“Throughout 2021, strikes provided workers critical leverage to bargain over fair pay, safe working conditions, and a share of the pandemic recovery,” the Economic Policy Institute said in a blog post.
Forbes
September 16, 2022
According to numbers from the state Department of Revenue, a tiny portion of Massachusetts households — 0.6% — made incomes over $1 million in 2019. Some 90% those households were white. The Economic Policy Institute has ranked Massachusetts as the sixth worst state in the country for income inequality.
WBUR
September 16, 2022
International comparisons of inflation rates are notoriously difficult to make, and even when one manages to compare the numbers, the environments are different. For instance, when new cars became more difficult to find, Americans were harder hit because we use cars more and spend more on them than Europeans do. Looking beyond the energy and food price increases caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States has a core inflation rate of 5.9 percent over the past 12 months. The rate is 5.4 percent in Canada and 5.5 percent in the United Kingdom. Across the G7 nations, the rate is 4.8 percent, and across Europe it’s 6.8 percent. “Rising inflation is a global problem,” according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Nation
September 16, 2022
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute details a number of positive reforms from the Biden administration, often below-the-radar, but including strong, high-profile appointments to the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court. Incidentally, these appointments reflect a serious commitment to anti-racism. Relatedly, if we consider the well-being of immigrants in an anti-racist, labor framework, the reversal of some of the most xenophobic Trump policies is also noteworthy. When it comes to the PRO Act, Biden has been vocal in his support for the omnibus labor legislation but, again, resistance from certain Democratic senators has stymied its passage in Congress.
In These Times
September 16, 2022
If there is any consolation for workers, it is that jobs remain plentiful, said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“If workers were facing it [inflation] with higher unemployment … people would have fallen even further behind,” he said, adding that the impact of higher prices on Americans’ standard of living is indisputable.
“Inflation has reduced people’s purchasing power. There’s no two ways about it.”
NBC News
September 16, 2022
Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that changed. At least for workers at the bottom and in the middle, said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Instead, we’ve seen wages at the top rise, we’ve seen a declining value of the minimum wage, we’ve seen measures implemented that make it harder for workers to form a union,” Gould said.
Marketplace
September 16, 2022
According to Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, providing a pathway to citizenship for immigrant workers who are already in our labor market would mutually benefit both our economy and the undocumented workers themselves. These workers often face horrific working conditions
Salon
September 16, 2022
1. DOWN: Inflation-adjusted wages and salaries. Although wages are up, prices are rising faster. Between August 2021 to August 2022. While private-sector workers’ earnings rose by 4.6%, inflation shot up by 8%. In 12 of 13 sectors I studied, workers’ raises failed to keep up with price increases (the exception was mining; not even construction and leisure and hospitality kept pace with inflation). It is not plausible that worker bargaining power is causing price increases. Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, argues, “labor costs are dampening—not amplifying—price pressures.” In other words, workers’ rising wages have alleviated rather than exacerbated inflation.
Here’s a little more context: since 1979, U.S. wages adjusted for inflation have stagnated compared to the rest of the G7 nations, as well as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. There has also been meager improvement for American workers in other measures such as total compensation and working conditions. The increasing automation of tasks may lead to new kinds of stress and injuries, research suggests. The Economic Policy Institute has dubbed employers’ ability to intensify the working hour and day without increasing pay as “quiet fleecing.”
4. DOWN: Wages are not keeping pace with worker productivity. Since the Economic Policy Institute published the famous alligator graph in the 1980s, with the wide jaws of productivity going up and wages going down, workers have been giving more to the economy than they have been getting. This is the “quiet fleecing” mentioned above.
Forbes
September 16, 2022
It takes unions an average of 409 days to negotiate a contract, according to a study conducted by Bloomberg Law. And just under half of newly formed unions reach a contract before the one year decertification deadline, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute. PAYWALL
Fortune
September 16, 2022
Not surprisingly, surging prices have hit lower-paid workers especially hard. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 buys less today than it has at any point over the past 66 years, an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows. The current value of the minimum wage in real dollars is at its lowest level since February 1956, when the lowest U.S. wage was 75 cents — the equivalent of $7.19 in June 2022 dollars.
CBS
September 16, 2022