According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO take-home pay grew by around 1,200 percent from 1978 to 2019. Meanwhile, the compensation for typical workers grew by 13.7 percent.
New York Magazine
June 16, 2021
A team of White House economics advisers had, ostensibly, convened a brain trust of left-leaning think tanks and policy experts on Monday evening to discuss how they might help President Joe Biden build a case for his economic agenda, a pair of proposals hitting the skids in negotiations with both Republican senators and their moderate Democratic colleagues.
But the wonks wouldn’t get down to business until Biden’s aides addressed one matter: Why had Biden and the White House appeared to have abandoned support for the supplemental unemployment benefits buoying workers through the fragile economic recovery? Representatives from multiple organizations—including the Economic Policy Institute, the National Women’s Law Center, and the Hamilton Project—raised the issue when it was their turn to speak, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Attendees didn’t belabor the subject, but the message was clear: The administration’s recent messaging on the subject is a real problem.
Mother Jones
June 14, 2021
More than a half-million child care workers would see a pay raise if the minimum wage was increased to $15 per hour, according to a new report.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that more 43.5 percent of child care workers, or 560,000 people, would benefit from the minimum wage being bumped to $15 per hour in the next four years.
Roughly 95 percent of the child care workers who would get a pay raise are women, and 36 percent are Black or Hispanic. Black and Hispanic child care workers would see their yearly income rise by $3,200 and $3,100, respectively.
“Low wages for child care workers reinforce existing racial and gender inequality, since both Black child care workers and women are particularly likely to see their wages increase with a $15 minimum wage,” Julia Wolfe, a co-author of the report and state economic analyst for EPI, said in a statement. “Child care workers deserve to be paid a wage that better reflects the value of their work and allows them to care for their own families.”
Newsweek
June 14, 2021
Josh Bivens/Economic Policy Institute: “They should definitely stand pat.” Fed officials view the price spike as a temporary consequence of the economy’s rapid reopening….and say supply will eventually rise to meet demand. “We’re measuring prices relative to a year ago and prices had just collapsed. and so if you take out what economists call that base effect, you get numbers more like just over 2% for core inflation over the past 12 months. That’s not much to worry about at all.”
Hearst TV
June 11, 2021
All in all, the labor report is a good sign for the economic recovery. “High quits mean workers feel comfortable leaving their jobs in search of better matches,” Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote. “Low layoffs are an obvious good. The economic recovery is gaining momentum.”
The Fiscal Times
June 11, 2021
On Wednesday, a day ahead of the jobless data release, Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and an Obama Labor Department veteran, broadly agreed with Deese.
“Things are getting back to normal,” Shierholz told Insider. “I think the key is we don’t want to make drastic policy changes at this point.” When it comes to relief and recovery measures for this recession, “we are doing it so right,” she said. But she warned that could still change.
Shierholz said she expects to see a quick bounceback and strong recovery, but changing course could threaten that. “If we start pulling back with those measures now, we’re going to just cut that off at the knees,” she said.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has floated an interesting hypothesis that wages might not be accelerating as quickly as we think. May’s wage growth was driven by the leisure and hospitality sector, which consists mostly of workers at restaurants that customers are only just starting to patronize again. What if that wage surge, Bivens posits, is really a tip surge? This sector reported a huge decline in wages in March and April 2020 as restaurants were shutting down, even as other sectors were experiencing that freakish momentary wage spike at the start of the pandemic.
What’s different about restaurants? Well, Bivens observes, restaurant workers get tips, and when customers disappear, tips disappear. Now customers are coming back, along with tips.
…
Why have wages stagnated during the past four decades? The EPI’s Bivens and Lawrence Mishel argued last month that the blame rests with high interest rates, proliferating trade deals, ever-more-brazen wage theft (i.e., employers’ failure to pay minimum wage or overtime), an eroding legal minimum wage, diminishing legal overtime eligibility, judicial decisions restricting the ability of workers to sue their employers, deregulation, privatization, economic concentration, a fissuring workforce (meaning a trend toward outsourcing labor within the U.S. to smaller, less scrupulous companies), and declining union power. These were policies consciously pursued by government at all levels at the behest of the business lobby.
New Republic
June 11, 2021
Nearly half of all U.S. farmworkers lack legal status, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Just more than a quarter of farmworkers are U.S.-born, according to the agency’s numbers. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research think tank based in Washington, D.C., estimates about 10% are foreign workers in the United States on H-2A temporary visas. The average farm wage was $13.99 an hour as of 2019, roughly 60% of the average non-farm wage.
Stateline
June 11, 2021
“This pandemic has been going on for 15 months. We have a lot of people that are stuck in long-term unemployment,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She said that right now, almost 30% of people who are unemployed have been out of work for a year or more.
Marketplace
June 11, 2021
Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, neither is its cause. New research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers.
To be clear, wage suppression was not an unintended consequence — it was the intentional outcome of policies at the legislative, regulatory and corporate levels deliberately implemented to keep wages low. As a nation, we chose to suppress wages on behalf of the rich and corporations — and with spectacular success.
The Hill
June 11, 2021
“High quits mean workers feel comfortable leaving their jobs in search of better matches,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Low layoffs are an obvious good. The economic recovery is gaining momentum.”
Politico
June 11, 2021
From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew 940 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And yet, in 2017, Trump and the Republican Congress cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Rolling Stone
June 11, 2021
Child-care workers have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. But a new report finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour could benefit more than half a million employees.
The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that if the federal minimum wage is gradually increased from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025, roughly 560,000 workers in the child-care sector will benefit.
…
“Child-care workers deserve to be paid a wage that better reflects the value of their work and allows them to care for their own families,” says Julia Wolfe, co-author of the report and state economic analyst for EPI. “Low wages for child-care workers reinforce existing racial and gender inequality, since both Black child-care workers and women are particularly likely to see their wages increase with a $15 minimum wage.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute brought up the point that not everyone can work from home. A person’s job type is one key reason.
“Only 16.2% of Hispanic workers and 19.7% of Black workers can telework,” The Economic Policy Institute reported.
Black Enterprise
June 11, 2021
“This will cut aid to nearly four million impacted workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, argued in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
We start the hour talking with ProPublica’s JESSE EISINGER, an author on “The Secret IRS Files” report, about what they found, how the rich avoid paying their fair share, and what it reveals about inequities in our tax code. Then, we examine the uneven economic recovery and the pandemic’s impact on income inequality and the racial wealth gap. Our guest is VALERIE WILSON from the Economic Policy Institute.
WHYY
June 11, 2021
Walsh can continue his overtures to Republicans to minimize adversarial exchanges, but Democratic members losing patience with GOP opposition to Biden’s jobs and social-policy agenda want the secretary to make a difference in the policy arena—even if that means abandoning the niceties.
“I would hope that the Education and Labor Committee pushes for a proactive agenda that the secretary is committed to and political capital is spent around accomplishing,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute. “Because as we emerge from the pandemic, if changes aren’t made to our workplace system of rights, then we know what type of recovery we will have—an unequal recovery where workers will pay a price.”
Bloomberg Law
June 11, 2021
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute highlighted another factor that’s driving wages up: More tipping at restaurants and bars, as customers return.
If that’s a large contributor to wage increases, then pressures should ease once restaurants reach full capacity, according to Josh Bivens, EPI’s director of research.
“So long as the industries that are seeing the really rapid wage growth are also the ones seeing really rapid employment growth, that actually doesn’t strike me as a shortage,” he said. “That strikes me as how economies adjust to a big increase in demand.”
Bloomberg
June 11, 2021
A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that “nearly all the states cutting UI still have significantly fewer jobs than before the pandemic.” In Texas, for instance, nearly one million workers are “officially unemployed,” meaning that they’re actively looking for work but haven’t had luck yet.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
Broadly, 7.9 million workers said that they were not able to work because their work closed or lost business due to the pandemic. A recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that Black and Hispanic workers were less likely to be able to telework compared to white peers.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
The lower teen unemployment rate is “not unequivocally great news,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
For one thing, the amount of people in this group seeking work actually slipped slightly from April to May. Some job seekers might not be seeing opportunities and leaving the workforce altogether, she said.
MarketWatch
June 11, 2021
U.S. job growth picked up in May — along with worker pay — and the unemployment rate fell, signaling firms are making some progress filling a record number of openings as the economy powers up. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Romaine Bostick, Alix Steel and Joe Weisenthal on “What’d You Miss?” about the U.S. jobs report.
Bloomberg TV
June 11, 2021
Low-wage, low-hour workers were among the hardest hit during the pandemic, as 80% of job losses were among the lowest quarter of wage earners in the US, with leisure and hospitality sector the hardest hit and currently the industry facing the largest job shortfall, with 3.5m fewer jobs in February compared with the same month last year, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian
June 11, 2021
Although the job gains are welcome news for working people, analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that even if current monthly employment gains continue, the country won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until well into 2022.
Analyzing the latest numbers, EPI senior economist Elise Gould said that officially the labor market is still down 7.6 million jobs since February 2020 when the coronavirus crisis started. But taking into account the growth in the working-age population since then, the real jobs shortfall is still between 8.6 and 10.7 million.
The jobs recovery remains very uneven by race. For white workers, the official rate is 5.1%, close to the national average. For workers of color, the number of people still out of work is considerably higher: 7.3% for Latinx, 5.5% for Asian Americans, and 9.1% for Black workers. EPI economist Heidi Shierholz said Friday that the numbers show how “our history of and present systemic racism hugely affect the labor market.”
People’s World
June 11, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the data in conjunction with jobs numbers that have already been released for May “are telling a pretty similar story that there’s pick-up in demand and the supply of workers are increasing to meet that demand.
“It’s going to take a little while, but things are moving in the right direction.”
Financial Times
June 11, 2021
Average hourly wages across all industries last month increased by 2 percent, and leisure and hospitality was a leader for wage growth last month. But even the wage increases merely put the sector back to its pre-pandemic trend line rather than in inflation territory suggesting some massive labor shortage crisis, Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, noted on Twitter.
“In leisure and hospitality, earnings have grown enough to suggest a sector-specific shortage, but that may be largely the result of customers — and their tips — returning,” Shierholz tweeted.
Skift
June 11, 2021
“Postal workers look like America, but with a higher proportion of Black workers and veterans,” writes Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, in an enlightening report titled “The War Against the Postal Service” released this past December. It notes that postal work pays better than private sector jobs that do not require a college degree. Only 9 percent of postal workers make less than $15 an hour, compared to more than 28 percent in the private sector overall.
The Progressive
June 11, 2021
Instead, tips likely account for the pay increase as restaurants and bars return to pre-Covid customer capacity, according to Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“Since December 2020, the rise in tip income, not an increase in base wages, can likely entirely explain the acceleration of wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in restaurants and bars,” he wrote Friday.
CNBC
June 11, 2021
“The labor market is on the right track, but there is still millions of workers yet to be absorbed in the economic recovery,” Economic Policy Institute’s senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
Al Jazeera
June 11, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, noted the economy is still down 7.6 million jobs since early 2020 and said the real shortfall is more like 8.6 to 10.7 million when taking into account lost growth.
Courthouse News Service
June 11, 2021