The need for enrichment can be met by reducing unpredictability in workers’ schedules and ensuring better pay for those who do work irregular or nontraditional hours. Scholars at the Brookings Institution and the Economic Policy Institute have identified a host of promising reforms in this arena.
The Hechinger Report
January 11, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that elimination of the 80/20 rule will cost workers $700 million annually.
The rule change, EPI argues, “will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. We also find that as employers ask tipped workers to do more non-tipped work as a result of this rule, employment in non-tipped food service occupations will decline by 5.3 percent and employment in tipped occupations will increase by 12.2 percent, resulting in 243,000 jobs shifting from being non-tipped to being tipped.”
For example, EPI suggests that restaurant owners may require tipped workers to assume duties once done by cleaning crews, dishwashers or prep cooks, all of whom receive a full minimum wage.
Washington Post
January 11, 2021
The problem of the disconnect between the economy and the markets is that it is unsustainable long-term. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1% take home 21% of all income in the United States, the largest share since 1928.
Investing.com
January 11, 2021
Because of miserably inadequate federal benefits, even those workers with access to employment face the Catch-22 between going to work and risking infection and staying home and risking destitution. Less than one-quarter of the workforce worked remotely or from home over the last four weeks, according to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
World Socialist Web Site
January 11, 2021
The $900 billion stimulus and relief package signed into law in late December should provide a significant boost to the economy, softening the blow from the resurgent virus. “Without that stimulus package, over 10 million people would have lost unemployment insurance benefits at the end of December,” Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute told Marketplace. “That would have been a huge drag on the economy that we will not see.”
The Fiscal Times
January 11, 2021
Desde Economic Policy Institute se refleja que 26.8 millones de trabajadores han sido impactaos negativamente por la COVID, 10.7 millones de ellos están oficialmente desempleados pero además 7.5 millones trabajan menos horas o han visto cómo sus salarios se han recortado, 4.9 millones ya no están en la fuerza laboral pero se deberían calcular a 3.7 millones más.
El Diario
January 11, 2021
“President-elect Biden will inherit an economy that has been decimated by Trump, who not only presided over outright job losses during his tenure, but also enacted a litany of anti-worker policy decisions and squandered the labor market strength he inherited,” wrote Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Gould called on the new Congress to pass more aid for state and local governments in addition to extending unemployment benefits.
She called the job losses in December “an unequivocal disaster for the state of the economic recovery.” She noted the year ended with 9.8 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic began in February, and the economy is down 546,000 jobs since Trump took office in January 2017.
Courthouse News
January 11, 2021
Higher-wage workers were six times more likely to be able to work from home than lower-wage workers, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute. The lower-wage workers who had to continue reporting to work risked continual exposure to the virus — and were more likely to live with family members over the age of 60.
Business Insider
January 11, 2021
“Until the virus is under control, until people can freely engage in economic activity again, there is one hand tied behind the economy’s back,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “That is totally different than what Obama-Biden faced when they came in.”
Washington Post
January 11, 2021
All that said, mapping out this network of institutional and grassroots infrastructure is maddeningly complex. It includes the Democratic Party in its various incarnations, and closely allied national issue groups such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, or the League of Conservation Voters. There is also the labor movement; large donors; mass digital groups such as MoveOn; the new wave of post-2016 resistance groups such as Indivisible and Run for Something; established think thanks such as Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, and Demos, which run from center to left; newer and younger groups such as Sunrise; and groups that reflect the new consciousness around racial justice and remediation such as Color of Change.
American Prospect
January 11, 2021