“There are a lot of people like Janelle in Washington who have technical skills and policy experience, but there are very few who have the kind of vision that she has and an amazing ability for framing,” said John Schmitt, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. “She’ll walk into a situation and immediately see what the core issue is.”
Bloomberg
March 1, 2021
There is lag in the reporting of those numbers, but drops in one program may reflect movement into a different program, rather than a return to the work force, said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and the director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
New York Times
March 1, 2021
Costco announced last week it would raise minimum wage for US workers to $16 an hour. There are many misconceptions about minimum wage, who actually benefits from it. The Economic Policy Institute lays it out like this, many people think we’d be bettering the lives of teenagers who work part time after school who want extra spending money. That’s not the reality. The people who would benefit from $15 an hour are, on average, 35 years old, 59% are women, 28% of them have children, 54% of them work full time, and the majority are essential and frontline workers.
MSNBC
March 1, 2021
I think it will pass if it doesn’t have it in it, but that’s a big loss for the country because if you raise the minimum wage as we’ve proposed and as the overwhelming majority of Americans support you are giving a raise to 32 million people, according to the Economic Policy Institute and you’re also helping directly the lives of children.
MSNBC
March 1, 2021
Cites productivity-pay chart.
New York Magazine
March 1, 2021
“The proposals to use the tax system aren’t anybody’s first choice for doing some kind of effective wage increase for low-wage workers,” said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that’s backed boosting the wage floor to $15 per hour.
Bloomberg Tax
March 1, 2021
The measure would have given a pay raise to some 32 million workers, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
The Balance
March 1, 2021
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., dismissed the $10 proposal as “legislated poverty.” The Economic Policy Institute estimated the Romney-Cotton plan would only benefit 3.2% of the workforce, compared to more than 20% of workers who would see a raise if the federal minimum wage is increased to $15 per hour.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
March 1, 2021
Heidi Shierholz
Economic Policy Institute
Senior Economist and Director of Policy
Washingtonian Magazine
February 26, 2021
Wage theft isn’t one of the crimes most prosecutors and politicians refer to when they talk about getting ‘tough on crime,’ but it represents a massive portion of all theft committed in the country, according to a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
NJ Today
February 26, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute reports that an estimated 146,000 workers would receive wage increases if a $15 per hour minimum wage is passed by Congress and signed into law. Of those 146,000 workers, 80,000 are women and 66,000 are Black. 12th District workers benefiting from the legislation would see an average annual wage increase of 18% or approximately $4,200 in 2020 dollars.
Rep. Alma Adams
February 26, 2021
The Center for Economic and Policy Research notes that the wage gap between white and Black workers is narrower among postal workers than among private sector employees. The Economic Policy Institute has found that Black workers’ share of USPS jobs is significantly higher than their share of all public sector jobs.
Inequality.org
February 26, 2021
The findings in this column are based on CAP’s analysis of 2020 Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotational Groups (CPS-ORG) data extracts made publicly available by the Economic Policy Institute. The analysis includes workers ages 16 and older who were in the labor force and employed and were not self-employed.
Center for American Progress
February 26, 2021
An analysis from the Economic Policy Institute called the report’s predicted impacts to job losses “just wrong and inappropriately inflated relative to what cutting-edge economics literature would indicate”.
The Independent
February 26, 2021
More than 1.3 million workers are subject to the tipped minimum wage, which allows employers to pay below minimum wage under the assumption that tips will bring up the total hourly pay, and make up the difference with a “tip credit.” The proposal attracted considerable attention in 2018 during a vicious battle in Washington, D.C., over Initiative 77, a ballot measure that repealed the tip credit only to later be reversed by the D.C. Council. Organizations such as the National Restaurant Association and Restaurant Workers of America, which launched an impressive astroturf campaign in the Initiative 77 fight, have been vocal opponents of a tipped wage repeal. Proponents of the tipped minimum wage argue that a repeal would be damaging to the restaurant industry, resulting in job losses, increased prices, or even closures. But analysis by the Economic Policy Institute does not support these claims and One Fair Wage notes that in states lacking a tipped minimum wage, the restaurant industry is actually experiencing growth.
In These Times
February 26, 2021
David Cooper, “Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers,” Economic Policy Institute, February 5, 2019, available at https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2024-would-lift-pay-for-nearly-40-million-workers/. ↩
Center for American Progress
February 26, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute reported that the minimum wage, if adjusted for inflation, should have exceeded $15 by 2020.
“Yet since the late 1960s, lawmakers have let the value of the minimum wage erode, allowing inflation to gradually reduce the buying power of a minimum wage income,” according to a 2019 report.
The Independent
February 26, 2021
The Post and Courier
February 26, 2021
FEATURING MONIQUE MORRISSEY – US Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, known for his allegiance to Donald Trump, faced a House Oversight committee hearing this week where he said he intended to remain his position until kicked out. He told lawmakers, “get used to me.”
Rising Up with Sonali
February 26, 2021
The letter was spearheaded by the American Economic Liberties Project, a non-profit focused on anti-monopoly policies, and People’s Action, a network of community groups. Other progressive groups that signed on include the Working Families Party, Public Citizen, the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project.
Huffington Post
February 26, 2021
Citing his own research and studies from the Economic Policy Institute, Reich testified to Congress in 2019 that the $15 an hour wage would positively affect 32 million American workers. Also, he notes that while opponents claim that restaurants will have to raise prices and thus lose business, research shows that sales don’t drop. “This finding is based on a study of 27 metropolitan areas by two researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston and an MIT economist,” he says.
Truthout
February 26, 2021
A national minimum wage of $15 would mean around one in five Americans earns more, the Economic Policy Institute found. It could also help reduce income equality, its research found, with women, minorities, and frontline workers benefiting the most.
Business Insider
February 26, 2021
Romney and Cotton’s plan would only raise wages for around 3 percent of American workers, compared to 21.2 percent of workers under the Democratic proposal, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsweek
February 26, 2021
“We’ve lost 10 million jobs in the COVID-19 recession,” Robert E. Scott, senior economist at Economic Policy Institute, said. “We need to make those jobs up.”
Newsy
February 26, 2021
The letter was spearheaded by the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly nonprofit, and People’s Action, a network of community organizations. The coalition included several advocacy groups, such as Public Citizen; think tanks, such as the Economic Policy Institute; as well as organized labor stalwarts like Unite Here, a union of 300,000 service workers; the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents 50,000 airline workers; and additional progressive groups.
Common Dreams
February 26, 2021
According to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute think tank, the Romney-Cotton plan would leave 27 million fewer American workers with a pay increase in comparison to Democrats’ proposal—with 11 million fewer Black and Hispanic workers and 16 million fewer women benefiting from the GOP plan. What’s more, it would continue the trend that has seen the federal minimum wage steadily decline in recent decades when adjusted for inflation, according to the think tank.
“Romney-Cotton’s $10 target by 2025 is the equivalent of $9.19 per hour in today’s dollars, about 13% less than what the minimum wage was at its high-water mark in 1968,” the EPI’s Ben Zipperer and Daniel Costa wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “It is unconscionable that we should pay the lowest-wage workers today less than what they earned five decades ago, while the economy’s productivity has more than doubled over the last 50 years.”
Fortune
February 26, 2021
David Cooper, “Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would lift pay for nearly 40 million workers,” Economic Policy Institute, February 5, 2019, available at https://www.epi.org/publication/raising-the-federal-minimum-wage-to-15-by-2024-would-lift-pay-for-nearly-40-million-workers/. ↩
Center for American Progress
February 26, 2021