“A ton of resources are wasted during a really crucial time … just having to go through this ad hoc stimulus and relief and recovery, and it just doesn’t have to be like that,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department. “We can automate things to make it so Congress could step in if they ever needed to do more relief, but it would mean that the basic structure of relief and recovery would be there already.”
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“Waiting until the very eleventh hour to extend the pandemic unemployment insurance programs, there have been millions of people who saw the lapses in benefits,” Shierholz said. “To lawmakers who have a cushion in their bank accounts and if they don’t get paid for a couple of weeks they’re fine, that is not the case for most people.”
VOX
February 23, 2021
Black workers are more likely than others to be employed in frontline essential jobs, according to a June 2020 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Black Americans make up more than a quarter of public transit workers, nearly 20 percent of child care and social service workers, and 18 percent of trucking, warehouse and postal service workers.
PBS Newshour
February 23, 2021
Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said that $15 in 2025 would be an “appropriate” level since it would put a dent in “poverty wages.”
“There is a kind of a large hole that we’ve dug ourselves in having low minimum wages relative to what workers need,” he told Insider. “And so then I think it does make sense to have some kind of gradual set of increases, because you do want to give time for some businesses to accommodate the higher wage schedule.”
Business Insider
February 22, 2021
According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the wage increase would affect nearly one-third of workers in Hinson’s district. She and other members of the House Budget Committee will review the proposal during a hearing on Monday
Iowa Public Radio
February 22, 2021
To read more about the national teacher shortages
The Economic Policy Institute
The teacher shortage is real, large and growing, and worse than we thought
Virginia Public Media
February 22, 2021
- Counter: “That claim of job loss isn’t supported by evidence — it’s likely an overestimate of negative employment impact. But even if you accept their findings, they still find the benefits far outweigh the costs,” Heidi Shierholz, the Labor Department’s chief economist under Barack Obama, told CBS.
Washington Post
February 22, 2021
Black people also suffer inequities in the labor market. For fifty years now, the unemployment rate of Black people has remained twice the rate of whites. In Washington, D.C., the city where John Thompson and I were born and raised, the jobless rate for Black people was more than six times the rate of whites in 2019. And Black households in 2019 earned just 61 cents on the dollar when compared to white households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Progressive
February 22, 2021
As Insider reported last month, research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute suggests raising the minimum wage would increase income for nearly one in three Black workers. According to the institute, 23% of people who could see a boost in wages would be Black or Latinx women.
Teen Vogue
February 22, 2021
An organizing boom has hit the nonprofit world as workers at numerous legal aid groups, cultural institutions and advocacy organizations ranging from local social service providers to the American Civil Liberties…[paywall].
Law360
February 22, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute estimates raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 “would lift pay for nearly 32 million workers across the country.” According to an EPI study, 32 million workers — or 21% of the workforce — would see a raise if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour. The study also suggests that the increase “would provide an additional $107 billion in wages for the country’s lowest-paid workers,” the average of whom would see an additional $3,300 a year.
Media Matters for America
February 22, 2021
Did low-wage workers lose out in the first period and make gains in the second? Not at all. According to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, wages for the bottom 10th percentile of US workers rose in the late 1990s, and fell during the years from 2010 to 2014.
FAIR
February 22, 2021
We get some background on forced arbitration and why it matters from previous CounterSpin conversations with Celine McNicholas from the Economic Policy Institute and Joanne Doroshow from the Center for Justice and Democracy.
FAIR Counterspin
February 22, 2021
Over 70 percent of federal labor standards investigations of farms found violations, including wage theft and inadequate housing and transportation, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. However, although the agriculture sector accounts for a much higher share of investigations and violations than its share of total U.S. employment, there is a very low chance any farm employer will be investigated.
Currently, a hierarchy exists where legal immigrants suffer higher workplace violations than non-immigrants, but illegal immigrants suffer the highest rates of all, said Daniel Costa, director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute.
“It’s pretty clear that the lack of a legal status leads to the ability for employers to break the law against you without much worry of getting in trouble,” Costa said. “They fear retaliation and can’t speak up in the workplace because that could lead to their deportation and they’re afraid to report violations to government officials because they don’t want to interact with officials over deportation fears.”
Politico
February 22, 2021
Trump nominated three “employer-side” members to the NLRB, giving businesses a distinct majority on the five-member board, which currently has one vacant seat. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that Trump’s NLRB members sided with the pro-business Chamber of Commerce in 10 key issue areas, based on a 2017 “wishlist” published by the Chamber. The board also undercut unions’ ability to organize outside of business hours and allowed gig workers to be classified as independent contractors.
Center for Responsive Politics
February 22, 2021
Public Citizen and other groups are circulating a letter in support of DeFazio’s bill. The levy is “an important step toward having Wall Street pay its fair share of taxes,” says the letter, whose signatories so far include the liberal Economic Policy Institute and unions such as the AFL-CIO and International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Bloomberg
February 22, 2021
Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department economist now with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, offers a much higher estimate of nearly 19 million unemployed, derived from the number of officially unemployed (10.1 million), those who dropped out of the labor force (5.3 million), and those who are misclassified or non-responsive to surveys (3.5 million). Add the people who have seen cuts to their income (6.8 million), and the total of those negatively affected economically by pandemic comes to 25.5 million.
The Fiscal Times
February 22, 2021
When Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2018, a move now being debated in Congress for all American workers, some believed it would pressure other companies to lift pay levels as well — particularly rival retailers and warehouse employers.
“This is going to be a big deal for very low-wage workers,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based economic think tank said at the time. “It’s going to compel other businesses to raise wages as well.”
Gainesville Times
February 22, 2021
We talked to Celine McNicholas, Director of Government Affairs and Labor Counsel with the Economic Policy Institute, to get the low-down on what we can expect, and dare to hope for.
Dissent Magazine
February 22, 2021
The federal minimum wage is the baseline for employers in the state. A single adult needs to earn $11.76 per hour working full time to meet her basic needs in South Carolina, $4 more than the current minimum wage. According to David Cooper at Economic Policy Institute, the wages of roughly 684,000 South Carolina workers — a third of the state’s workforce — would increase if the state adopted a $15 minimum wage by 2025.
Statehouse Report
February 22, 2021
As David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, notes in the report, minimum wage hikes result in stronger buying power to workers. In turn, hospitality businesses benefit from the extra purchases. “Tax breaks or deferrals, rent subsidies, expanded lending programs, and other business-oriented relief measures all help firms weather a downturn,” Cooper says, “but they’re not going to drive additional spending in the same way that a minimum wage hike does.”
Mother Jones
February 22, 2021
Of the workers who will benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage hike, 59% are women, with nearly one in four of these women being Black or Latina, reports the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
February 22, 2021
“Because a higher minimum wage lifts up lower-income households — although some middle-income households benefit, too — it is likely to have a stronger effect than many — possibly even most — other recession response measures state and local policymakers might consider,” Dave Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said in One Fair Wage’s report.
Restaurant Dive
February 22, 2021
But without hundreds of billions in new federal aid, state and local governments won’t have the money to do that, said Julia Wolfe at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Many of them will be tempted to pursue austerity — the same mistake that they made last time around, in the Great Recession,” Wolfe said, after which it took years to restore public sector employment.
Marketplace
February 22, 2021
Amazon, with more than one million employees, has hired the law firm Morgan Lewis and a Koch-backed consulting group called the Center for Independent Employees to hinder the union vote.
The tactics utilized by Amazon aren’t unusual. In 2017, Boeing took out a Super Bowl ad to combat an employee union effort in Charleston, South Carolina, and the governor of Tennessee led “captive audience” meetings at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga facility in 2019. According to Celine McDaniels, director of government affairs and labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, employers illegally fire union organizers in at least a fifth of all union elections.
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The rise of professional “union avoidance” consultants in the 1970s created an industry that reaps hundreds of millions of dollars annually by convincing workers not to form or join unions. And it works: According to a November 2020 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the use of these tactics has been a major reason for increased difficulty organizing unions, contributing to private sector union density declining from 35.7 percent in 1953 to just 6.2 percent today.
The Progressive
February 22, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute points out that the results were the 48th consecutive week “claims were greater than the worst week of the great recession.”
Newsweek
February 22, 2021
Other economists have disputed the CBO report. Estimates by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute predict 32 million US workers would benefit from the minimum wage increase, which includes a quarter-million workers in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.
The Guardian
February 22, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. labor market is 9.9 million jobs smaller than pre-pandemic levels.
LA Progressive
February 22, 2021
In the following weeks, activists took note of other figures who could potentially become allies on the inside. On the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, formerly of the Economic Policy Institute, and Heather Boushey, who co-founded the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, are viewed as formidable forces to promote their shared worldview.
Daily Beast
February 22, 2021
While the CBO may project job losses, that is not what extensive years of research shows. Furthermore, studies by the Economic Policy Institute show that “public assistance programs would fall by between $13.4 billion and $31.0 billion.” This will help to reduce the federal debt. They reported that: “Earned income tax credit (EITC) and child tax credit (CTC) expenditures would decline by somewhere between $6.5 billion and $20.7 billion annually. Expenditures on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and other major government transfers would fall by between $5.2 billion and $10.3 billion annually.
Artvoice
February 22, 2021
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 22, 2021