In a virtual talk hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, Mr. Casey reiterated many of his long-standing policy issues — from addressing age discrimination to expanding Medicaid to blocking cheap Chinese imports — framed in the context of legislative action this spring.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
May 7, 2021
According to EPI’s research, CEO compensation jumped 14 percent from 2018 to 2019. Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, said the increased CEO pay seen at various casino companies last year was largely due to the stock market’s rapid recovery over the course of the pandemic, since a majority of executive compensation comes from cashing out stock options or stock grants.
Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 7, 2021
Kyle Moore, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said he’s encouraged by the Fed’s increased focus on unemployment and higher tolerance for inflation. “In the past there have been Fed chairs who have been overly wary of inflation and they’ve often tried to fight it at the expense of employment,” he says. “That has disproportionately fallen on Black workers.”
Quartz
May 7, 2021
- The unemployment rate is 10.3% among 20- to 24-year-olds, and 13.3% among 18- to 19-year-olds, compared with the 5.3% unemployment among those over 25.
“We’re still in a huge hole,” says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. “We are far from being recovered now.”
Axios
May 7, 2021
“Employers have the ability to set the terms of the contract,” said Elise Gould, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
“They’re really holding all the cards. They have all the leverage,” Gould said.
Gould noted that the country was still down 8.4 million jobs in March from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. The economy had been steadily adding jobs before the virus left millions out of work, she said, so theoretically the jobs shortfall is even higher, perhaps as high as 11 million.
Detroit Free Press
May 7, 2021
“We are certainly not seeing rapid wage growth that would really be the red flag of ‘Wow, things are tight. Employers truly on a really widespread basis can’t find the workers that they need,’” Shierholz said.
NPR
May 7, 2021
Many labor and retirement analysts say that raising the minimum wage would be a vital step for advancing the economic security of lower-wage workers in the second half of life.
It would allow some to retire later, which could then boost their Social Security benefits when they finally claim them, said Ben Zipperer, economist at the progressive nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
Next Avenue
May 5, 2021
Despite anecdotal evidence from businesses, liberal economists said it’s unlikely the United States is facing a labor shortage. Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, noted that there are still far more unemployed workers than job openings, according to federal government surveys. She said there haven’t been meaningful wage increases, either, which are a hallmark of labor shortages.
“It’s certainly happening in places,” Shierholz said of businesses having a hard time finding workers. “The real question is not whether it’s happening here or there, but is it a driving force in the labor market? And when you look at the data, it just doesn’t come up.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
May 5, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute notes that income inequality in the United States has been worsening for years: “From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5%. … In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.” Our level of income inequality is now closer to that of developing countries in Africa and Latin American than to our European allies.
The Washington Post
May 5, 2021
But are unemployment payments the culprit here? “It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a real driving factor,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “There is basically a lever employers can pull if they truly are facing a labor shortage of some kind: They can pay more to either attract new workers into the labor force or poach workers who are already in the labor force.”
Shierholz noted there have yet to be signs of significant wage growth in the industries where workers are purported to be in severe shortage, and that previous data during the pandemic and the 2008 economic recession demonstrated that expanded unemployment benefits had minimal to no impact on whether workers returned to work.
The American Prospect
May 5, 2021
“There are lots of anecdotal reports swirling around about employers who can’t find workers,” Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a Tuesday op-ed. “But a closer look reveals there may be a lot less to this than meets the eye.”
Shierholz said that while there may be bona fide labor shortages in some pockets of the country, there are still too few jobs for too many unemployed workers.
“In the latest data on job openings, there were nearly 40 percent more unemployed workers than job openings overall, and more than 80 percent more unemployed workers than job openings in the leisure and hospitality sector,” she said.
She added that those businesses should raise wages to attract more workers, particularly because service jobs “are inherently more stressful and potentially dangerous because workers now have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns.”
The Hill
May 5, 2021
Biden’s plans amount to a massive gamble that Democratic efforts to double down on government redistribution of wealth and resources won’t trigger a backlash. Elise Gould, economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the pandemic revealed “a tale of two economies,” starting with the substantially higher infection and death rates of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the US compared with Whites.
“Just the sheer numbers of people who have died and gotten seriously ill and seeing the disparities in those numbers — I think makes it difficult not to do something and not to do something big to fix this.”
Business Insider
May 3, 2021
The U.S. and other market economies should create a “reciprocal” trade remedy program to combat unfair foreign trade practices, Casey said on Friday.
“We should consider working with allies to create a common defense against illegal subsidies from nonmarket economies like China,” the Senate Finance Committee member said at a virtual event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute. “This could mean establishing reciprocal remedies against trade distortions, such as illegal subsidies. Measures could be limited scope, such as anti-dumping or countervailing duties on goods from these nonmarket economies.”
Politico Morning Trade
May 3, 2021
In a virtual talk hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, Mr. Casey reiterated many of his long-standing policy issues — from addressing age discrimination to expanding Medicaid to blocking cheap Chinese imports — framed in the context of legislative action this spring.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
May 3, 2021
According to EPI’s research, CEO compensation jumped 14 percent from 2018 to 2019. Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, said the increased CEO pay seen at various casino companies last year was largely due to the stock market’s rapid recovery over the course of the pandemic, since a majority of executive compensation comes from cashing out stock options or stock grants.
Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 3, 2021
- The unemployment rate is 10.3% among 20- to 24-year-olds, and 13.3% among 18- to 19-year-olds, compared with the 5.3% unemployment among those over 25.
“We’re still in a huge hole,” says Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. “We are far from being recovered now.”
Axios
May 3, 2021
Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C., applauds these programs because of the heightened risks that Black-owned businesses face.
“Even before the pandemic, Black-owned businesses had less of a cushion to withstand a downturn because their owners financed the businesses with their savings or funds from their families and friends,” Wilson says in a phone interview.
Although less than 10 percent of all U.S. businesses are Black-owned, they are more likely to be in vulnerable industries. One estimate, Wilson says, showed that 40 percent of the revenues of Black-owned businesses are earned in the five most vulnerable sectors—including leisure, hospitality, and retail—compared with 25 percent of the revenues of all U.S. businesses.
“Black-owned businesses also faced barriers in obtaining PPP loans because they didn’t have a relationship with a bank before the pandemic,” she explains. “Large, publicly traded corporations were the first to get the loans so that the $349 billion originally allocated was quickly depleted.”
The Progressive
April 30, 2021
The $15 minimum wage for federal contract work Nelson refers to comes via an executive order issued this week. It offers a major pay bump for the workers whose minimum wage currently sits at $10.95 — the Economic Policy Institute estimates it will impact 390,000 federal workers.
Jacobin
April 30, 2021
In the 1930s, Southern lawmakers pushed the idea of varying the minimum wage to cater to lower-wage regions, according to economist Heidi Shierholz at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. And she said the policy had similar drawbacks then to the drawbacks it would have today: “It would lock in existing low-wage conditions in certain regions that are the result of historic racism.”
In the South, for instance. “That would actually result in a higher Black-white wage gap nationally. Because white workers are more concentrated in places with higher wages, and Black workers are more concentrated in places with lower wages.”
Shierholz, who served as chief economist in the Obama administration’s Labor Department, believes the federal government should set a single nationwide minimum wage of at least $15 an hour. Then state and local governments can set their own minimum wages higher, as warranted by local economic conditions and the cost of living.
NPR Marketplace
April 30, 2021
“The economically relevant question is: Is it happening in a large enough scale to be driving anything? We still have officially unemployed workers far outstripping job openings,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, a former DOL chief economist during the Obama administration. “In just numbers, there are not enough job openings to go around right now, period. That’s the key thing that’s keeping us from putting more workers back to work.”
Wage growth — usually a sign that employers are competing to find workers — has been unchanged at 3.4 percent since December. And the number of people looking for work on the job-search platform Joblist has increased 10 percent so far in April, according to data provided to POLITICO.
Shierholz also points to the 916,000 new jobs added in the March jobs report as evidence that people are returning to work.
“That was extraordinary job growth, which is hard to square with really loud calls of ‘I can’t find the workers I need’ when over 900,000 people managed to get hired,” she said.
Politico
April 30, 2021
Kevin Dempsey, president of AISI, which represents major steelmakers, argues that the consolidation is a sign of health and increased investment for the industry, and the current supply shortage is a temporary bottleneck being experienced by many other industries, including semiconductors.
He cited a March study https://www.epi.org/publication/why-global-steel-surpluses-warrant-u-s-section-232-import-measures by the Economic Policy Institute showing the industry has committed to $15.7 billion in new or upgraded American steel facilities since the tariffs were implemented in 2018, which will add 3,200 direct new jobs.
Reuters
April 30, 2021
The government requires that many employees of contractors be paid a prevailing wage — essentially the going rate for an occupation in a particular place, as determined by the Labor Department — but their pay will rise as a result of the order if the prevailing wage is less than $15 an hour. An analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that up to 390,000 workers will directly benefit.
New York Times
April 30, 2021
“In fact, the pay gap between CEOs and their workers is now among the largest in history. According to one study, CEOs make 320 times what their average workers make.”
Biden is referring to an annual survey by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, which examines the pay of chief executives at 350 of the largest companies. The ratio of CEO-to-worker compensation was 320-to-1 in 2019, up from 293-to-1 in 2018 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965, the group says.
The Washington Post
April 30, 2021
The move by Biden could raise wages for up to 390,000 workers, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Per EPI, half of the workers who will get a raise are Black or Hispanic — and half are women.
Business Insider
April 30, 2021
The order will raise wages for up to 390,000 workers, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimated on Tuesday. Advocates for a higher minimum wage have long supported such a measure for federal workers. Though Biden can’t raise the federal minimum wage for all workers without Congress, raising the wage for federal contracts helps hundreds of thousands and bypasses a legislative body that is stifled by the filibuster.
New York Magazine
April 30, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute estimates up to 390,000 low-wage contractors will see a raise as a result of the executive order. EPI estimates the average annual pay increase for year-round workers will be up to $3,100, largely benefiting women and Black or Hispanic workers.
Yahoo Finance
April 30, 2021
Instead of another round of broad checks, lawmakers should focus on extending unemployment benefits and the child tax credit because they could provide “longer-run fixes” for American households, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
April 30, 2021
For many Americans, that might sound like an ominous proposal as it would mean things like groceries, restaurant bills, and leisure activities would all cost more, but Robert Scott, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, says higher inflation is actually a good thing.
“A tight labor market and a rapidly growing economy, if we can get there, is going to sustain higher levels of wage increase,” explained Scott. “So, you might be paying more: 2-3% a year more for your food, and groceries, and rent, but your wages might be rising at 3% or 4% or 5% a year. That’s good news. If wages are rising more than prices, you’re going to see a rising standard of living.”
Scripps National News
April 30, 2021