The number of jobs created, 261,000 in October, is historically strong and economists had expected a number closer to 200,000, according to the New York Times. But as Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz noted on Twitter, that is far off the average pace of 539,000 per month from the first quarter of 2022.
Globe St.
November 7, 2022
Heidi Shierholz, Economic Policy Institute Senior Economist and Director of Policy, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the October jobs report, the state of the economy, how inflation is affecting year-over-year wage growth, and the outlook for a recession.
Yahoo Finance
November 4, 2022
Features Josh discussing the Federal Reserve rate hikes.
Al Jazeera
November 4, 2022
D.C.’s dining scene, replete with celebrity restaurateurs and two dozen Michelin-starred restaurants, is one of the country’s most celebrated. But proponents of I-82 say the industry’s growth was built on an artificial labor subsidy that exploits workers. “Tips were intended to be an extra or bonus on top of a wage, not your primary source of income,” Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, the national organization leading this effort, says. “Fundamentally, what is wrong with the system is the employers are not paying for the cost of the labor.” Experts say the maddening unpredictability of wages from week to week makes long-term financial planning difficult for restaurant workers. “A system that’s built on customers’ whims for supplying the bulk of a person’s income just leaves a lot up to chance,” David Cooper, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says. Leaving pay to the vagaries of customers means that Black and female restaurant workers in Washington get smaller tips than their white and male counterparts.
Washington Monthly
November 4, 2022
“One of the reasons why we continue to see persistent pay disparities both in gender and race is so much of the process and decision making about salary is hidden or secretive,” said Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
Wilson, director of the think tank’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, said it but does feel there’s more worker willingness to discuss pay — and that’s an important first step. Still, she said, “you do need laws that really formalized it as a practice that everyone is required to adhere to.”
Morningstar
November 4, 2022
I tend to agree more with Heidi Shierholz, Chief Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, who said, “People who are quitting are taking other jobs, not just leaving the workforce.”
Forbes
November 4, 2022
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in July that inflation does not directly decrease people’s incomes in the aggregate in the way that unemployment does and that in the long term, a recession would hurt economic growth more than inflation would.
Tennessee Lookout
November 4, 2022
What impact do unions have? According to the Economic Policy Institute, workers in unions earn an average of 10.2% more than their peers who are not organized; unions set higher wage standards for all workers; union workers are more likely to be covered by employer health insurance packages than non-unionized workers; and union workers have more paid vacation and sick days. Women and Black and Hispanic workers in unions are paid considerably more than their nonunion peers. No wonder unions have a 70% favorability rating, according to a recent Gallup poll, and union organizing is succeeding across the nation.
Knoxville News Sentinel
November 4, 2022
Corporate profits and CEO pay surged to an all time high this year, while more people than ever are taking second jobs to make ends meet. Corporate profits account for over half of the higher prices people are paying, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
KALW
November 4, 2022
About 60 million workers are subject to forced arbitration, according to a 2018 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. PAYWALL
Fortune
November 4, 2022
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, argued that studies of state and local projects that used project labor agreements found that they did not decrease the number of bids for work or increase costs
Route Fifty
November 4, 2022
There’s a third major, often unappreciated factor fueling inflation: many US corporations have exploited the inflationary environment by aggressively increasing their prices and profit margins. Exxon’s second-quarter profits soared to $17.9bn, more than triple what it earned in last year’s second quarter, while Chevron’s earnings also more than tripled, to $11.6bn. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, found that roughly 40% of the recent inflation in the US can be attributed to fatter corporate profit margins. Maybe Republican TV ads should be attacking corporate greed rather than Joe Biden.
Guardian
November 4, 2022
Since 2020, corporate profits after tax have leaped to record highs, according to Federal Reserve statistics. The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI) calculates that corporate profits grew by nearly 54% from the second quarter of 2020 through the end of last year. That compares with an average of 11.4% a year over the previous four decades.
Forbes
November 4, 2022
This isn’t just a result of bad politics – the failure to adjust the country’s minimum wage is an economic and moral travesty. Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s are now watching their children and grandchildren grow into a standard of living far below their own generation’s standards. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the value of the federal minimum wage today is at its lowest in 66 years. Workers earning the federal $7.25 minimum wage are making 27% less than a worker earning the same in July 2009, adjusted for inflation, and 40% less than a minimum wage worker in 1968.
The American Independent
November 4, 2022
As Director of Research at the Economic Policy Institute Josh Bivens points out, this distributional outcome is the result of highly unbalanced bargaining power between corporations and workers. Even if the current labor shortage gave workers some negotiating leverage, corporations still have enough power to resist upward wage pressures and protect their margins. The external shocks rippling through the economy over the past two years have simply not been enough to reverse decades of policies that have systematically eroded the power of labor.
Brown Political Review
November 4, 2022
A study by the Economic Policy Institute found increased construction costs as a result of prevailing wages are also offset by better workplace safety, the social benefits of higher wages and increased government revenue from projects, Albear said.
The Diamondback
November 4, 2022
Nationwide, families spend an estimated $1 trillion in Social Security benefits each year, according to figures from the National Committee to Support and Preserve Medicare, while economists with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute have argued expanding social security benefits by raising taxes on the rich could have an even more pronounced economic impact.
Newsweek
November 4, 2022
“Inflation is coming from continued supply-chain bottlenecks, the energy prices, dealing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Elise Gould, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, told Insider. “There’s still some mismatch. I think that some of that’s going to come down on its own, so I think the Federal Reserve doesn’t have to act so aggressively.”
Business Insider
November 4, 2022
The study does not offer specific numbers on racial disparity seen since June. According to the Economic Policy Institute, non-Hispanic Black women account for the largest percentage of abortions in most states.
ABC 7
November 4, 2022
As of 2017, almost 70 percent of all Black children in the United States attended schools that are highly segregated by race, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Root
November 4, 2022
The Economic Policy Institute, the One Fair Wage campaign, and others have published research showing that tipped workers in states that eliminated the subminimum wage enjoy higher earnings, face less harassment on the job, and are less likely to live in poverty. It can also reduce race and gender inequities perpetuated by the tipped wage.
Human Rights Watch
November 4, 2022
But will sacrificing working families to a recession really bring inflation down? It’s unlikely considering the source of rising prices. Wage gains made by in demand workers have already been eaten up by what the AFL-CIO union federation coined “Greedflation,” leading to an overall 2.4 percent drop in real wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute, less than 8 percent of recent inflation is due to rising labor costs. For reference, that is a miniscule amount compared to the historical rate of 61.8 percent. Rather, the biggest recent driver has been runaway corporate profits at 53.9 percent. To put just how explosive these increases have been into context, normally corporate profits are responsible for just 11.4 percent of inflation.
Triple Pundit
November 4, 2022
In response, Fields shared an Economic Policy Institute report on employers’ common anti-union intimidation tactics with the News. The report repeatedly references a national survey naming “management pressure” as the top reason employees vote against unionization, often prompted by the threat of job losses and employers encouraging supervisors to have one-on-one conversations about unionization with their subordinates.
Yale Daily News
November 4, 2022
As much as investors love a good earnings report, Corporate America’s cash machine has disproportionately fueled the inflationary boom. A study by Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, found that as price pressures were cranking up in 2021, fattening company profit margins accounted for more than half the increase. Labor costs contributed less than 8% — a flip of the dynamic that held from 1979 to 2019.
Financial Advisor
November 4, 2022
Moreover, today’s inflation is very different from the stagflation of the 1970s. Then, labor unions were strong; now, they are nearly extinct. Wages aren’t keeping up with rising prices, much less driving them. Even Fed officials admit that today’s inflation is driven largely by the notorious supply chain disruptions attending the rapid opening of economies from the Covid shutdown, by the war in Ukraine and Russian sanctions that roiled gas and food supply, by the ravages of extreme weather, including droughts across the US and China—and by corporations’ using the crisis to pocket record profits. An analysis of the Economic Policy Institute showed that profit markups accounted for more than half of price hikes and wage increases less than one-10th.
The Nation
November 4, 2022
Our new series, “People-Side Economics,” expands on these perspectives, exposing the bias and half-truths we hear every day, and bringing ideas we can use in organizing. In this third installment of the series, Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz talks with Convergence editorial board member Stephanie Luce about what does—and doesn’t—cause inflation, and how worker power plays a part in fighting it.
Convergence
October 28, 2022
Economists use an “employment multiplier” to calculate the number of indirect jobs supported by a worker, and according to the independent Economic Policy Institute, mining has an employment multiplier of 3.9, meaning this state’s 20,800 mining and logging jobs (piled together again for convenience’s sake) may support 81,120 other jobs, for a total of 101,920. That’s not inconsequential, but it’s also not 134,000.
LA Progressive
October 28, 2022
Nationwide, families spend an estimated $1 trillion in Social Security benefits each year, according to figures from the National Committee to Support and Preserve Medicare, while economists with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute have argued expanding social security benefits by raising taxes on the rich could have an even more pronounced economic impact.
Newsweek
October 28, 2022