Media clips
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“In terms of things that would lower prices on store shelves, it’s pretty tough to act that quickly,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Philadelphia Inquirer October 21, 2022 -
A third element was a long-overdue ideological shift in the Democratic Party, especially its presidential wing. Before Biden, economic advisers to Democratic presidents were free-traders, counseling that the nature and location of production was the proper business of the market, not the state. With Biden, voices long in the wilderness on industrial targeting, such as the labor movement, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute, have had the heady experience of actually influencing and making policy.
American Prospect October 21, 2022 -
Bottom line: Employers Could Be Quitting On Workers
There is a truth behind the idea of “quiet quitting,” but the truth is that employers are quitting on workers. The evidence points in the direction of workers feeling increased pressure and working too much instead of too little. The Economic Policy Institute has argued that “quiet fleecing” would be a better term.
Forbes October 21, 2022 -
According to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, Colorado teachers earn almost 36% less than other workers with college degrees, the widest such gap in the nation and a full 3 percentage points worse than the next closest state, Virgina. How would you help the state change this and boost salaries for Colorado educators?: Not all teachers work the same hours. According to the World Economic Forum, U.S. teachers spend 998 hours in the classroom per year. Teachers’ prep time and homework from students vary but add more hours. Teachers who work longer hours and produce better results should be rewarded. But the educational system is a monopoly and does not allow this flexibility. More solutions than this one-size-fits-all for rewarding teachers are needed. There is also disparity among teachers and other professions. Degrees in the (science, technology, engineering and math) area considered more rigorous than education degrees. Many times, teachers are teaching subjects they are not even trained to teach. Teachers are also told what to teach and how to teach it; this is vocational at best — becoming technicians rather than professionals. Our teachers should be given the autonomy to use their ingenuity to challenge all students to think, create, innovate. Change is needed in the Colorado public school system.
Daily Camera October 21, 2022 -
As the country deals with inflation and a looming recession, the economy is top of mind for Americans in the 2022 midterm elections. However, when researching candidates, it’s important to remember that policy makers did not cause inflation. Inflation was caused by global and public health issues, like supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19, port shutdowns, a shift of spending from services to goods, and the war in Ukraine. Knowing this, Economic Policy Institute(opens in new tab) President Heidi Shierholz advises voters to elect candidates based on their willingness to boost living standards and eliminate inequalities, which directly impacts the economy.
“[Elected] policy makers don’t have the ability to really affect inflation. They do have the ability to pass policies that ameliorate the harms of high inflation for the people who are hardest hit,” she says. “So things like raising the minimum wage, the expansions of the child tax credit which were in the relief and recovery packages(opens in new tab). Those are the kinds of things that policy makers can do for the people who are getting hit hardest by inflation until inflation comes down. And it is.”
Additionally, union organizing is at its highest point of approval since 1965(opens in new tab). State and local governments, not just the federal government, have the ability to build worker power(opens in new tab) (the Economic Policy Institute has outlined some of the ways(opens in new tab) they can do so). That starts with electing leaders in the midterms who can enact these policies.
Marie Claire October 21, 2022 -
In July 2021 President Joe Biden issued an executive order promoting competition in the economy that encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to impose a national ban or limit on noncompete agreements. The FTC held a workshop on noncompetes the following year. It isn’t clear how any FTC-imposed ban would be enforced. California has a law barring enforcement of noncompete agreements, but a 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that 45 percent of the state’s businesses maintained them anyway. Lower-wage workers are easy to intimidate even when the law isn’t on management’s side. Another problem is that an FTC ban would face a likely legal challenge from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the agency lacks jurisdiction over the matter. “Non-competes have a legitimate place in contract law,” the Chamber’s Sean Heather, senior vice president of anti-trust policy, told The Wall Street Journal in June. Republican FTC commissioner Noah Phillips agrees. But as FTC chair Lina Khan pointed out to the Journal, the rationale for noncompetes “really falls apart” when they’re imposed on low-wage workers.
New Republic October 21, 2022 -
Older households are more likely to be indebted than they were three decades ago and a typical older household held roughly three times as much debt in 2016 as it did in 1989, adjusted for inflation. The increase in financial fragility is highlighted in the forthcoming Older Workers and Retirement Security Chartbook, a research collaboration between The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Economic Policy Institute funded by the RRF Foundation for Aging.
Forbes October 21, 2022 -
In capitalist societies, it’s a given that corporations are run for elite owners and investors, not the workers who actually create the value and profits. It’s also a given that corporations will try to pay their employees as little as they possibly can. In 2021, CEO compensation packages at the top 350 U.S. corporations averaged $27.8 million annually, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, CEOs earned 399 times as much as the average worker. In 1965, CEOs by contrast earned only 20 times the average worker compensation. But it’s actually worse for many. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the 300 largest corporations paying the lowest median wages in 2020 had a CEO to worker pay gap of 670 to 1!
CityWatch LA October 21, 2022 -
But Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that inflation has been ubiquitous “across every advanced economy” since the pandemic began and he didn’t believe the American Rescue Plan was a major contributor to inflation. An analysis published in August by Bivens, Asha Banerjee, and Mariia Dzholos examined the United States’ core inflation from December 2020 to May 2022 and compared it to core inflation in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. To calculate the rate of acceleration in each country, the researchers took the difference between the “post-pandemic” core inflation and the “pre-pandemic” core inflation using data from 2018 and 2019.
Bivens also pointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s research on housing inflation and said that price gains in the United States were mostly driven by pandemic-related events that would have occurred without the stimulus — like supply chain disruptions and increased demand for housing. And although he said he believed the American Rescue Plan had inflationary impacts, the trade-off was necessary to stave off higher unemployment numbers.
“We could have kept inflation much lower in the US if we had raised interest rates through the roof beginning in early 2021 and hadn’t done the stimulus package,” Bivens said. “But there would be a huge cost to that. We’d be looking at a very different labor market with much higher unemployment.”
VOX October 21, 2022 -
A recent special issue of The Journal of Law and Political Economy casts a jaundiced eye on the convenient fiction that employment contracts reflect the free choices of employees. The issue was conceived and edited by Lawrence Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute.
“This is Econ 101 silliness, that any transaction between consenting adults is optimal,” Mishel said. “The basis of at-will employment is that if a worker can quit then an employer has to be able to quit a worker. That’s the logic. If you articulate it like that, people would be something between horrified and laughing.”
The main power workers do have is the threat to quit. But, Mishel wrote in his introduction to the special issue, “The death on the job of eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six in an Amazon warehouse when tornadoes struck the Midwest in December 2021 vividly illustrates the ineffectiveness of quitting, either as a constraint on employer exploitation or as a protection of basic worker freedoms.” (The final death toll in the Kentucky factory was nine.)
New York Times October 21, 2022