The first paragraph of the commentary posted Wednesday on the website of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank founded by, among others, Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, lays out the thrust of the argument pretty succinctly:

“For more than a year, there has been a high-profile debate over what Apple should do with its enormous cash reserve, now amounting to $137 billion. The proposals have been curiously one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders. Almost entirely absent from the discussion has been whether those reserves should also be used to provide fairer compensation to the workers making its products abroad or selling its products here. This imbalance is part and parcel of a larger trend: the share of economic rewards going to workers is diminishing.”

A larger backlog of EEOC cases could increase the number of workplace discrimination cases which go directly to court. If a workplace discrimination charge goes unheard by the agency for more than 180 days, complainants can request that a “Notice of Right-to-Sue” be issued automatically. However, those cases could still go unheard thanks to a rash of vacancies in the federal courts.

Some of the cases unheard by the EEOC might not even be submitted to the courts in the first place, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former OSHA commissioner.

“They’re hard cases to bring, hard cases to prove,” he said. Plus, “most people can’t afford attorneys to do it.” Instead, they rely on government agencies to “help them assert their rights.”

For complaints about health and safety standards, employees don’t even have the option of going to the courts on their own. Instead, all those complaints must go through OSHA. While that agency hopes to avoid serious reductions in its workload capacity due to the sequester, Eisenbrey said that the status quo at the department is already “completely insufficient.”

“The chance of having an OSHA inspection, if you’re an employer, in any given year is close to zero,” he said. He estimated that there were only about 1,000 inspectors in the agency, compared to seven million employers nationwide.

The critics argue, moreover, that companies have exploited the H1-B program to fuel outsourcing, bringing in foreign employees into the U.S. to train them and then sending them back their native countries to run their offshore operations: They point out that the top 10 companies that petitioned for H1-B visas in FY 2012 were all outsourcing giants.

Their preferred course of action is anti-fraud and anti-abuse legislation just introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), which would require companies to do more to hire native-born workers, raise wages for foreign-born workers, and make it more difficult to use the program to fuel outsourcing. The underlying message is, “don’t think about expanding the H1-B before examining the problems,” explains Ross Eisenbery, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a vocal critic of the visa program.

Many economists say that Republican plans to slash spending would hurt the economy. Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) proposed budget would destroy 2 million jobs in 2014 alone if it were implemented, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Not surprisingly, liberal economists have jumped on Brooks’s arguments. Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute argues that the economy is still performing so under par — $985 billion below its potential output if all our factories were going full tilt — that it needs a major boost from government-financed economic activity to increase production, employment and consumption. Coincidentally, the day after Brooks’s column was published, Gallup released a poll showing that 72 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, would support a major federally financed infrastructure repair program and a federal program creating 1 million jobs. Nearly 80 years after Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, it seems the American people would like the government to re-create it.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the country’s labor market is in crisis, and it’s projected the unemployment rate will not drop below 6 percent for another four years.

“This is precisely the time that we should provide legal status and a path to citizenship for undocumented workers, because it will actually make things better,” she said. “It will actually improve the economy and generate some jobs, so this is a very good time to do it given the economic context.”

Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., said Nutter appears to be taking a hard line stance similar to that of Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, whose tussle with his city’s teacher’s union resulted in a strike last year.

Emanuel, Eisenbray said, is among a breed of new Democratic leaders who aren’t as beholden to unions as their predecessors were; instead, they’re more beholden to wealthy contributors who are more likely to want tax cuts.

Workers, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly marginalized. Despite the recession, the nation’s income has continued to grow, but a larger portion of it goes to the wealthy, Eisenbray said.

“Part of what’s going on is that everyone, all blue collar workers and even white collar college-educated workers, have seen their wages stagnate or fall in the past 10 or 12 years,” Eisenbray said. “They’ve lost their retiree health benefits, their employer-covered health care, their pensions have been virtually wiped out. There has been this huge erosion across the board in the compensation of the American middle- and working-class, and the public employees have held out longest. They had a good relationship with the politicians they bargained with. But now they’re under attack.”

“Lower-wage jobs are coming back first,” said labor economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-leaning think tank. “But it’s all bleak and it’s all due to lack of demand for work to be done. We’re still not getting more than just what we need to hang on,” Shierholz said. “These last few months have looked better, but we cannot yet claim robust recovery by any stretch.”

The debate over what to do with Apple’s reserve money has been “one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders,” writes the Economic Policy Institute’s Isaac Shapiro. The workers who manufacture and sell Apple products, he notes, have been left entirely out of the debate. Despite the notoriously grim conditions at some factories which make Apple products, low-level employees are unlikely to see any benefit from a massive corporate surplus.

Social Security

In These Times

These critically important findings are contained in the report “Strengthening Social Security: What do Americans Want?” compiled by the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). “The American people, contrary to popular belief, are overwhelmingly willing to pay more for Social Security, and that includes every age and income group, across party lines, and even Tea Partiers,” observes Monique Morrissey, an Economic Policy Institute economist specializing in retirement security issues.

“There is a lot of support for increasing benefits,” Morrissey told Working In These Times, noting that the report found 84 percent of respondents believe that benefits are not high enough, and 75 percent support higher benefits—a finding that runs directly counter to the push for lower benefits promoted by long-time austerity champion billionaire Pete Peterson and the corporate-led Fix the Debt coalition.

The Gantz brothers are doing their best to get Washington’s policy community involved. They screened the film at the Economic Policy Institute and had planned a screening at the Center for American Progress that was canceled by weather.

RYAN’S BUDGET COULD COST 2 MILLION JOBS    According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget would decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.7 percent and cost 2. million jobs by next year. EPI also estimated that Ryan’s budget would increase the unemployment rate by between 0.6 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points.

Read more at http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Blogs/Debt-and-Taxes/2013/03/14/Orszag-Our-Fiscal-Cliff-Tax-Mistake.aspx#0zMUz1o5ZtA3EBcK.99

But one researcher said Ryan’s budget is a “very austere vision” for America.

“The insane amount of cutting that he’s calling for is absolutely undoable given our economy’s weakness right now,” said Rebecca Thiess, budget policy analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, in an interview with Progress Illinois. “The Republicans are trying to sell to the American people that cuts are necessary because we have such runaway projected debt levels, but his budget doesn’t actually target what our debt levels actually come from, which is projected health costs.”

Thiess said the Economic Policy Institute helped draft the House Progressive Caucus budget, called “Back To Work.” In stark contrast to Ryan’s budget, the Progressive Caucus budget includes a $4.2 trillion tax hike and $2.1 trillion in economic stimulus and investment from 2013 to 2015. Saying that it would create 7 million jobs in the first year, the budget is set to decrease the deficit by $4.4 trillion over 10 years. It would also increase the highest tax rate from 39.6 percent to 49 percent.

Ryan’s budget is likely to pass in the House though, according to Thiess, but it will “go nowhere” after that.

“Paul Ryan’s budget is saying ‘no budget deficit’ is what we should be pursuing right now,” she said. “It has no regard for what we need given our current economic context, which is jobs. We’ve got 4 million Americans unemployed and economic growth and what the American people need isn’t getting their safety net crushed right now.”

However, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recently broke down the implications of the BLS survey, and determined that greener industries actually grow faster than the overall economy: For every increase of one percentage point in the share of green jobs that made up an industry’s employment — or its “green intensity” — overall employment in that industry increases 0.034 percentage points higher.

“America was much more equal when you go back to the late ’50s, and ’60s,” Nicholas Finio, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, told Campus Progress. “Deliberate policy decisions have allowed this to happen.”

The silver lining: Higher marginal tax rates and better labor protections can make America more equal. “Policy is what made it this way,” Finio said, ”and policy can turn it back.”

“The fact is that we have an economy now that’s working well only for those at the very top,” said Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C. “Unless we adopt a new approach to economic policy, we’re going to continue going down this path, which means growth that does not really benefit the great majority of people in this country.”

Nationally, Mishel says the declining value of the federal minimum wage is a major factor driving inequality.

Some argue that raising the minimum wage offers benefits to those who may not need them. This argument is also flawed. The Economic Policy Institute’s latest analysis shows that most low-wage workers live in low-wage households, and 84% of the workers in low-wage jobs are at least 20 years old. But, regardless of age or need, anyone who shows up to work and puts in hard hours deserves a wage that keeps him or her out of poverty.

“The strong showing in February is welcome,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “But given the jobs deficit of 8.9 million jobs (from the 2007 recession), even at February’s growth rate we wouldn’t get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate until 2017.”

“There is no evidence of a ‘skills’ mismatch in the labor market,” said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “What we have is a broad-based lack of demand for workers, not a skills problem.”

In her view, businesses aren’t hiring because demand for their goods and services hasn’t risen enough to require new workers.

BOBKOFF: It’s simple math. We are still way below employment levels from before the financial meltdown. Heidi Shierholz is a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She says we still need 9 million more jobs to get back to healthy levels.

HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: It’s a little sobering ’cause you start to think, okay, but even if we got a report this strong every single month from here on out, given how large the job deficit is in our labor market, it would still take until the middle of 2017 to get back to the pre-recession unemployment rate.

BOBKOFF: And Shierholz says much of the drop in the unemployment rate can be attributed to job seekers dropping out of the labor force. But enough with the naysayers, says Brian Jones of Societe Generale.

Monique Morrissey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told the  Post that life expectancy “has increased mainly among the privileged class.” For many, she says, raising the retirement age would amount to a significant benefit cut.

“Life expectancy has increased mainly among the privileged class,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist who focuses on retirement issues at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization. “For many people, raising the retirement age would amount to a significant benefit cut.”

Andrew Fieldhouse, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimates that the plan would cost the country 2 million jobs in 2014 alone.

The budget plan that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled on Tuesday would eliminate 2 million jobs in 2014, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

If implemented, Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” plan would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent and increase the unemployment rate by 0.6 to 0.8 percentage points, EPI found.

About 17 percent of the women who would be affected by a minimum-wage increase have children and almost a quarter of them are their family’s sole breadwinner, according to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute. Female minimum-wage earners also overwhelmingly live in the South, where every state except Florida has a state wage at or below the federal minimum.

The JOLTS data are also useful for diagnosing what’s behind our persistently high unemployment. In today’s economy, unemployed workers far outnumber job openings in every sector. This demonstrates that the main problem is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings.

—Heidi Shierholz, “Job Openings and Hiring Dropped in December, and Have Not Increased since Early 2012,” Economic Policy Institute, Feb. 12, 2013

THE CASE FOR $2 TRILLION STIMULUS – Fiscal Times’s Andrew Fieldhouse: “Ensuring a rapid return to full economic health using borrowed money is actually fiscally responsible — austerity will simply replace structural budget deficits with bigger cyclical deficits, and a poorer nation will have a harder time sustaining its debt. By boosting the economy and shrinking the cyclical deficit, efficient deficit-financed stimulus would even presently reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio. Accepting bigger budget deficits to boost demand is the only means of guaranteeing a full recovery as opposed to banking on its emergence perpetually four years away.” http://bit.ly/XVekGA

And the need is real. The federal government classified 10.5 million Americans as “working poor,” including 4.1 million full-time workers. Their ranks have been swollen by an economy that’s funneled 98 percent of all income gains to the top 10 percent of earners since 1980, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Liberal-leaning economists say the move would help millions of workers without better prospects pay their bills. It would also pump more money into the economy through higher consumer spending, they argue.

“Unfortunately, for far too many people, the ladder that they’re on doesn’t have a whole lot of rungs,” said Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.

But the available data suggest that roughly half the workers likely to be affected by the $9-an-hour level proposed by the president are in families earning less than $40,000 a year. So while raising the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour may not be particularly well targeted as an anti-poverty proposal, it’s not badly targeted, either.