October 25, 2018

Minimum Wage Hikes Still Creating Winners and Losers

Instead of alleviating poverty, Seattle’s minimum wage experiment is creating a system of winners and losers. A new study from economists with the University of Washington show that Seattle’s recent minimum wage mandate is marginalizing workers still looking to establish themselves in the Emerald City, while more experienced workers…
News October 12, 2018

VIDEO: Bernie And Bezos on Amazon’s $15 Wage Folly

Amazon’s recent decision to raise its starting pay rate to $15 an hour–responsive, in part, to pressure from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders–generated controversy from an unlikely group of protesters: The company’s employees. “Why Some Amazon Workers Are Fuming About Their Raise,” wrote the New York Times. “The company says everyone wins…
Arkansas October 8, 2018

99% of “Arkansans for a Fair Wage” funding from outside Arkansas

Come November, Arkansas will vote on Issue 5, a ballot initiative supported by “Arkansans for a Fair Wage”, which would hike the statewide minimum wage from $8.50 to $11.00 (a nearly 30 percent increase) by 2021. Behind the push for a government mandated minimum wage increase in The Natural State…
October 2, 2018

Companies are voluntarily raising wages without imperiling jobs in the process

Amazon’s announcement of a $15 starting wage continues a trend of major companies, including Target and WalMart, voluntarily raising their minimum wage. Unfortunately, this positive development was soured by news that it would lobby for an increase of the federal minimum wage, which would cause business closures, job…
Missouri September 25, 2018

The Dark Money behind Missouri’s Minimum Wage Push

This November, Missouri voters will have the option to vote “yes” or “no” on proposition B, a ballot initiative that would increase the state’s minimum wage from $7.85 to $12.00 in 2022 (a 52 percent increase). The “local” group supporting this initiative, “Raise Up Missouri”, isn’t very local…
September 10, 2018

Previous evidence of minimum wage harm refutes biased study

A recent study from researchers with U.C. Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment suggests that cities which have implemented a higher minimum wage have seen “no significant negative employment effects.” This is just the latest flawed report from a team of researchers who’ve been exposed as…
August 23, 2018

Ideology Over Evidence in the “Fight for $15”

Democratic Socialist candidate for Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star on the left, supports nearly doubling the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. In a visit to her previous employer, she demonstrated why this policy is such a bad idea. The Coffee Shop has been…
August 3, 2018

New project highlights teenagers struggling to find work

Today, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) launched a new web project featuring the stories of more than six dozen teenagers around the country who’ve been unable to find work for the summer. The stories, collected through Facebook, highlight the difficulties today’s youth face while attempting to enter the labor…
July 25, 2018

The Sick Leave Fight Moves South To Texas

Labor backed activists have collected signatures for a ballot measure that would force all San Antonio businesses to provide paid sick leave. The data shows that previous attempts to mandate paid sick leave did little to address workplace sickness, and actually hurt employees’ work opportunities. In 2004, San Francisco became the…
June 28, 2018

July 1st Minimum Wage Increases: What You Need to Know

On July 1st, eighteen states and locales will see mid-year minimum wage hikes. Ten cities in California alone will see minimum wage increases, despite evidence that previous minimum wage increases have decreased employment opportunities in industries with a higher…