EPI in the news

• Joe Biden should retire the phrase ‘dignity of work’

  Ten years after he delivered that speech to rapt Democratic delegates, Biden seemingly believes that its message will still resonate with voters. And he may be right. Unemployment is low, but in other respects, the average American worker lives in challenging times. Though the labor market is tightening, wage growth is slow, and it isn’t evenly distributed to all workers. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, reported in February that wage growth has largely been concentrated in the top ten percent of high-wage workers since 2007. Overall, wage growth hasn’t kept pace with rising rents or with medical expenses; a 2018 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that employers are gradually shifting more medical costs to workers, as insurance premiums continue to rise.

  New York Magazine | May 2, 2019
• Google’s Sundar Pichai made $480 million last year, for an astounding ‘hourly’ rate

  According to a 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute, the average American CEO made $15.6 million in compensation, or about 271 times that of the average U.S. worker.

  Fox News | May 2, 2019
• Trump promised $4,000 raises from his tax scam. He was off by $3,767.

  The report comes on the heels of another report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which found that the average increase to workers’ bonuses in 2018 was one single penny.

  Shareblue Media | May 2, 2019
• Most restaurant workers don’t earn enough to feed their own families

  New York is not an anomaly. The Economic Policy Institute found that in states that allow payment of a sub-minimum wage, 18.5 percent of workers are impoverished; in states where everyone earns the federal minimum, the poverty rate drops to 11.1 percent. Furthermore, the institute notes that closing the loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that allows payment of a sub-minimum wage, and upping the hourly minimum to $15 by 2024, would boost the wages of 38.1 percent of African American and 23.2 percent of white workers.

  Truthout | May 2, 2019
• The State of the U.S. labor market: Pre-April 2019 jobs release

  Despite the possibility of last-minute spending, 40 percent of Americans are unable to afford a $400 emergency, while wages remain close to stagnant for most people, even as those at the top continue to see gains. Recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that labor income for the bottom 90 percent has shrunk by more than 10 percent since 1979—translating to about $10,800 of lost pay per household. With little sign of bipartisan cooperation on pro-worker policies, a tight labor market is the primary force that most workers can expect to reverse this trend in the coming year.

  Center for American Progress | May 2, 2019
• Reversing the baby bust

  The plurality of these costs—29 percent—come from housing, but food (18 percent), transportation (15 percent), and childcare (16 percent) all play a role. This last factor is of particular importance to the 80 percent of dads and 60 percent of moms who are employed, especially when working moms predominate among the hard-pressed middle class. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has estimated that childcare costs exceed 10 percent of the median family’s income—the federal threshold for affordability—in every state in the union.

  The American Conservative | May 2, 2019
• The millennialization of American labor

  But that was then. In the decades since, collective bargaining rights have been under unending attack and it is no accident that union density in the United States has declined to near single digits. Up to 87 percent of private-sector employers fight their employees’ efforts to unionize, sometimes spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay “union-avoidance consultants” to bust the organizing drives.

  The American Prospect | May 2, 2019

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