Supporters say the measure would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
January 28, 2021
Stovall’s work points to another failure to reevaluate Beltway assumptions: Even if the USDA were only meant to address rural issues, that doesn’t exclude the interests of people of color. Along with the rest of the country, rural areas are becoming increasingly diverse, with about 20 percent of residents being people of color. More specifically, animal slaughtering and poultry processing workers are nearly twice as likely to be nonwhite as workers in other industries, and more than twice as likely to be foreign born, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The working conditions at meatpacking plants are chronically neglected—undoubtedly a result of those demographics—and the Covid-19 pandemic has made them even worse. While the Trump administration is largely to blame for the failure to protect meat processing workers, it’s not a stretch to say Vilsack opened the door for him. As Tom Philpott pointed out in Mother Jones, Vilsack’s partial privatization of poultry processing oversight set the stage for the Trump administration to allow plants to operate processing lines at 175 birds per minute, up from 140. One analysis by the Food and Environment Reporting Network found that 40 percent of plants operating at the higher rate had Covid-19 outbreaks, compared to 14 percent of overall plants.
The Nation
January 28, 2021
Raising the minimum wage is also expected to increase income for nearly 32 million Americans, with larger effects for Black, Latino and female workers, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
January 28, 2021
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. It’s author, Richard Rothstein, is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Carolina Panorama
January 28, 2021
Analysis by the Economic Policy Institute suggests this legislation would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including about a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers. But, franchise owners are concerned.
Fox Business
January 28, 2021
1 – Zipperer, Ben, and Josh Bivens. “9.2 Million Workers Likely Lost Their Employer-Provided Health Insurance in the Past Four Weeks.” Economic Policy Institute, 16 Apr. 2020
PR Newswire
January 28, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, an increase in the federal minimum wage will result in a pay increase for “38.1 percent of all black workers and 23.2 percent of all white workers.” Black workers are also less likely to live in areas where the state minimum wage is higher than the federal minimum wage.
News One
January 28, 2021
Beginning in 2026, the federal minimum wage would be indexed to median wage growth. According to an independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Raise the Wage Act would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers.
Atlanta Daily World
January 28, 2021
A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) points out that the official number of unemployed is miscounted in the best of years, made far worse in the age of COVID-19. The methodology itself is skewed. Issues such as overlooking individuals more likely to be unemployed than those included in final calculations lead to an official unemployment rate that was off by 1.5 percentage points at the beginning of 2020. That means 2.7 million unemployed people were “misclassified as not in the labor force” even before the pandemic hit. And that’s a conservative estimate. The wonky nature of that skewed methodology that produces skewed numbers means that it’s hard to get a real number and therefore a real handle on how bad things really are. And this is no accident. As Professor Wolff put it, “There is literally no aspect of this subject that isn’t loaded with people’s ideological agendas. It’s built into the numbers. It’s built into the way that those numbers are interpreted. Both the numbers and their interpretation are highly contestable.”
Mint Press News
January 28, 2021