Despite growing levels of educational attainment, there is still significant dispersion between the groups of people who do and do not have college degrees, new research from the Economic Policy Institute finds.
Axios
May 15, 2019
Michigan public school teachers made 23% less than other college-educated workers in 2017 on average, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Michigan Live
May 15, 2019
Meanwhile, progressive economists had their own reasons for challenging the focus on the gig economy. This theme became prominent in the work of the Economic Policy Institute’s former president and current senior fellow, Lawrence Mishel, and has continued in subsequent work either written or published by EPI.
The American Prospect
May 15, 2019
Wisconsin Public Radio
May 14, 2019
“Getting profitable by squeezing down costs is going to create even further problems, with the high turnover rate with drivers and challenge the new drivers so they can expand,” said Larry Mishel, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “There are huge contradictions at the heart of their business model.” Last year, Mishel worked on a study of Uber drivers and concluded that their W-2 equivalent hourly wage is less than what 90% of U.S. workers earn. “Our results indicate that Uber drivers earn low wages and compensation and the total hours and compensation in the gig economy represent a very small share of total hours and compensation in the overall economy,” Mishel’s study said.
MarketWatch
May 14, 2019
An Economic Policy Institute report from 2018 found that after taking into account vehicle expenses and depreciation, Social Security and Medicare taxes paid after the fact, the average Uber driver wage was $10.87 per hour. Basic statistics knowledge suggests that many drivers would make below their local minimum wage, which varies nationally from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour in some cities in California.
Salon
May 14, 2019
In 2015, the top 1% of families in the U.S. made more than 25 times what families in the bottom 99% did, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. That represents a reversal of a trend that saw the income gap narrow from the time of the Depression until the 1970s. Given the populist pushback against other “one percenters” by movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the backlash against the U.S. banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis, it might seem logical for athletes to draw some of the public’s ire toward the superrich.
The Christian Science Monitor
May 14, 2019
Empirical evidence indicates that union members generally earn higher wages than their non-union colleagues. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the transportation and warehousing sector in 2018, the median wage of union members was 25.5% higher than non-union workers. The differential calculated by the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute, which takes age, education and other factors into account, is 13.6%.
LA Times
May 14, 2019
“This may prove to be another ploy to coerce a trade deal from China’s negotiating team,” Robert E. Scott, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., told MultiBriefs in an email. According to him, that tactic will not remedy the basic problem of the U.S. economy, namely chronic trade deficits, the gap between what America exports to and imports from China.
MultiBriefs
May 14, 2019
Part of the problem is that the US no longer has the manufacturing base it once did. According to Robert E. Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, over the past two decades, the US has lost roughly a third of its manufacturing capacity, as more than 90,000 factories have closed and 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost.
CNN
May 14, 2019