Media clips
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South Carolina and Montana residents will be cut off from federal pandemic unemployment benefits next month, with Republican governors in each state claiming the payments have led to a workforce shortage. Economists say that’s not the case.
“Employers are just angry that they are unable to find workers at relatively low wages,” Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said in an interview. “The jobs being posted are more stressful, more risky, harder jobs than they were pre-COVID. … When the job is more stressful, then it should command a higher wage.”
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Shierholz told ABC News that after the $600 bonus on unemployment expired at the end of July, “You should have seen a bump up in employment, and you can’t see that in the data so it just points to that it wasn’t really causing the labor supply effect. It’s just difficult to imagine that something half that big is having any effect now.”
But a report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a more likely reason some employers aren’t attracting workers is that many of these businesses are offering too-low wages. In a true labor shortage, the report states, wages will rise as does competition among employers. But wages aren’t growing — at least not quickly enough.
ABC News May 14, 2021 -
Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed the U.S. added 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the 1 million gain economists had forecast. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde, Romaine Bostick and Joe Weisenthal on “What’d You Miss?” about the growing pains as the economy rapidly reopens.
Bloomberg TV May 14, 2021 -
Valerie Wilson: Child care responsibilities disproportionately fall on women. And so at a time when everyone was home, children and parents, women clearly took on more of those responsibilities, but they took on those responsibilities at the same time that they would usually be working. So there was some difficult tradeoffs.
PBS Newshour May 14, 2021 -
The Biden administration plans to name Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade official, to head the Labor Department’s international affairs division, according to people familiar with the appointment.
Ms. Lee, who most recently served as president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that often critiques free trade policies, is slated to become the deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs. In that job, she will oversee the bureau that investigates labor rights, forced labor and child trafficking around the globe.
Wall Street Journal May 14, 2021 -
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 -
May 14, 2021
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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