Media clips

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• BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says a return to office will solve inflation. Maybe in a different era he’d be right

  There’s more than meets the eye, though, when it comes to productivity rates, reached by dividing the GDP by the number of hours worked. Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told Fortune back in May that a close look at GDP numbers actually shows “healthy growth.” She said the dip in worker productivity is more due to a decline in inventory and increase in imports.

  Fortune September 16, 2022
• Is Remote Work Contributing to Higher Inflation?

  On the other hand, the Economic Policy Institute says that between 1979 and 2019, while net productivity increased by close to 60%, worker compensation only grew by about 16%. Additionally, wage inflation this year has still not kept pace with the rise in inflation, so perhaps compensation is simply catching up to productivity right now.

  Lincoln Journal Star September 16, 2022
• Analysis Shows ‘Quiet Fleecing’ of US Workers—Not ‘Quiet Quitting’—Is the Real Problem

  “Quiet quitting”—an allegedly new trend characterized by workers performing only their required job duties and no more—has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks, but the defining trend of the past 40 years of U.S. economic history is “quiet fleecing,” and we should be talking much more about it.

  “The reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and not getting paid for it.”

  That’s the argument put forth Friday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank with a long track record of popularizing research on wage suppression and runaway inequality.

  “Everyone’s obsessed with a post-pandemic phenomenon called ‘quiet quitting,’” EPI wrote in an email. “It’s basically defined as workers just doing the basic requirements of their jobs and not going ‘above and beyond.’”

  “But the reality is workers have long been going ‘above and beyond’ and not getting paid for it,” EPI continued. “We’re calling this phenomenon ‘quiet fleecing.’”

  Common Dreams September 16, 2022
• September 16, 2022
  September 16, 2022
• The child poverty rate fell by nearly half in 2021 as enhanced child tax credit sent billions of dollars to families

  “Though there were more jobs in 2022, families were certainly more squeezed by rising prices,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “And so the disappearance of this child tax credit would have hurt more.”

  CNN September 16, 2022
• Worker Power Is Weakening, Indicators Show

  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.

  September 14, 2022
• Most U.S. workers say their pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

  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 14, 2022
• Workers at Amazon, Chipotle, and Starbucks are winning union elections. But it might take years before they see a contract

  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 14, 2022
• These states are raising their minimum wage based on today’s CPI report as inflation remains stubbornly high

  Dave Kamper, a senior state policy coordinator at the Economic Policy Institute, told Fortune that the automatic minimum wage adjustments help low-wage workers in certain states keep up with inflation. 

  “This is what indexing the minimum wage does: It means that the lowest-wage workers don’t have to wait for a legislature to get its act together and raise the minimum wage for them to keep up,” he said. “Prices are up this year, considerably higher than what we’ve been used to for a long time, and low-wage workers are going to suffer from that more than anyone else.” 

  Kamper said the other five states, and D.C., that don’t use August’s CPI report will still see an increase in minimum wage but at various times throughout the year. Also, he said, more states are likely to begin indexing their minimum wage based on inflation because wages are growing slower than prices. 

  “What we’re seeing here is that as prices go up, worker wages are falling behind,” he said. 

  Nonetheless, Kamper thinks it should be a federal policy that the federal minimum wage be tied to inflation. It allows for predictability and stability for workers, and it gives them the ability to keep up with inflation as the costs of goods soar, he said.

  “Indexing the minimum wage means the state’s minimum wage is protected from prevailing changes in the political winds,” Kamper added. 

  Fortune September 14, 2022
• Florida has a problem with minimum wage violations and it could get worse

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, Florida is one of just a handful of states nationwide that lacks a state labor department, which — prior to its abolition — had tracked workforce statistics, housed a hotline for workers to learn about their rights, and had served as a mechanism for enforcing wage and hour laws.

  88.5 WMNF September 14, 2022