer, is rife with abuse. Wage theft is rampant, forced labor is common, and the contracts employers sign, which guarantee certain hours and living conditions, are rarely honored. On top of that the U.S. Department of Labor rarely enforces regulations, which allows mistreatment to go unchecked. In 2019, the DOL performed just over 1,000 agricultural wage theft investigations, down from 2,431 in 2000, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. At the same time, the number of workers on H-2A visas has increased 660%, from 30,000 in 2000 to more than 200,000 in 2019.
Facing South
January 29, 2021
Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., told Marketplace in 2019 that “racial wage-gain disparity” can be attributed to lower educational status, higher unemployment and racial discrimination in hiring among Black people.
“African American workers haven’t benefited as much as they would from a federal minimum wage increase,” Wilson told the outlet, “which would get into those southern states that have about 60% of African American workers, and are much less likely to increase minimum wages.”
Sacramento Bee
January 29, 2021
The figures show there was a lapse in benefits for people who still need them, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. And the total of 2.88 million fewer claims that first week may be an underestimate of the true size of the problem because even individuals claiming benefits could be experiencing delays, according to Stettner.
The Balance
January 29, 2021
As Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute explained to me, two factors at work in 2020 created this weird disparity. One is what she calls the “pandemic composition effect,” which means that the industries that lost the most jobs last year thanks to the pandemic were industries that tended to have low unionization rates — bars, restaurants, hospitality, etcetera. The second factor was that unionized workers were less likely to lose their jobs than non-union workers in the same industry. Each of those two factors was responsible for about half of the increase in union density. So even as hundreds of thousands of union jobs were lost, union members were less impacted than the economy as a whole, which produced the mathematical trick of an appearance of progress. (It is worth noting, too, that assuming that jobs come back to the same hard-hit industries when the pandemic is over, that will serve to dilute and reduce last year’s union density gains.)
In These Times
January 29, 2021