Before the crisis, families paid two out of three dollars spent for early care and education — the Economic Policy Institute calculated that $42 billion was spent by families out of the total $64 billion spent privately and publicly for this essential service. This crisis showed how unstable that financing system made child care programs on which working families rely.
EdNC
February 22, 2021
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the wage increase would affect nearly one-third of workers in Hinson’s district. She and other members of the House Budget Committee will review the proposal during a hearing on Monday
Iowa Public Radio
February 22, 2021
“You have one swath of the economy getting absolutely slammed and then a huge swath of workers who haven’t seen a decline in pay,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “In a normal recession they’d be helping to keep the economy going but that is not at all the case now.”
Lessons from previous recessions, Ms. Shierholz continued, show that without a concerted effort to provide relief to those hard-hit low-wage workers — particularly by eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers — any economic recovery will compound existing wage gaps.
New York Times
February 22, 2021
To read more about the national teacher shortages
The Economic Policy Institute
The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought
Virginia Public Media
February 22, 2021
— Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Labor Department, “thinks the best answer to how many people are still affected economically by the pandemic is 25.5 million.”
Politico Morning Shift
February 22, 2021
- Counter: “That claim of job loss isn’t supported by evidence — it’s likely an overestimate of negative employment impact. But even if you accept their findings, they still find the benefits far outweigh the costs,” Heidi Shierholz, the Labor Department’s chief economist under Barack Obama, told CBS.
Washington Post
February 22, 2021
The wage hit its peak in inflation-adjusted terms in 1968 at just over $12. Though it has been raised 14 times since then, it has not kept pace with the cost of living. The current nearly 12-year stretch is the longest it’s gone without a boost.
That means minimum wage workers are getting poorer over time, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“Every year that Congress does not raise it, people get a pay cut,” he said.
CNN
February 22, 2021
Black people also suffer inequities in the labor market. For fifty years now, the unemployment rate of Black people has remained twice the rate of whites. In Washington, D.C., the city where John Thompson and I were born and raised, the jobless rate for Black people was more than six times the rate of whites in 2019. And Black households in 2019 earned just 61 cents on the dollar when compared to white households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Progressive
February 22, 2021
When Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2018, a move now being debated in Congress for all American workers, some believed it would pressure other companies to lift pay levels as well — particularly rival retailers and warehouse employers.
“This is going to be a big deal for very low-wage workers,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based economic think tank said at the time. “It’s going to compel other businesses to raise wages as well.”
Gainesville Times
February 22, 2021