In a Tuesday webinar on “Organizing, Collective Action, and the National Labor Relations Board” hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo shared her perspective on the current state of American labor law.
Alabama Political Reporter
June 17, 2024
But if the solution is expanding legal pathways to working in the U.S., how would that work? Daniel Costa, who studies immigration policy at the Economic Policy Institute, has one proposal.
DANIEL COSTA: EPI has proposed for years having a commission on immigration in the labor market that studies the health of the economy and makes recommendations about where the level should be. I think it’s a really common-sense idea that would take into account that pull factor that we’re talking about.
MA: Yeah. And, in fact, there’s already something we have like this for trade. The U.S. International Trade Commission is this bipartisan body that helps shape trade policy based on economic conditions.
WONG: But Daniel also adds a note of caution. If expanding legal pathways means expanding temporary work visas, that program has its own problems for the workers who are granted those visas.
COSTA: They come with visas that are essentially owned and controlled by employers who control their immigration status. And so, in practice, they don’t have a lot of rights.
NPR Planet Money
June 17, 2024
Studies show that gender price discrimination can cost women in practical, physical, and financial ways. Data from the Economic Policy Institute show that women still make about twenty percent less on the dollar than men.
Kiplinger
June 17, 2024
Twenty-two states increased their minimum wage this year, which is especially pertinent to an industry that employs high numbers of minimum- and low-wage workers, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis.
Stacker
June 17, 2024
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Wage Tracker, 92 percent of Dollar General workers earn less than $15/hour.
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
June 17, 2024
We know about the theory of “greedflation” exhibited by corporations since the COVID pandemic. Corporate profiteering was responsible for more than half of the increase in prices between 2020 and 2021, per the Economic Policy Institute.
The American Prospect
June 17, 2024
Perhaps no single chart has been as influential in the American discourse over the past decade as the “productivity vs. pay” graph. There are many versions of this graph floating around, but I’m going to use the versions published by the Economic Policy Institute. Here is probably the most famous version of the chart — the version that most of us used when we debated the issue back in the late 2010s: [paywall].
Noah Smith's blog
June 14, 2024
By either calculation, of course, contemporary U.S. CEOs are making fantastically more than their CEO counterparts back in the middle of the 20th century. In the 1960s, the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out, chief execs at major U.S. corporations seldom pocketed much more than 20 times the pay that went to their workers. Since then, the CEO-worker pay gap has quadrupled — and then quadrupled again.
Inequality.org
June 14, 2024
Historically disadvantaged groups are disproportionately employed in low-wage jobs. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis of wage and census data, real wages – that is, adjusted for inflation – among low-income workers were 12% percent higher in 2023 than they were in 2019.
Nevada Current
June 10, 2024
The Labor Department estimates the reform would transfer $1.5 billion a year from employers to employees in the form of higher wages. The benefits would go disproportionately to workers who are women and people of color, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
Huffpost
June 10, 2024
Women and people of color are disproportionately represented in certain restaurant roles. For example, Hispanic people are more likely to be staffed as dishwashers or cooks, according to an Economic Policy Institute report.
Grist
June 10, 2024
“While top management often shows great interest in keeping down other costs for the company, it has no interest in keeping down its own pay. If the firm’s directors are not actively working to limit CEO pay, then no one is,” economist and CEO pay expert Dean Baker wrote in a research paper published by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
Yahoo Finance
June 10, 2024
And a new blog from a think tank that often backs higher wages and union causes last week criticized the nursing home sector’s continued insistence that more direct care staff is not readily available.
Monique Morrissey, senior economist for The Economic Policy Institute said her organizations were pushing back “against unfounded industry claims of a worker shortage that would prevent nursing homes from meeting the new standard.”
“The nursing home industry has attempted to equate a staffing decline with a worker shortage,” she wrote. “But this decline mirrored a decline in occupancy, and, if anything, suggests that there’s a pool of sidelined workers who could be lured back if pay and working conditions improved. This is true in both urban and rural areas. …
McKnight’s Senior Living
June 10, 2024
Connecticut pulled ahead of Massachusetts, where the minimum wage hit $15 in 2023 and has not increased since. Connecticut now boasts the fourth highest minimum wage in the United States, behind California ($16), Washington ($16.28) and Washington, D.C., ($17), according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Connecticut Public Radio
June 10, 2024
Pro-union scholars and attorneys see Lion Elastomers and Atlantic Steel as a step toward protecting employees’ free speech in the workplace. Charlotte Garden, a labor law professor at the University of Minnesota, wrote in a 2022 report for the Economic Policy Institute that the issue “illustrates how employers can weaponize workplace civility rules when they create upsetting situations and then punish workers for becoming upset.”
Bloomberg Law
June 10, 2024
“We obviously need to watch out for what’s happening with historically marginalized groups to make sure that the recovery gets experienced,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
But Gould isn’t particularly worried about the uptick in jobless rates for certain demographics just yet. “We’re not seeing any real divergence from trends there,” she added.
CNBC
June 10, 2024
Instead, the opposite happened. A recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute found that from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, the lowest-paid decile of workers saw their wages rise four times faster than middle-class workers and more than 10 times faster than the richest decile. A recent working paper by Dube and two co-authors reached similar conclusions.
The Atlantic
June 10, 2024
by one estimate from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), 4.3 million salaried employees are now poised to receive pay for exceeding normal work times — long hours during which they previously would have labored, effectively, for free.
Truthout
June 10, 2024
The weakness in the household survey could be due to the more volatile employment readings among young adults, Economic Policy Institute economist Elise Gould noted, a reading she described as “likely a blip” associated with summer seasonal factor adjustments.
The Hill
June 10, 2024
The U.S. unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%, marking 30 straight months of near-record low unemployment, noted the center-left Economic Policy Institute.
“This labor market just keeps cranking out huge numbers of jobs. We’ve added almost a million jobs in the last 4 months alone, and the unemployment rate has been at 4% or less for TWO AND A HALF YEARS,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the center-left Economic Policy Institute, posted on X. “It really is incredible.”
Salon.com
June 10, 2024
For those who care about inequality and fairness, wage trends of the last several years have been strong for lower-wage workers. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has documented that “real wages” (adjusted for inflation) “of low-wage workers grew 12.1% between 2019 and 2023.”
Forbes
June 10, 2024
I’m building this newsletter on the following two charts, which appear to contradict each another. The first, from the center-left Economic Policy Institute, shows a huge gap opening between pay growth and productivity growth. The second, from the center-right American Enterprise Institute, shows no such gap.
…
Bivens responded by email when I asked him for his reaction. He wrote, “We’d readily concede” that the gap between pay and productivity is “much, much smaller” when looking at averages, which by definition include the people at the top. He added: “But that’s kind of our whole point — rising inequality within wage income means that the average of this wage income will rise far faster than wage incomes for the vast majority.”
He claimed that Winship has not proved that the higher pay going to people at the top is closely connected to their higher productivity.
He wrote that he stands by including housing services in his measure of output because “housing services matter a lot for how well the economy is or isn’t delivering rising living standards to families.” In any case, he said, they don’t have a big impact on the results.
The New York Times
June 10, 2024
The investments needed for the green transition are “rife with market failures,” says Adam Hersh, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “So if we want to see that change, then we have to have some kind of public intervention.”
Christian Science Monitor
June 10, 2024
The wage gap between top CEOs and typical workers is widening. And Dan Toomey is the LONE MAN capable of informing the public about it. Our guests for this episode are Josh Bivens, Chief Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and Theo Francis, Special Writer at The Wall Street Journal covering executive compensation
Good Work with Dan Toomey
June 10, 2024
As economists assess the latest jobs report, they’re highlighting how its survey of households wasn’t so great.
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, has offered some thoughts about what’s going on.
“The weakness in the household survey appears to be driven by the more volatile young adult series, likely a blip and could be due to an odd seasonal factor at the start of summer. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t rebound next month,” she said in social-media posts, which are shown below
MarketWatch
June 10, 2024
…CEO pay and that of the typical employee. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO pay has increased by 1,460% in the last 50…[paywall].
Forbes
June 10, 2024
The Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District is getting ready to host a public “drive a bus event” in June.
The event is an effort to bring in new school bus drivers. According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, the national number of school bus drivers has gone down 15% since 2019.
WMTV (Wisconsin)
June 10, 2024
By analyzing data from 1953 to 2020, William Chittenden, a finance professor from Texas State University, found that inflation rose 3.35% per year under Democratic presidents and 3.5% under Republican presidents.
A similar study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found much the same. Looking at inflation rates from 1949 to 2024, prices rose 2.91% under Democratic presidents and 3.29% under Republican ones.
Money
June 10, 2024
“In addition, analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows Virginia has the third least competitive teacher pay in the country when compared to other fields that require a similar level of education,” the VEA report read.
dogwood
June 10, 2024