The very first thing we talked about, he pulled out a graph that I’d made with Larry Mishel, which showed the gap between productivity growth and median compensation. Okay. So productivity growth grows, grows, grows — not as fast as we’d like but it does grow, you know, a percent percent and a half per year — on trend, and the median compensation, the compensation workers right in the middle of the scale — was flat, flat flat for, you know, not all of those years, and in fact, in the latter nineties, when the job market really tightened up precisely like my earlier theories, were trying predict, then you saw some action at the median. But for the most part — and by the way, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens have a forthcoming paper on this which is really elucidated, you need to get them on here and talk to them about it — and Joe Biden, who was the vice president elect then pointed to that graph and said this is what I want to work on. I want middle-class people to get a fair shake. I want to think about the policy agenda that’s going to, in my words, relink median compensation and overall economic growth. And that agenda is a deep one.
Bloomberg
May 14, 2021
“Employers can’t really expect to post jobs that are actually inherently different and harder than pre-pandemic,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Money. “They can’t expect to post them at the same wages, and get the same number of workers.”
Yahoo Finance
May 14, 2021
Another point to consider: Many of the anecdotes about the inability to hire workers are coming from restaurant owners and others in the relatively low-paying service industry. Yet according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, low-wage sectors as a whole showed “notably faster job growth” in April than other sectors. EPI argued that a bigger problem is the lingering pandemic effects on schools, child care providers and families, which are forcing many women to stay home to care for dependents.
LA Times
May 14, 2021
One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.
For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.
New York Times
May 14, 2021
One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.
For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.
New York Times
May 14, 2021
Research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and Howard University professor Ron Hira found the visa program was exploited by outsourcing companies and that “most H-1B employers … are taking advantage of a flawed H-1B prevailing wage rule to underpay their workers … resulting in major savings in labor costs for companies that use the H-1B.”
The institute’s Daniel Costa and Hira found that in 2019, IT staffing and outsourcing companies had applied for large numbers of H-1B workers at the second-lowest wage levels, while Google, Apple, Cisco and Oracle had a mix of higher and lower levels.
The Mercury News
May 14, 2021
Because of the decline in union membership, “American workers are losing $200 billion a year,” she said, citing unspecified research. “So, this impacts not only the quality of life of the American worker, this impacts the quality of life of all Americans because it impacts our economy.”
“And to the extent that we are interconnected — when our economy does well, when the middle class does well — we all do well, which means unions must do well.”
The task force is aimed at bolstering union membership and worker power, specifically in organizing and bargaining. Harris seemed to be citing research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which studied the impact of “deunionizing” over the past few decades.
Business Insider
May 14, 2021
“Customers are coming back faster than restaurants can staff up,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “By raising pay, they are able to get more workers in the door.”
Associated Press
May 14, 2021
CEOs of 350 large publicly traded companies in 2019 earned an average 320 times more than the typical worker in the same company, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, the average ratio was 61-to-1.
Huffpost
May 14, 2021