Perkins Project

EPI’s 2017 Perkins Project on Worker Rights and Wages was a policy response team tracking the wage and employment policies coming out of the White House, Congress, and the courts during the first year of the first Trump administration. This watchdog unit of economists and lawyers kept an especially close eye on the federal agencies that establish and defend workers’ rights, wages, and working conditions, including the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The Perkins Project was headed by former Labor Department Chief Economist Heidi Shierholz and was named for Frances Perkins, Labor Secretary under FDR and principal architect of the New Deal labor reforms. Inspired by Perkins’s legacy, the Perkins Project monitored, analyzed, and publicized attempts to dismantle the laws and regulations that protect worker rights and wages. Perkins Project reporting armed activists, journalists, lawmakers, and lawyers with the facts they needed to fight for working people.

For the second Trump administration, EPI is standing up an even more robust Federal Policy Watch initiative to alert, inform, and arm legislators, journalists, activists, and workers with facts needed to defend workers’ rights and quality of life.

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