The inflation spike of 2021 and 2022 has presented real policy challenges. In order to better understand this policy debate, it is imperative to look at prices and how they are being affected. The price of just about everything in the U.S. economy can be broken down into the thre … | Continue reading
Order the book You can also purchase the book at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound.org, or your local bookseller. In The Color of Law (published by Liveright in May 2017), Richard Rothstein argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America … | Continue reading
What this report finds: Thousands of skilled migrants with H-1B visas working as subcontractors at well-known corporations like Disney, FedEx, Google, and others appear to have been underpaid by at least $95 million. Victims include not only the H-1B workers but also the U.S. wor … | Continue reading
Millions of Americans struggle to get by on low wages, often without any benefits such as paid sick leave, a pension, or even health insurance. Their difficult lives are made immeasurably harder when they do the work they have been hired to do, but their employers refuse to pay, … | Continue reading
Saturday marks 12 years since the last federal minimum wage increase on July 24, 2009, the longest period in U.S. history without an increase. In the meantime, rising costs of living have diminished the purchasing power of a minimum wage paycheck. A worker paid the federal minimu … | Continue reading
Today’s analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) highlights a number of things that policymakers should keep in mind as they consider minimum wage legislation in the upcoming Congress. First, the benefits of passing a significant increase in the federal minimum wage—li … | Continue reading
Employment law Economics Philosophy Political science There is an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. There is, however, a pervasive assumption in economics, political science, law, and philosophy that this is a relationship of equal power. Thi … | Continue reading
What this report finds: Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages that have grown much faster than the stock market and the pay of typical workers, college graduates, and even the top 0.1%. In 2019, a CEO at on … | Continue reading
The CARES Act, the $2 trillion-plus package to provide economic relief and recovery from the coronavirus shock in early April was, for many reasons, deeply imperfect. But the modifications the CARES Act made to the nation’s unemployment insurance (UI) system are an utterly crucia … | Continue reading
H-1B is a temporary nonimmigrant work visa that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers as well as fashion models from abroad; nearly 500,000 migrant workers are employed in the United States in H-1B status. The H-1B is an important—but deeply flawed—vehicl … | Continue reading
This Labor Day, EPI experts have contributed essays on remaining obstacles blocking workers looking for faster wage growth and greater economic opportunity. These essays look beyond the relatively happy news of low unemployment in the very recent past and focus instead on the dee … | Continue reading
The latest report in EPI’s annual series analyzing current and long-term trends in CEO compensation. | Continue reading
In 2018, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 was worth 14.8 percent less than when it was last raised in 2009, after adjusting for inflation, and 28.6 percent below its peak value in 1968, when the minimum wage was the equivalent of $10.15 in 2018 dollars. On January 16, 2019, Sen. … | Continue reading
The media are full of stories about robots and automation destroying the jobs of the past and leaving us jobless in the future; call it the coming Robot Apocalypse. We are also told that automation and technology are responsible for the poor wage growth and inequality bedeviling … | Continue reading
The proposed merger of Sprint and T-Mobile would cut the number of national players in the U.S. wireless industry from four to three and reduce earnings in the affected labor markets. The federal agencies reviewing this merger must take labor markets as well as product markets in … | Continue reading
Income inequality has risen in every state since the 1970s and, in most states, it has grown in the post–Great Recession era. From 2009 to 2015, the incomes of the top 1 percent grew faster than the incomes of the bottom 99 percent in 43 states and the District of Columbia. The t … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, June 26 from 12:00–1:30 p.m., Sam Pizzigati of the Institute for Policy Studies will join Economic Policy Institute President Thea Lee for a discussion about Pizzigati’s new book, The Case for a Maximum Wage. Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast mo … | Continue reading
Wage theft—employers’ failure to pay workers money they are legally entitled to—affects far more people than more well-known and feared forms of theft such as bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies. Employers steal bil … | Continue reading
In a new paper, EPI Distinguished Fellow Lawrence Mishel uses newly available administrative data to calculate the hourly pay earned by Uber drivers, as well as the scale of Uber relative to the overall economy. Mishel’s estimates show that driving for Uber is very low paying, an … | Continue reading
Our country has suffered from rising income inequality and chronically slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans. This disappointing living-standards growth—which was in fact caused by rising income inequality—preceded the Great Recession and conti … | Continue reading
The Supreme Court will soon decide whether employers can lawfully require workers to sign mandatory arbitration agreements that include class and collective action waivers. A ruling in NLRB v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc., Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, and Ernst & Young LLP v. Morris … | Continue reading