The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified teachers voicing their concerns about being undervalued and overworked. While teachers aren’t the only ones leaving at a higher rate during the pandemic, they experience some of the most severe and unique problems. To start, they are already paid less than other college graduates: According to the Economic Policy Institute, the teacher pay penalty — the percentage difference between teachers and other college-educated workers — is almost 19%.
South Bend Tribune
December 23, 2021
According to a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, for every 10 people who said they successfully filed for unemployment benefits between March 22 and April 18, 2020, three to four additional people tried to apply but could not navigate through the system to file a claim. Further, two additional people for every 10 successful filers did not even try to apply because it was too difficult to do so. Even more recently, backlogs in application processes for affordable housing programs have made headlines, with millions of dollars available to help individuals in need, but distribution of those funds lagging.
GCN
December 23, 2021
Even before the onset of the COVID-19 health crisis, childcare in Seattle and statewide was expensive and hard to come by. The Economic Policy Institute ranked Washington the ninth least affordable state for child care in 2019. Right now, childcare costs Washington families almost $8,000 more per year than in-state tuition at our public colleges. And that’s if you can even find childcare. At the presser, Mosqueda described Seattle as a “childcare desert.”
The Stranger
December 23, 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.
Seattle Times
December 23, 2021
HCL Technologies, based in India, wields the H-1B skilled-worker visa as a way to undercut competition and find the cheapest workers, according to the study by the Economic Policy Institute.
News Nation Now
December 23, 2021
In Oregon alone, Amazon has four warehouses, from Troutdale to Hillsboro. Oregon also has provided Amazon with more than $342 million in subsidies in recent years, rewarding one of our nation’s most profitable companies with lucrative tax breaks. While lawmakers may view this exchange as beneficial for Oregon’s economic growth, research shows that’s not the case. A report by the Economic Policy Institute found the opposite — states have more to lose by offering Amazon tax incentives to bolster job creation.
The Register-Guard
December 23, 2021
The even bigger picture: Since 1978, the Economic Policy Institute reported earlier this year, CEOs at major U.S. corporations have now realized, after inflation, a pay hike of a whopping 1,322 percent. The typical worker earnings bump over the same four-plus decades: just 18 percent.
Inequality.org
December 23, 2021
More money is stolen each year in wage theft than in property crimes.
A 2017 report by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that “the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year,” per The Guardian. That’s more than the value of stolen goods in all property crimes, according to the latest FBI statistics.
The Center for Public Integrity
December 23, 2021
“The thing that we really need to be careful about is making sure that we are sufficiently measuring what that really means,” said Valerie Wilson, Director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
KIRO
December 23, 2021
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