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According to the Economic Policy Institute, RTW laws aim to hamstring unions’ ability to help employees bargain with their employers for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Research shows that historically, wages for union workers average about 11% more than those of their non-union counterparts. Non-union workers in RTW states generally have fewer benefits as well.
The Tennessean October 11, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 30 of America’s 50 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted minimum wages that are higher than the federal standard. That leaves 20 where employers are still allowed to pay their workers as little as $7.25 an hour. Five of them — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — have no minimum wage at all. Two others — Georgia and Wyoming — still have their minimum wages set at $5.15 an hour. In all seven of those states, the federal threshold of $7.25 applies.
GO Banking Rates October 11, 2022 -
That’s according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Even as the country suffered through a pandemic, global supply chain disruptions and rising inflation, child poverty rates declined to the lowest on record. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy concluded, much of this can be attributed to last year’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit.
To be sure, some states and localities have spent relief funds in ways that do not actually improve the lives of average Americans. At least 21 states used the money to replenish unemployment insurance funding, which — as the Economic Policy Institute notes — has little impact on economic growth and effectively amounts to a tax cut for corporations. Some local governments are even using funding to build and expand jails and prisons, rather than invest in education, affordable housing, job programs or other programs that address the root causes of crime.
Finger Lakes Times October 11, 2022 -
A new analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute looks at C-suite salaries
Pay for chief executive officers rose by just over 11% from 2020 to 2021, according to a new report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Compared with the typical worker’s pay, CEOs were paid 399 times as much in 2021, the highest multiple on record, EPI said. In 1965, CEOs were paid 20 times what the average worker made.
On average, CEOs were paid $27.8 million in 2021, the institute said.
And CEO pay has risen by 1,460% since 1978. CEO compensation rose 36% faster than the stock market during this period, the EPI noted, and “far eclipsed the slow 18.1% growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation” over that span, in 2021 dollars.
“Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy,” Josh Bivens, the director of research at EPI and one of the report’s authors, said in a statement.
“We need to enact policy solutions that would both reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions and limit their ability to do so,” he added.
Dave Kamper, a senior state policy coordinator at EPI, wrote on Twitter TWTR, -1.35% : “CEO pay has gone up 1,460% since 1978. In our last report released before COVID started, in 2019, it had *only* gone up 940%. That is to say, ONE THIRD of the TOTAL jump in CEO pay since 1978 has come in the past three years.”
The EPI estimated the average CEO compensation of the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. companies. It used data from the S&P Compustat ExecuComp database for the years 1992 to 2021, and survey data published by the Wall Street Journal for selected years dating back to 1965.
Compensation figures included salary, bonuses and long-term incentive payouts, including stock awards and stock options.
The EPI also noted a shift in how CEOs were being paid: CEO compensation in this roundup had shifted away from the use of stock options and toward the use of stock awards.
MarketWatch October 7, 2022 -
American CEOs have seen their pay soar over the last four decades, far higher than the rate of pay raises for average workers.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 1978 and 2022, CEO compensation at the 350 largest firms rose by an inflation-adjusted 1460%. Outstripping the 18% increase for typical workers.
The rise, according to researchers, is due mainly to rent-seeking, the ability to manipulate regulations to create monopolies.
News 4 San Antonio October 7, 2022 -
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Oct. 5, 2022) — CEO pay, including stock awards and options, is up 11.1% since 2020 and 1,460% since 1978, a new EPI analysis finds. This increase was not matched by increased pay for typical workers: The ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker pay soared to 399-to-1 under EPI’s realized measure of CEO pay, the highest ratio on record, up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a massive increase from 59-to-1 in 1989.
*RE-POSTED FULL PRESS RELEASE
The Stand October 7, 2022 -
The teacher shortage problem has been going on for 50 years. Why are so few entering the profession?
Average weekly wages for public schoolteachers have been stagnant for years, according to Economic Policy Institute analysis from this summer.
And it’s only gotten worse. Since the 1990s, what’s called the teacher pay penalty has been on a worsening trajectory, the Economic Policy Institute wrote. The penalty shows how much less teachers earn compared to those with college degrees. If, in comparison, teachers are earning more, it’s called the teacher pay premium.
By 2021, the pay penalty hit historic levels.
Male teachers, though, have always faced a pay penalty compared with their nonteaching counterparts. “The large wage penalty that men face in the teaching profession goes a long way toward explaining why the gender makeup of the profession has not changed much over the past few decades,” the EPI wrote.
Teachers often receive a larger share of their compensation as benefits, compared with other professions. But even when accounting for benefits, teachers still see a 14.2 percent penalty.
Grid News October 7, 2022 -
CEO pay continues to spike, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. In 2021, the average CEO earned $27.8 million.
A report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, found CEO pay was “exorbitant,” continuing a decades-long upward trend that has widened the income gap between the top 1% of the population and the bottom 90%. The authors, who looked at America’s 350 largest publicly owned companies, recommend policies that could discourage CEOs from seeking excessive pay, helping to redistribute wealth back to average employees.
In 2021, the average CEO earned $27.8 million, a figure that has increased 1,460% since 1978. (The EPI’s measurements are based on salary, bonuses, and stock benefits—importantly, the value of those stocks when cashed in, not when they were first granted.) But workers’ earnings did not trend similarly: CEOs made 399 times more than an average worker, up from 366 times in 2020 and 30 times in 1978.
The most glaring example of how stock rewards result in inordinate pay is Elon Musk, the richest CEO in the U.S., who exercised $23.5 billion of stock options in 2021. Because this represented an incomparable “extreme outlier,” the EPI chose to exclude Musk from the report (as it did with Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, after Facebook’s IPO). The authors admit that some stock options can make sense because they incentivize CEOs to make business decisions that generate shareholder returns. “But,” they wrote, “is it really necessary to give a CEO options on 16 million shares of stock to achieve this goal?”
Fast Company October 7, 2022 -
The most glaring example of how stock rewards result in inordinate pay is Elon Musk, the richest CEO in the U.S., who exercised $23.5 billion of stock options in 2021. Because this represented an incomparable “extreme outlier,” the EPI chose to exclude Musk from the report (as it did with Mark Zuckerberg in 2013, after Facebook’s IPO). The authors admit that some stock options can make sense because they incentivize CEOs to make business decisions that generate shareholder returns. “But,” they wrote, “is it really necessary to give a CEO options on 16 million shares of stock to achieve this goal?”
The Street October 7, 2022 -
While workers’ wages have stagnated in comparison to productivity over the past four decades, CEO pay in the U.S. has skyrocketed at a rate far outpacing the growth of the economy and productivity, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds.
According to research released by EPI on Tuesday, CEO pay has skyrocketed by a staggering 1,460 percent since 1978. This has far outpaced the growth of the economy and even the pay of the top 0.1 percent, EPI finds, with the S&P stock market growing by 1,063 percent in the same time and the earnings of the top 0.1 percent growing 385 percent between 1978 and 2020.
By contrast, worker pay has remained relatively unchanged since 1978, rising by a mere 18.1 percent over the past 43 years, EPI finds. As a result, the gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has grown significantly. While CEOs at the top 350 U.S. firms had an estimated average pay of $27.8 million in 2021, the average worker at the same firms made $70,400, the report shows. This is a ratio of about 400 to 1 in 2021 — itself a major multiplication of 1965’s ratio of 20 to 1 and 1978’s ratio of about 30 to 1.
EPI’s data doesn’t even include the pay of CEO Elon Musk, who has been one of the pandemic’s biggest winners. Researchers specifically chose to exclude Musk and Tesla from their analysis because, if his realized salary, including stock sales, had been included, his pay would have been almost 1,000 times that of the average CEO of a large company. This would have boosted the average CEO pay increase between 2020 and 2021 by over 300 percent.
As EPI notes, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy,” EPI economists Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra write. “CEOs are getting ever-higher pay over time because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80 percent) is stock-related. They are not getting higher pay because they are becoming more productive or more skilled than other workers, or because of a shortage of excellent CEO candidates.”
EPI recommends that Congress implement policies to reign in CEO wealth, like setting a higher corporate tax rate for corporations with large CEO pay ratios and setting higher marginal tax rates for the richest Americans.
Truthout October 7, 2022