And this all reminded me about a conversation I had last year with Heidi Shierholz. She’s the president of the Economic Policy Institute. And last year, we talked about this idea of retaliation against workers organizing unions. And to be clear, we’re talking about this in general, not about Tesla.
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: It is not legal for employers to retaliate against workers for organizing. It is not legal for employers to fire workers for organizing. So that shouldn’t be happening. This should not be an issue.
NPR
February 24, 2023
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) lays the blame for our national tipping culture on the 1966 amendments creating a so-called “tip credit” to the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to EPI, “The creation of the tip credit—the difference, paid for by customers’ tips, between the regular minimum wage and the sub-wage for tipped workers—fundamentally changed the practice of tipping.”
LA Progressive
February 24, 2023
Features Margaret discussing the latest strikes data.
Your Rights at Work
February 24, 2023
Wage theft — when employees are paid less than the required federal and state minimums — is widespread, costing some 2.4 million workers in the 10 most populous states in the country $8 billion a year, according to a 2017 study by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. New York is among those states. One in six low-wage workers is a victim of wage theft, with an average loss per employee of $3,300 a year, according to the EPI study.
Newsday
February 24, 2023
“In the past couple years, we’ve definitely seen a resurgence in the labor movement,” Margaret Poydock, a policy analyst and government affairs specialist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Insider. “We’ve seen strong support in labor, because workers can see what unions can do for them. They see that unions can help negotiate better pay, better benefits, safer working conditions. The pandemic kind of revealed how much work sucked.”
Business Insider
February 24, 2023
There are approximately 1.4 million home care workers in the US (an undercount), according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the majority of them Black and Hispanic women, who earn a median hourly wage of just over $13 per hour.
CNN
February 24, 2023
According to Pew Research and the Economic Policy Institute, wages have grown so slowly since Ramsey first entered the labor market that the average worker’s purchasing power hasn’t measurably budged in the ensuing four decades. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the households in the country’s top-earning quintile saw their real incomes rise by 111% during that same 40-year period.
GO Banking Rates
February 24, 2023
While allotments of H-2B visas for low- and semi-skilled non-agricultural workers are increased annually, enforcement of the government’s wage and hour rules in this category has deteriorated to the point of disappearing. “The H-2B program’s wage regulations are allowing employers to legally undercut U.S. wage standards and underpay migrant workers,” Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported in 2021.
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
February 24, 2023
Facing similiar prospects across the Pacific, a report published in April 2022 by United States Economic Policy Institute Research Director Josh Bivens echoed similar. The institute’s report details the overheating view of the economy often emphasises the fast nominal wage growth of the past year as justification for the arguments of policymakers.
Savings.com
February 24, 2023
A main cause for the widening income disparity is the huge pay gap. According to Equilar, the median income of CEOs of listed companies in 2021 was 20 million dollars, up 31 percent from 2020, while that of average employees increased from around 69,000 dollars to some 72,000 dollars, up about 4 percent. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay had skyrocketed by 1,322 percent between 1978 and 2020, while typical worker compensation had risen just 18 percent.
Global Times
February 24, 2023