EPI in the news

• America’s Workers Are About to Be Forgotten Again

  For decades, there has been a maddening gap between what the US economy could be delivering for working families and what it actually does deliver. The richest country in the world chronically fails to offer broad-based economic prosperity and security, because policymaking has been captured by the wealthy and privileged. In pursuit of their own financial interests, the well-off have piled one boulder after another in the way of a typical household’s ability to carve out an economically secure life.

  This has been a long-going, incremental process, so there is no magic-bullet solution that could immediately clear the path. Each presidential administration must be graded on how many boulders it removed (or added). Viewed in this light, the economic-policy priorities of former President Joe Biden’s administration deserve much more credit than they have received. Biden chalked up significant achievements on behalf of American families, and even those that were stymied by Congress were well worth pursuing.

  Project Syndicate | January 24, 2025
• How taxpayer money is funding private religious schools

  Resources:
  

  Economic Policy Institute: How Vouchers Harm Public Schools

  KALW | January 24, 2025
• How Trump’s Deportation Plans Could Blow Up the Food System and Increase Migrant Labor

  An Economic Policy Institute report, published in 2022, found that migrants with H-2B visas are being “employed in industries in which there is extensive wage theft and lawbreaking by employers” — with the largest share, more than half of all penalties assessed between 2000 and 2021, coming from the food industry.

  Politico Magazine | January 24, 2025
• Right-to-work proposal reemerges in New Hampshire State House

  Data shows workers in right-to-work states make 3.2% less on average than their counterparts in similar positions in non-right-to-work states – $1,670 per year for a full-time worker – according to the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute. On job growth, the Economic Policy Institute draws a different conclusion from the Harvard study cited by Cline, saying there are “no measurable employment advantages between RTW and non-RTW states.”

  New Hampshire Bulletin | January 24, 2025
• A Tale of Two Economies

  Our friends at the Economic Policy Institute also issued a new report on another widespread practice that’s hurting the labor market: Workers who are misclassified as independent contractors. Studies show that as many as 30% of employers misclassify their workers as contractors, even though they meet all the legal requirements to be considered employees.

  The Pitch from Civic Ventures | January 24, 2025
• Continuing unemployment claims climb, but it’s not nervous time

  But Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute isn’t worried. “When we look at continuing claims as a share of the labor force, it’s basically the same as it was pre-COVID,” she said.

  Sure, it’s not as low as it has been in the past three years, with a hot labor market, she said.

  “I would say that it’s been pretty stable over the last couple of years. You know, maybe a little bit of an uptick. But again, layoffs remain low. Things are still pretty strong,” she said.

  Marketplace | January 24, 2025
• Older Americans’ workforce share nears 20-year low

  “I think the trends in employment for the over-55 population can be explained by the aging baby boomers,” said Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute. “Simply put, the 55-plus population is getting older and employment rates decline with age.”

  S&P Global | January 24, 2025

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