Features interview with Heidi Shierholz.
Bloomberg TV
April 14, 2023
Employers spend over $400 million per year in “union avoidance” consultants, according to a recent study of US Department of Labor data by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. But the figure may actually be higher, as Amazon disclosed March 31 that it spent over $14 million in 2022 alone on such expenses, and Starbucks—which also is experiencing high organizing activity—has yet to reveal how much it spends on consultants.
Bloomberg Law
April 14, 2023
A 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute think tank reported that the decline in unionization has translated to a loss of earnings equivalent to $3,250 for a median full time worker.
VICE
April 14, 2023
Workers’ wages have lagged productivity for decades, as the Economic Policy Institute has faithfully reported. This is because employers have power to set wages. They aren’t the passive agents you learned about in baby economics class operating on a knife edge to keep prices at a minimum and forced to pay market wages.
Forbes
April 14, 2023
But to lure them back employers had to increase wages, even after Covid benefits had expired. Why was this so? Writing in The American Prospect in January, Josh Bivens of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute suggested that a major driver was something he called “severed monopsony.” Monopsony is the tendency of monopoly (in practice, oligopolies) to drive down prices by reducing competition for workers.
New Republic
April 14, 2023
The speed and scope of the recovery is due to many factors, but chiefly to the stimulus Biden and Democrats in Congress pushed through in the spring of 2021. Progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute and elsewhere had warned during Obama’s first term that the 2009 stimulus was woefully inadequate to the task of restoring the economy. Fortunately, a critical mass of President Biden’s economic advisers, unlike Obama’s, came from those very same progressive circles that had predicted the molasses-slow pace of the post–Great Recession recovery.
American Prospect
April 14, 2023
Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, stated that the Fair Wage Act increase will benefit more than 163,000 Marylanders. The Maryland Center on Economic Policy reported that affected workers would see their wages increase $0.54 an hour. That’s $782 a year.
Popville
April 14, 2023
It’s a starting point that the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank says is needed to fix the profession.
In August of 2022, the EPI released a report showing that over the last two decades teacher pay is falling behind other professions.
Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote the EPI report and says teacher pay is even worse for women.
Scripps news
April 14, 2023
“The debate about what that residual difference is, is what leads to whether or not we address that racial disparity by trying to increase investments in education or something else, rather than directly thinking about how we can address the structural issues that generate that difference, or even how we better enforce antidiscrimination law to eliminate that difference,” says Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
The American Prospect
April 14, 2023
Maryland is one of 30 states and Washington, D.C., that has a minimum wage higher than the federal rate of $7.25 per hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in the district.
The Daily Record
April 14, 2023