“This should throw some cold water on those hyping the explosion of freelancing and the rapidly changing nature of work,” added Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute.
Market Watch
June 8, 2018
“This should throw some cold water on those hyping the explosion of freelancing and the rapidly changing nature of work,” said Lawrence Mishel, a fellow at Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Reuters
June 8, 2018
“It should be pointed out that this measure does not completely capture the rise of what is referred to as ‘fissured work,'” said Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute in a statement. “The contract firm workers in this survey must answer yes to the question ‘Do you usually work at the customer’s worksite?’ and much of the fissuring of the workplace we see involves offsite work.” In other words, the eye of the beholder counts at least in part for the BLS data
MultiBriefs
June 8, 2018
There’s a messy family feud brewing in the Group of Seven. We’ll get to that. But first let’s take a look at what may be one of the most overblown phenomena of the past decade: the gig economy. WSJ labor reporter Eric Morath sums up a new government survey: The emergence of the gig economy in the past decade has scarcely changed the U.S. labor market. Indeed, all those Uber drivers, contractors and temp workers added up to a scant 6.9% of the labor force last year, down from 7.4% in 2005, the last time the survey was taken. More than 90% of Americans were on the payroll of the firm for which they performed work. “This should throw some cold water on those hyping the explosion of freelancing and the rapidly changing nature of work,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel.
The Wall Street Journal
June 8, 2018
Valerie Wilson, director of the economic policy institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy, said the report challenges criticisms that people who don’t receive raises aren’t aggressive enough in negotiating a pay raise. “It bolsters the fact that pay gaps are real, they’re not imagined and they’re not the fault of the people who are unpaid,” Wilson said. The report found that when workers aren’t given explanations for being denied a raise, or when they don’t believe the reasons given, they are less satisfied at their current jobs and are more likely to quit. Still, Wilson noted that the consequences of being denied a raise can linger for an entire career by hindering workers’ ability to change between jobs or move up into a job that pays more. (Valerie quoted throughout)
The Washington Post
June 7, 2018
D.C.’s overall minimum wage is $12.50 per hour, and will increase to $15 by 2020. By law, employers have to ensure that tipped workers make that amount as well—by combining the base wage of $3.33 with their tips—and if workers’ wages are too low, employers are required to supplement them. In practice, employers often fail to do this. Research by the Economic Policy Institute found that recent Department of Labor investigations of close to 9,000 restaurants resulted in workers receiving nearly $5.5 million in back pay because of tipped wage violations.
Talk Poverty
June 7, 2018
Some research, like a recent Economic Policy Institute analysis, has focused on a narrow definition of the “gig economy” that only includes on-demand apps like Uber. It suggests that the number of people working in the gig economy is extremely small. Other surveys, like those conducted by McKinsey and the Freelancers Union and Upwork, have included anyone who has completed a freelance project, arriving at much larger estimates of the gig economy’s size.
Quartz
June 6, 2018
There’s another possibility as well, which is that politicians are increasingly seeing a gridlocked Congress as a dead end when it comes to getting things done. At the municipal level, left-leaning district attorneys like Larry Krasner have been able to immediately and substantively change harsh policies that put poor people of color in jail at disproportionate rates. At the state level, attorneys general similarly wield major influence over policy. They’re often the surest safeguards for labor rights, as the Economic Policy Institute noted in a May report. They can place some buffers between immigrants and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and shore up state anti-discrimination law. When Ellison tweeted that he intends to be “the People’s Lawyer,” he may well have had these facts in mind.
The New Republic
June 6, 2018
As corporate media outlets predictably trumpeted the right-wing narrative that Social Security is in dire financial straits after the Social Security Trustees’ annual report was released on Tuesday, advocacy groups and experts were quick to denounce the fearmongering and correct the record, arguing that the new analysis shows the program is “stronger than ever.” “Each year, the release of the trustees report provides an occasion for Social Security scaremongering by those wanting to shrink our social insurance system,” Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, noted in a blog post on Tuesday. “But not only can we afford current benefits, we can afford to expand them.”
Common Dreams
June 6, 2018
May’s jobs report showed that, on average, black college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 earn $3.34 less per hour than their white counterparts. Over the course of a year this amounts to a difference of about $7,000. Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, also reveal that the gulf between the wages of female and male young college graduates stands at $3.15 per hour. Despite the large pay gaps, these workers earned similar credentials and have had similar levels of experience. Elise Gould, a senior economist at the EPI and one of the authors of the report, said: (quote Elise’s Tweet)
Indy 100
June 6, 2018