Full Employment: Are We There Yet?
The Atlantic/Gillian White
Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says that the number of prime-age Americans who are actually working remains low, even by historical standards. And the wage and productivity growth that’s happened hasn’t been significant enough or speedy enough. For those reasons, Biven says the economy isn’t at full employment. But he says that he gets why people think it might be time to call it: The labor market has tightened up and now some economists are starting to fear that continuing expansionary policies—essentially, keeping interest rates artificially low—in hopes of drumming up jobs and growth could instead result in inflation. But Bivens would be inclined to wait to see if any evidence of that inflation shows in the data. And that hasn’t happened yet. (Josh quoted throughout)
The Atlantic
May 27, 2017
Wage theft costs low-paid California workers $2 billion per year
San Francisco Chronicle/Dominic Fracassa
Each year, minimum-wage violations by California employers sap the state’s workforce of nearly $2 billion in earnings, increasing the financial vulnerability of already at-risk populations and creating a drag on the state’s overall economic health, according to a report released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington. Employees who are supposed to be getting paid the minimum wage in California are, on average, losing $64 per week and about $3,300 annually — 22 percent of their earnings — from employers shortchanging their hourly workers. Though the current state minimum wage of $10.50 an hour translates to an annual salary of $21,840, minimum-wage workers don’t always have full-time work, so they collect only $11,700 a year in wages on average. That forces them “to rely on public assistance programs to survive and provide for their families,” the report’s authors wrote. (whole story)
San Francisco Chronicle
May 26, 2017
The New Deal as raw deal for blacks in segregated communities
The Washington Post/Charles Lane
Book review for The Color of Law.
Washington Post
May 26, 2017
Mark Zuckerberg supports universal basic income. What is it?
CNN Money/Patrick Gillespie
Critics say the idea has good intentions, but it doesn’t solve bigger problems related to abysmal wage growth in recent decades. They also say it challenges the notion that you need to work to earn money. “It’s a misguided mission,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center. “It’s a tech CEO view of the world that I think is distorted.”
CNN Money
May 26, 2017
“If you hang around with executives, you adopt a certain view of the world, and it’s a view of the world that seems to be informing his policies,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning advocacy group in Washington. “It takes a lot to think cutting corporate taxes is central to tax policy when corporate profits are near historic highs.”
The New York Times
May 26, 2017
Don’t panic about a robot takeover just yet
Marketplace Tech/Ben Johnson
You’ve heard it before: the robots are coming and they’re going to steal our jobs. But, wait a second — the Economic Policy Institute has crunched the data and is now arguing that the effects of automation are a little overstated. One of the authors of the report, Lawrence Mishel, joined us to break down why and what he thinks workers should actually be worrying about. Then to cap off the week, we’ll play Silicon Tally with Rachel Metz, an editor at the MIT Technology Review.
Marketplace
May 26, 2017
Things like creating good-paying jobs and addressing inequality. Our friends at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) are out with a new report looking at the ongoing discussion about automation and employment. You’ve heard the narrative before: The robots are coming, and they’re taking our jobs. EPI’s conclusion? Enough already. “What is remarkable about this media narrative is that there is a strong desire to believe it despite so little evidence to support these claims,” authors Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens argue. “There clearly are serious problems in the labor market that have suppressed job and wage growth for far too long; but these problems have their roots in intentional policy decisions regarding globalization, collective bargaining, labor standards, and unemployment levels, not technology.” (whole story)
Alliance for American Manufacturing
May 26, 2017
Supporters of the policy are optimistic it could help people escape from poverty. The increase might also spur economic growth as workers are able to afford basic needs. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive nonprofit, found a federal increase would lift wages for 41 million workers without many consequences. “The federal minimum wage was established in 1938 to help ensure that all work would be fairly rewarded and provide a decent quality of life,” EPI said in a statement when the bill was being introduced. “The current minimum wage falls far short of this goal. Thanks to congressional inaction, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has been eroded by inflation.”
Inside Sources
May 26, 2017
Marketplace
May 26, 2017
“You have to look at what’s being bellowed at the top of the administration’s lungs—‘We’re supporting workers’—versus what’s happening behind closed doors,” says Heidi Shierholz, who leads the Perkins Project on Worker Rights and Wages at the Economic Policy Institute and served as chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration. Shierholz and her colleagues have tracked moves by the Trump administration—and its GOP allies in Congress—that would, among other things, make it easier for companies to hide their safety problems and other workplace violations, as well as hurt workers saving for their retirement.
Fortune
May 26, 2017