Economic Policy Institute

Correct.

And their data, highlighted by the Economic Policy Institute, shows an incredibly aggressive environment right now.

The EPI notes that unfair labor practice or ULP charges are occurring in 41.5 percent of all union elections.

Wow.

I mean, because as you say, it was predictable and was predicted.

My friend Rob Scott, who's the trade economist at the Economic Policy Institute for a number of years, he wrote a piece just as the WTO, China was being admitted to WTO, that put an estimate, analysis of, I think it was 150, 200,000 jobs lost to manufacturing.

And I remember that.

Gary Huffbauer is a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

And so far, she says, none of those other numbers on job growth or wage growth indicate now is a good time to quit your job.

Heidi Sheerholz at the Economic Policy Institute says quite the

opposite, actually.

If you have a job, the right thing to do is to hang on to it if you can.

In short, Walmart was building out the domestic infrastructure to bring cheap goods manufactured in Shenzhen to homes in Nebraska.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Walmart was responsible for 15% of the change in the trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2013.

The company felt a mission to pass on those savings to consumers.

Sam Walton had promised exactly this in 1992, saying, In 2005, economist Jason Furman, who would later work in the Obama White House, called Walmart a progressive success story.

So I think you're going to start seeing more and more of those things go on.

Let's go next to the shameless shout-out that we have, and I always love talking about the Economic Policy Institute, which I do here, and Dr. Catherine Edwards and her work on behalf of working folks.

And you can, in the show notes, find a link to her website.

Mark of Art, and let me just say, Mark, you get extra credit if you can work the phrase bespoke personal precarities into your shameless plugger shout out.

Thank you.

Go ahead, go on ahead.

I'm going to go right to the Economic Policy Institute.

I have been a fan since I met Jeff Faux in 1995 at a UAW newspaper editor's conference, and the PR department for the UAW had him there.

Since 1979, American productivity has increased about 94%, while the hourly pay of the typical worker has increased just 33%.

And that's according to the Economic Policy Institute.

So essentially, we're producing dramatically more than we were several decades ago, but the typical worker's paycheck hasn't grown nearly as quickly.

Another statistic that kind of illustrates this labor capital divide that's been growing, the latest BLS data shows that labor share of output, basically the portion going to workers through wages and benefits, fell to 52.8% in the second quarter.

But I also think the big one is that it is an entire industry dedicated to convincing workers that they don't need unions.

In the US, the Economic Policy Institute just released a report about how much money goes into busting unions, and it's $1.5 billion.

There is an entire and that's billions of the B. There's an entire industry that is like made up of lawyers and PR firms and like pundits, I'm sure, and right wing think tanks that are designed to just crush unions.

And that comes with an entire apparatus of sending out sending out mailers to tell people, oh, you know, you don't need a union.