“There’s just no valid argument, I think, for excluding agriculture,” said Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute based in Washington, D.C.
Costa has worked at EPI for 11 years, looking specifically at the intersection of immigration and labor policy issues. The nonprofit, nonpartisan institute was established in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.
Statesman Journal
February 11, 2022
Well, we already know that the omicron wave has started to fade. You know, this was a very sharp spike but also a fairly short spike. And Elise Gould, who’s a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says daily infections have already fallen by more than half from where they were in the middle of last month.
NPR Morning Edition
February 11, 2022
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which first presented its research last week to a task force of the American Federation of Teachers, employment in public elementary and secondary schools decreased by nearly 5% overall from fall 2019 to fall 2021. The number of people employed as teachers fell by 6.8%, bus drivers by 14.6%, and custodians by 6%.
Common Dreams
February 11, 2022
According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in the public high school sector made around 19.2 percent less than other types of workers who also went to college as of 2019. Teachers in the country have made less money on a consistent basis when compared to their counterparts in other fields, an exception being the 1960s.
Newsweek
February 11, 2022
“I don’t think anybody would dispute that we’re moving in the right direction,” said Valerie Wilson, labor economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “That being the case, as we often see, there are pretty significant differences in terms of the pace of recovery by race and ethnicity.”
Washington Post
February 11, 2022
As of January 30, federal contract workers must be paid at least $15 an hour under an executive order Biden signed in April that was finalized by the Labor Department in November. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit, estimated that the number of workers who got a raise when it took effect last month may have been as high as 390,000. That’s a substantial accomplishment.
New Republic
February 11, 2022
There are 2.9 million fewer jobs now than before the pandemic, but as Elise Gould of Economic Policy Institute points out, if you take population growth into account, the shortfall is 4.5 million.
The New York Times
February 11, 2022
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) did not collect wage data specifically for school bus drivers in 2019 and 2020, but BLS economist Elka Torpey told Jacobin that their median hourly wage in 2018 was $15.58. According to David Cooper, who directs the Economic Policy Institute’s Economic Analysis and Research Network, the number appears to be similar for 2020. At full-time, year-round hours, it’s not enough for a single adult to sustain an acceptable standard of living in many states — let alone raise kids or plan for retirement.
Jacobin
February 11, 2022
Though Starbucks maintains the firings were related to the union, retaliation is strikingly common in union campaigns in general. In 29% of all union elections in 2016-2017, employers were charged with illegally coercing, threatening, or retaliating against workers over their support of unions, according to a 2019 report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. More than half of large employers over the same period were charged with at least one illegal act, EPI found.
VICE
February 11, 2022
A 2020 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that nearly 40 percent of the animal slaughtering and processing workforce in the U.S. was foreign born and 70 percent of those workers were non-citizens. Meatpackers have increasingly relied on a limited number of immigrant worker visas over the last decade to staff their plants.
Politico
February 11, 2022