The analysis of Social Security Administration data was done by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which also compared wage trends over the past four decades. Between 1979 and 2021, the top 1 percent has seen its wages rise by over 200 percent, while the 0.1 percent’s wages rose by over 460 percent, the report found. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, saw its wages rise by a mere 29 percent, or just about a 0.7 percent raise yearly on average, compared to the 11.1 percent yearly raise on average for the top 0.1 percent.
The state minimum wage increases around New Year’s Day will affect 3.4 million workers currently earning base pay and another 5.4 million who make somewhat more but will benefit from ripple effects within a business, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The figures don’t include city and county minimum wage increases.
Inequality in the U.S. deepened in 2021, with the country’s top 0.1% experiencing a 18.5% jump in earnings from the previous year, according to a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The bottom 90% of earners, meanwhile, swallowed an overall loss of 0.2% in inflation-adjusted earnings in the same period.
The employer-provided pension—monthly income from a company for which you no longer work—is a hoary part of the American past that never really existed for most of us. In 1970, at pensions’ peak, just under one in two American workers worked for an employer with the traditional retirement plan. (“A Timeline of the Evolution of Retirement in the United States,” Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, 2010, scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/legal/50.) Today, the number stands at one in five in the private sector. (Monique Morrissey, “Private-Sector Pension Coverage Fell by Half over Two Decades,” Working Economic Blog, Economic Policy Institute, January 11, 2013, https://www.epi.org/blog/private-sector-pension-coverage-decline/.)
“Inflation can normalize without taking a hammer to the head of the economy,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said Tuesday. But Powell—who has openly targeted workers’ wages as CEO pay runs rampant—brushed aside such arguments during his press conference Wednesday, claiming there is no “painless way to restore price stability.”
Jennifer Sherer, a senior state policy coordinator for the Economic Policy Institute — a think tank focusing on progressive economic policy — said that the position of fast food work was not immutable because workers’ wages and their standing in the economy are determined by political factors. “There’s this outmoded idea that somehow there’s a natural market that’s going to set the right wage,” Sherer said. “Employers intentionally find ways to boost their profits by suppressing wages, and policy choices have enabled and sort of abetted that wage suppression.”
Since Jan. 2014, 28 states and D.C. have changed their laws around minimum wage, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which has been tracking these changes nationwide.
Even when Black Americans do build wealth through homeownership, downturns in the economy wipe them out. According to the Economic Policy Institute, from 2005 to 2009, a time period covering the foreclosure crisis, Black households saw their median net worth fall by 53 percent, while white households saw just a 17 percent decline. And on the flip side, when the housing market is doing well, Black households tend to benefit less than white ones.
The alleged trend of “quiet quitting” grabbed media attention this year. But plenty of employees were, by official measures, working more than ever. The U.S. had an “exceptionally strong” job market in 2022, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, with 4.3 million jobs created through November. That was the second-best performance since 1940, he said, with the first-best being 2021.
A new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute looks at wage growth in 2021, using annual earnings from the Social Security Administration. They found that the top 1% saw average real wages grow 9.4% from 2020 to 2021, while the bottom 90% saw wages decline ever so slightly by 0.2%.
The bill would close a loophole in the 2010 Break Time for Nursing Mothers Law, which mostly only covers hourly workers and excludes most salaried occupations, per the Economic Policy Institute.
As a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute outlines, without increased domestic production of electric vehicle batteries and other power train components, the large-scale introduction of electric vehicles could result in the loss of over two hundred fifty thousand jobs in automobile assembly and parts production.
But even as it gained cachet among this emerging class of centrist-minded visionaries, the third way drew skeptical appraisals from detractors both left and right, who justly assailed its ambiguity and lack of substance. The Economist derisively stated in 1998, “Trying to pin down an exact meaning is like wrestling an inflatable man. If you get a grip on one limb, all the hot air rushes to another.” Jeff Faux of the Economic Policy Institute likewise noted that while “Clinton and Blair are two of the most articulate politicians of the age…their definitions of the third way leave the observer without a clue as to what it means.”
“Inflation can normalize without taking a hammer to the head of the economy,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said Tuesday.
Unions can barely keep themselves afloat, much less fund extensive advocacy outside their core functions. The Economic Policy Institute, long the most influential union-aligned think tank in the US, took only 14 percent of its funding from unions in 2021.
In a study of teachers’ salaries, Sylvia Allegretto, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, found a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010. In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364. By 2010, teachers made $1,352 and other graduates made $1,811. By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.
The Economic Policy Institute released a report on how the pandemic has exacerbated a long-standing national shortage of teachers.
It acknowledges that there’s always been a pre-existing shortage of teachers. It is especially severe in schools with high shares of students of color or students from low-income families.
The reports said a shortage is not a function of an inadequate number of qualified teachers in the U.S. economy. Simply, there are too few qualified teachers willing to work at current compensation levels given the increasingly stressful environment.
To end the teacher shortage, the institute said state leaders must address the two most pressing reasons for the shortage: the long-standing decline in the pay of teachers relative to other workers with a college degree and the high and increasing levels of stress public school teachers face.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which advocates for the needs of low- and middle-income workers, found in a non-peer-reviewed study that the relative pay gap nationwide has increased over the last 25 years between teachers and their similarly educated peers to about 14%, including benefits.
As the Director of Research of the Economic Policy Institute Josh Biven has stated, “…Inflation is largely a global, geopolitical phenomenon that is just not under the Biden administration’s control…”
Foundation for Economic Education
December 16, 2022
NEW YORK — Workers earning minimum wage in more than two dozen states can expect a raise in 2023. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the following states and Washington, D.C. are set to raise their minimum wage at various points through the new year.
Fewer options for parents have also led to higher costs in most areas, though prices vary wildly state to state. For example, while the average annual price of a full-time child care center for a toddler costs more than $24,000 in Washington, DC, it comes out to roughly $6,800 in Arkansas, according to a calculator made by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. States like California and New York have some of the least affordable child care options, costing nearly half the median income for a single-parent family, according to a 2021 report from Child Care Aware of America. The same data reveals that in most regions of the US, annual child care costs for an infant are more expensive than housing, and usually exceed the cost of in-state public tuition at a four-year college.
Recent research suggests the pandemic has indeed worsened pre-existing teacher shortages nationwide, according to the Economic Policy Institute. A report released Dec. 6 by the left-leaning think tank points to stressful working conditions and low pay as reasons why there’s a lack of qualified teachers willing to work.
The closer a worker is to the government — and the older they are — the more likely they are to be unionized. About a third of public employees are unionized versus around 6 percent of private sector employees — about half of all employees covered under a union contract are in the public sector, while 16 percent are in manufacturing and 15 percent are in transportation or utilities, according to Economic Policy Institute (EPI) data.
Wages are one of the biggest issues in the US. The data from Economic Policy Institute shows that while productivity has grown by 62.5% in the US during 1979-2021, wages in comparison have only grown by 16%. This linear growth in wages relative to exponential productivity growth can be explained in part by the fact that the percentage of unions has halved in the country in the past 40 years, as noted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
While everyone defines “rich” differently, being part of “the 1%” has become synonymous with being wealthy in the U.S. The top 1% of earners in the U.S. earned median annual wages of $823,763 in 2020, according to the Economic Policy Institute.