Even some Nafta critics believe withdrawal would do the U.S. more harm than good. Robert Scott of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote the 2011 report widely cited by Nafta opponents claiming 700,000 U.S. jobs lost from the pact. Killing Nafta, Mr. Scott says, won’t bring them back. With the resulting higher costs, “multinationals like GM , Ford, and Toyota may just decide to shift production to Asia or Europe,” he says. “The U.S. benefits from having that production in North America, even if it’s in Mexico.”
The Wall Street Journal
October 16, 2017
In Corporate America these days, business gurus never tire of hammering home the importance of “building up the brand.” Over the past three decades, in America’s progressive circles, no institution has a done a better job at building up the brand — for careful, cogent number crunching — than the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute. Now the 31-year-old EPI stands poised to begin a new era. Thea Lee will next month succeed veteran economist Larry Mishel as the think tank’s president. Lee’s no stranger to EPI. She worked there early in her career, over 20 years ago, specializing on global trade during the pivotal debates on NAFTA. Lee continued that trade policy work at the AFL-CIO, America’s labor center, where she went on to become the labor federation’s policy director and then its deputy chief of staff. What will Lee’s new role mean for EPI’s widely respected work on income distribution and the squeeze on America’s working families? Inequality.org sat down with Lee earlier this week to get her take.
Inequality.org
October 11, 2017
As Economic Policy Institute Senior Economist Elise Gould wrote, the drop-off in unemployment “was almost certainly due to Hurricane Irma, which struck smack in the middle of the reference period, and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.” Over the phone, she told The Intercept that the storms had “a larger effect than I would have expected.” (Elise quoted throughout)
The Intercept
October 11, 2017
U.S. STILL SHORT ON TEACHERS: America is still short hundreds of thousands of teachers years after the Great Recession created a gap that has only widened since, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. Per the report, the number of teachers and education staff has failed to get anywhere near its pre-recession level and isn’t keeping pace with a growing student population. Public education jobs are down by 128,000 compared to nine years ago, and with growing enrollment added on, the report estimates the country is short some 327,000 teachers. Read it here.
Politico Pro
October 11, 2017
Recent findings by the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based think tank backed by labor unions, suggest that public schools are already in a teacher shortage bind: An Oct. 6 report found that given rising student populations, public schools are short by about 327,000 educators.
USA Today
October 11, 2017
“Generally, people have very little leverage to get a good deal from their bosses, individually and collectively,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. “People who have a decent job are happy just to hold on to what they have.” … In 1972, so-called production and nonsupervisory workers — some 80 percent of the American work force — brought home average wages equivalent to $738.86 a week in today’s dollars, after adjusting for inflation, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. Last year, the average worker brought home $723.67 a week.
The New York Times
October 10, 2017
Others are not so sure. Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute thinks wage losses in low-paid, hard-hit sectors, like food services, may have temporarily pulled the overall wage average up: “It’s clear that we are still not at genuine full employment, and the Federal Reserve should keep interest rates low until we are.”
Quartz
October 10, 2017
It’s the explicit goal of monetary policy to maintain a certain level of unemployment to control inflation. If the national unemployment rate gets low enough, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which literally throws people out of work to slow inflation down. Our lawmakers’ devotion to austerity, which also sucks spending out of the economy, vastly compounds the problem. Even at the peaks of recent business cycles, we’ve had more people looking for work than available job openings.
The Week
October 10, 2017
Now, many large employers — from tech giants to retail and restaurant chains — include prohibitions on collective workplace arbitrations. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute estimates that about 60 million American workers are covered by such agreements, and as many as 25 million of them cannot arbitrate collectively.
NPR Morning Edition
October 6, 2017
Polis cited a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute that found 2.4 million workers in the 10 most populous states lost $8 billion annually for minimum wage violations alone. “Clearly there’s not enough incentive already for employers to follow our existing law,” he said. “The last thing we need is another loophole to avoid the law.”
The Hill
October 5, 2017