“Policymakers and advocates must recognize that the fall of Roe is an economic issue and would be one more victory for the economics of control and disempowerment – low wages, little worker power, and rising disinvestment,” according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. “Reproductive justice is key to economic justice and protects women’s humanity, dignity, and the right to exert freedom over their own choices in the economy.”
Yu, who called the distinction, “frankly just terrible,” also worries that it could disproportionately harm Black borrowers and particularly Black women. Due to labor market discrimination, Black women often need more education to compete in the job market, but those same forces mean they’re not compensated the same for earning those degrees as their white and male counterparts. Black women with advanced degrees were paid nearly $7 less than white men with only a bachelor’s degree in 2020, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a worker-focused think tank.
The Cape Coral-Fort Myers metropolitan area ranks No. 14 nationwide in income inequality, according to a Economic Policy Institute Report. Florida ranks No. 2 of 50 states.
Just 38% of the bottom 10% of workers have paid sick days, while 96% of the top 10% have the benefit, the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould writes, highlighting recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data. And if you’re in the lowest-paid 10% of workers, you cannot afford to take unpaid time off work without serious sacrifice. Leisure and hospitality is the industry where the lowest percentage of workers—53%—have paid sick leave, even though many of those jobs are public-facing, bringing an increased risk of contracting COVID or any other virus, and an increased risk of passing it on.
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute found that the 2021 teacher total compensation penalty — the disparity between the wages and benefits of teachers and those of comparable college graduates — was 14.2% (a 23.5% wage penalty offset by a 9.3% benefits advantage). It’s a gap that has increased dramatically since 1993, when the total teacher compensation penalty was only 2.7%.
Myriad terms have been thrown around about the current state of the economy and the job market. A recent All Things Consideredpiece centered on the word “dynamism.” As defined by Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz, it’s the change, advancement and restless entrepreneurial spirit of workers. Stacey Vanek Smith, the co-host of NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money, talked to a couple of job hoppers and economists to take a better look at what’s really happening. The piece includes a quick listen, written storytelling and interesting data that give the audience a new perspective on an issue that’s been the subject of much conversation. — Emily Barske
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs were paid 351 times as much as typical workers in 2020. Between 1978 and 2020, CEO pay has grown by a staggering 1,322%; a world apart from the 18% wage growth workers saw during the same period.
The inadequacy of wage growth is shown by two other factors. One is the disconnect between productivity growth and wage growth. The two factors marched along together from 1948 until 1979, as the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute has shown. Since then, the gap between them has grown: From 1979 through 2020, U.S. productivity advanced by 61.8%, but average wages grew by only 17.5%.
“The lowest-income households, say bottom 20%, tend to not carry a ton of debt having incomes too low often to even qualify for significant loans,” L. Josh Bivens, research director with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said in an email.
The inadequacy of wage growth is shown by two other factors. One is the disconnect between productivity growth and wage growth. The two factors marched along together from 1948 until 1979, as the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute has shown. Since then, the gap between them has grown: From 1979 through 2020, U.S. productivity advanced by 61.8%, but average wages grew by only 17.5%.
Although, an increase to $15 an hour would absolutely suffice. According to the Economic Policy Institute, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 will increase the incomes of around 32 million workers by an average of $3,300 annually.
This comes from the idea that if these 32 million workers were able to make more money, they would have more disposable income to spend at small businesses, therefore generating more income for the business overall. With this disposable income, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that for every $1 paid to a low-income worker, $1.21 is added back into the gross domestic product (GDP).
The Economic Policy Institute projected that in 2025, a single adult with no children would need to work full time and make $18.50 per hour to stay above the poverty line in rural areas of Alabama and Mississippi.
With a more robust social services net, greater numbers of high-quality jobs across the economy and a comprehensive plan for transitioning automated-out workers to new job, automation can be a good thing for the economy in the long run, said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Automation is mostly opportunity,” he said. “It’s opportunity we need to manage better than we have, but I think blaming it for problems in inequality … really takes the blame off where it should be,” which is on concrete policy decisions that were the actual drivers, he said.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute showed disparities are still prevalent in paid leave, specifically sick time, in America.
The EPI report used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to identify trends in employer benefits throughout the country, and found more than 60% of “low-wage workers” still live without the ability to paid for sick time.
“The highest-wage workers (top 10%) are two-and-a-half times as likely to have access to paid sick leave as the lowest-paid workers (bottom 10%),” the report stated.
The data emphasizes the need for not only sick leave, but paid leave of all kinds, something Will Petrik, budget researcher from Policy Matters Ohio, said should be common sense for Ohio.
An estimated 54% of gig workers do not receive employer-provided benefits, according to Employee Rights Advocacy Institute For Law & Policy, a labor advocacy organization. Most gig workers are classified as independent contractors and are not entitled to benefits enjoyed by full-time employees. Those missing benefits can include paid sick days, health and safety protections, or unemployment insurance, according to a survey analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 42% of Home Depot workers earn less than $15 an hour. Most — 68% — make between $12 to $18. The living wage in Philadelphia for a single worker with no children is $17.87.
Over the decades, real wages — meaning wages accounting for inflation — have not increased significantly in comparison to the cost of living. The current value of the federally mandated minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, is at its lowest real-dollar level since the 1950s, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Other than retirement plans, most families have “little or no retirement savings” and “nearly half of families have no retirement account savings at all, Monique Morrissey of the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute documented in a 2019 paper.
Data from the Economic Policy institute shows that inflation has been similar worldwide over the past year-plus, with little correlation to either pandemic spending or post-pandemic recovery as measured by unemployment levels.
Based on that data, EPI argues that supply chain disruptions, rising commodity costs and shifting consumption patterns are more to blame for inflation than the money printer. That is, the problem isn’t too much money but too few goods, in the wrong place.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, economists’ opinions vary on which is worse for an economy: a recession or rising inflation. One common argument is that inflation is worse than a recession because it impacts everyone. By contrast, a recession—and the associated job losses that come with it—may impact a smaller number of people.
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), by contrast, has found that right-to-work laws did not boost job growth and are associated with lower wages and benefits for all workers. “By restricting the capacity of unions to bargain for workers and thus lowering wages and benefits, RTW laws lower tax revenues and reduce aggregate demand,” EPI said in a report published in 2018.
When rates rise, “Any consumer item that people take on debt to buy — whether that’s automobiles or washing machines — gets more expensive,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Inflation will come down quite a bit faster if we actually hit a recession. But the cost of that is going to be much bigger,” said Bivens said.
The danger, Bivens said, is that the Fed has set off a runaway train. Once unemployment starts rising sharply, it’s hard to make it stop. Rather than neatly halting at the 4.4% rate projected by Fed officials, the jobless numbers could easily keep rising.
“This idea that there’s an inflation dial that the Fed can just haul on really hard and leave everything else untouched, that’s a fallacy,” Bivens said.
Instead of the soft landing for the economy the Fed says it’s aiming for, Bivens added, “we are now pointing the plane at the ground pretty hard and hitting the accelerator.
2. Economics has finally recognized the existence of politics. For decades, or centuries even, economics gave no thought to politics. Wages, for example, were determined by a set of market forces, and politics had nothing to do with it. That’s how academics thought, but it’s not how the world works. In the world, workers make what they have the political power to make. That seems obvious to you and me, but economists were (and many still are) deeply resistant to acknowledging this. The book tells the story of how this change came about, through the work of people like Joseph Stiglitz and groups like the Economic Policy Institute. It’s a really important change because it rejects the assumption of classical economics that left alone, the market will find equilibrium. No—the state has to play an evening-out role.
Over the past five years, the average LAUSD teacher earned between $74,000 and $79,000 annually, compared to a salary range of $94,000 to $101,000 for the average bachelor’s degree-holder in Los Angeles, the UTLA study found. Teacher salaries don’t reflect the rate of inflation, the report contends, a conclusion that a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) also makes. The EPI analysis found that teachers nationwide earn 23.5 percent less than comparable college graduates, while the UTLA study found that its members earned 22 percent less than similarly educated Angelenos during the 2019-20 school year. To make up for this deficit, 28 percent of UTLA educators work another job to supplement their income, with 24.4 percent of teachers who’ve worked for the district for more than 20 years doing so.
Rising child care costs is a burden for working families, and if it gets unaffordable, it can keep parents away from the workforce. Also, it could keep children out of early learning programs. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the average cost of infant care in Pennsylvania is around $12,000.
When it comes to income inequality, Ohio is a little better than average. It ranked 29th in 2018, with the top 1% of earners getting an average of $859,000 a year and everybody else earning an average of $46,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
A new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows what the Left has always argued: that our best tool in the fight against poverty is redistributive social spending.
In this respect, a new analysis recently published by Asha Banerjee and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is just the latest addition to a vast body of data demonstrating that poverty is, straightforwardly, a policy choice. Drawing on the latest census data, Banerjee and Zipperer analyze the implications of various income support and pandemic-era programs in 2021 — finding that they protected tens of millions from falling into poverty, contributing to a rate that was lower than before the pandemic.
Not every program in EPI’s report dates from the pandemic. By far the largest impact (unsurprisingly) came from Social Security, which kept an estimated 26.3 million people from poverty in 2021.
But direct stimulus payments, unemployment checks, and tax credits also had a pronounced effect:
For decades, Democratic and Republican politicians alike have hacked away at the universality of various social programs — often, once again, on the absurd grounds that means-testing is more effective. It’s notable, then, that Banerjee and Zipperer find pandemic-era unemployment insurance (UI) benefits kept some 2.3 million out of poverty, one reason being that they did away with many of the restrictive eligibility requirements (the authors, in fact, note that estimates drawing on the existing census data likely understate the extent of UI’s anti-poverty impact, which was quite probably millions more). They conclude:
Given the overwhelming effectiveness of these programs in keeping people out of poverty, it is unconscionable that policymakers have allowed them to expire and added to the stress of low-income families in the years to come.
Banerjee and Zipperer are absolutely right. However, the pandemic — and the various discourse which ensued around particular benefits and credits — also underscored the extent to which the “debate” around the effectiveness (or supposed noneffectiveness) of social expenditure is an illusion.