Black men, for instance, are paid just $0.71 for every dollar paid to white men, the Economic Policy Institute reported in 2020.
Business Insider
December 23, 2021
In a free market economy, governments can be lobbied or influenced to set, or not set, regulations and rules. For example, the federal government, through its inaction on the federal minimum wage law, in part, has traditionally created a lack of mobility for employees on the lower end of the labor market. Unwittingly, now, that inaction on the federal minimum wage is creating mobility for employees working at or around the minimum wage. Throughout history, Congress has raised the minimum wage only 22 times. The current level, at $7.25 an hour, was set in 2009 and has not kept up with real economic growth (as noted by the Economic Policy Institute).
Forbes
December 23, 2021
“The quits are people who are quitting their job to take another job,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank and a former Labor Department economist in the Obama administration, told Nightly.
Politico
December 23, 2021
The problem is, historically it’s not clear that there has been a labor shortage in tech. Skeptics point to the fact that median wages in the sector haven’t increased everywhere in the country, or all that dramatically. “What happens when there’s something in short supply?” said Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University and research associate with the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “You have a price mechanism. In this case, it would be wages. So, anything in shortage you’d see wages going through the roof.” The fact that there haven’t been dramatic wage spikes, he says, suggests that claims of labor shortages in the U.S. are overblown.
Politico
December 23, 2021
Recent research from the Economic Policy Institute shows farm workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. workforce, earning $14.62 per hour on average in 2020, which is just 60% — or three-fifths — of what production and non-supervisory, non-farm workers earned at $24.67.
Daily News
December 23, 2021
“Unions promote economic equality and build worker power, helping workers to win increases in pay, better benefits, and safer working conditions,” said Asha Banerjee, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and co-author of the report. “But the benefits of unions extend far beyond the workplace. The data suggest that unions also give workers a voice in shaping their communities and political representation.”
Common Dreams
December 22, 2021
Robber barons become rich through ruthless and unscrupulous business practices. Members of both political parties have served and continue to serve their interests. In 2019, the Economic Policy Institute reported “CEO compensation had grown 940% since 1978 and a typical worker compensation had risen only 12% during that time.” This inequity was made possible by politicians who, in exchange for corporate money to fund their campaigns and line their pockets, disemboweled the federal and state tax laws, as well as environmental regulations, etc.
The Herald Times
December 22, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, estimates that a four-person household had to earn $97,547 a year to live in the San Diego/Carlsbad metro area in 2017. Under that same scenario, both parents would need to make $28.30 an hour, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.
Voice of San Diego
December 22, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in the United States between 1978 and 2018, CEO compensation grew by 940 per cent, while the wages of a typical worker grew by only 12 per cent.
Prince George Citizen
December 22, 2021
A study issued Dec. 9 by the Economic Policy Institute shows that even in the tech sector, immigrants are paid less than their U.S. counterparts, though federal law says that’s not supposed to happen.
Crux
December 22, 2021
Shutdowns, for example, pushed people toward spending on goods instead of services, according to Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute.
Marketplace
December 22, 2021
As of November, 15.6 million workers in the US are still being affected by the pandemic’s economic downturn; 3.9 million US workers are out of the labor force due to Covid-19, 6.9 million workers are still unemployed, 2 million workers are still experiencing cuts to pays or work schedules due to Covid-19, and another 3 million workers are misclassified as employed or out of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian
December 22, 2021
Internal documents on worker wages at outsourcer HCL Technologies, a leading provider of IT contract workers, are central to the allegations in the report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, based on documents obtained via a federal government whistleblower lawsuit against HCL in a federal court in Connecticut.
The Mercury News
December 22, 2021
“That drop in unemployment is in part because people are getting jobs, but also in part because people are leaving the labor force,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute told the nonprofit news website The19th.
BET
December 22, 2021
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) distinguished fellow Lawrence Mishel—the group’s former president—and research assistant Jori Kandra looked at the Social Security Administration’s newly available wage data for 1979 to 2020.
Common Dreams
December 22, 2021
A quick glance at the workshop’s speakers and agenda makes clear that the current FTC and DOJ appear to favor labor as a political interest group over the efficient functioning of labor markets free of anti-competitive restraints. There was discussion around the “problem” of employer power in the absence of market concentration (in universities of all places!), the need for collective bargaining rights for gig workers, and why restraints on worker mobility were bad. The speakers included the Assistant Secretary of Treasury discussing wage stagnation, the Assistant Secretary of Labor discussing worker protections, and the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor union think tank. One entire session was devoted to hearing from the representatives of labor unions.
JD Supra
December 22, 2021
Teachers in South Dakota also spend an average of $349 of their own money on classroom supplies, the Economic Policy Institute found, while the Education Law Center said per-pupil funding came out to $13,847, the 33rd-worst rate in the country and low enough to earn a “D” grade from the center. (The Education Law Center did give South Dakota credit for spreading funding relatively evenly across districts, however.)
Bring Me The News
December 22, 2021
And if the share going to profits is rising, the share going to some other economic components must be falling. Earlier this week, Larry Mishel and Jori Kandra of the Economic Policy Institute published a report on the distribution of wages that noted yet another record set. In 2020, the report concluded, the wages of the bottom 90 percent of wage earners constituted the lowest share of all wages paid in a single year since the government began charting such things in 1937. The bottom 90 percent earned just 60.2 percent of all wage income last year. To be sure, this reflected the pattern of who got laid off and who didn’t in the course of the pandemic, but it also marked the continuation of a long-term trend. Since 1979, the report documents, the wages of the top 1 percent rose by 179 percent (and those of the top 0.1 percent by 389 percent!), while those of the bottom 90 percent crept along with a 28 percent increase.
The American Prospect
December 22, 2021
HCL Technologies paid lower wages to H-1B visa workers compared to similarly employed US workers in the past few years, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Decan Herald
December 22, 2021
An outsourcing loophole in the H-1B visa program has allowed tech companies to get away with underpaying their migrant workers by millions of dollars, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. While the report focuses on the workers under the IT staffing firm HCL Technologies, the tactic of outsourcing labor to migrant workers and paying them less compared to their U.S. born counterparts to save money is all too common, the report claims. We’ll talk with the study’s co-author.
KQED
December 22, 2021
Recent research from the Economic Policy Institute shows farm workers are among the lowest paid workers in the U.S. workforce.
HudsonValley360
December 22, 2021
Noida-based IT services firm HCL Technologies Ltd has been evading H1-B visa rules in the US, according to a report by Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Mint
December 22, 2021
In addition, all workers toil in settings where occupational safety and health laws are inadequate. As the Economic Policy Institute shows, workers do not have a meaningful right to turn down dangerous assignments or protect themselves from hazards due to power imbalances in the workplace. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lacks the resources and authority to properly enforce laws and promulgate sufficient standards. Even with those constraints, there was a troubling history at Mayfield Consumer Products with 12 health and safety violations issued just in 2019.
Daily Independent
December 22, 2021
Researchers with the the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said last month that, at that time, at least 16 states had together devoted about $15.7 billion of American Rescue Plan Act funding for their unemployment insurance trust funds and that this came after 23 states used pandemic aid from the earlier CARES Act for the funds.
Route Fifty
December 22, 2021
In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of Parsing Immigration Policy, discusses a new report from the Economic Policy Institute that describes how one of the big Indian tech staffing firms cheated its own Indian H-1B employees by an estimated $95 million. Far from being an abuse of the system, Krikorian pointed out that the H-1B visa is designed to exploit foreign workers and undercut American workers.
Center for Immigration Studies
December 22, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute says the documents shoe HCL systematically underpays its workers as a business strategy (paywall).
Law360
December 22, 2021
A report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows the top 0.1% got the biggest raise in 2020.
Business Insider
December 22, 2021
Real disposable income is “resources that households have after the tax and transfers systems come into play,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “It’s a not-terrible bottom-line measure of how people are doing on average.”
The Hill
December 22, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., the cost of living for a two-parent, two-child family in Mecklenburg County, NC is $92,400 per year.
WCNC Charlotte
December 22, 2021