While the wage gap between men and women is smaller now than it was some 50 years ago, the rate of progress has slowed over time. According to the Economic Policy Institute, progress in closing the wage gap stalled in the mid-1990s. While a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimates the gender pay gap won’t close in the United States until 2059, a report from the AAUW claims more recent lags in the rate of progress will push the closure of the gap back to 2152. Globally, the World Economic Forum estimates the gender wage gap won’t close for another 170 years if progress continues at its current rate. That means a woman born tomorrow will sadly never see an end to the global wage gap.
Bustle
April 4, 2017
Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, highlights the fact that the subset of people affected by the rule are already on their way to becoming permanent residents and, after five years, even citizens. “So the government keeping them from working is really only a temporary thing, based on backlogs,” said Costa. “That fact weighs in favor of letting them work, I think. Many of them are just Americans-in-waiting.”
The Guardian
April 4, 2017
No son inmigrantes indocumentados ni trabajan “bajo el radar”, son casi medio millón de “trabajadores huéspedes” con visas temporales que con frecuencia sufren condiciones de “esclavitud moderna”, una situación que podría agravarse si el Departamento del Trabajo pierde fondos para proteger sus derechos, denunció este viernes el Instituto de Política Económica (“Economic Policy Institute”, EPI).
La Opinion
April 4, 2017
But there’s also broad recognition that reform is needed, given several high-profile examples where American employees have been replaced by lower-paid foreign workers through the program. Advocates for immigrants’ rights also argue H-1B workers are easily exploited because their legal status is tied to a particular employer. The Economic Policy Institute estimated there were about 460,000 people working on H-1B visas in 2013.
Bloomberg
April 4, 2017
A new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute compared wages and hours from 1979 and 2015 to show that most workers saw increases in the amount of time they had to work to make the same amount of money. “People are working more of the year,” Valerie Wilson, director at EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said. “Because we haven’t seen an increase in pay, people are having to work more to sustain their standard of living.”
VOX
April 4, 2017
This is not, incidentally, because an increase in the labor supply has no adverse effects for anyone. Rather, as Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute emphasizes in her overview of the literature, it’s that “earlier immigrants are the group that’s most adversely affected by immigration” because they are the people whose skill sets are most likely to put them in direct competition with new immigrants. Across a range of estimates, the effects on wages “tend to be very small, and on average, modestly positive.”
VOX
April 3, 2017
April 4, 2017 is Equal Pay Day, and while data proves that women make up to 22 percent less than men for doing the same job, many still refuse to believe the wage gap exists. A wage gap infographic from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) illustrates some of the reasoning used to mansplain away why men still earn more than women in every field. What’s more is that the date chosen to highlight the wage gap between men and women is not arbitrary. April 4 is how far women have to work into 2017 to earn as much as their male counterparts did in 2016, according to the EPI.
Bustle
April 1, 2017
Several economists said it’s unlikely that the planned report would address the broader economic forces behind the trade imbalance, since it would track trade deficits country-by-country and product-by-product. And the order on trade duties appears to duplicate the standards of a trade enforcement act signed into law by then-President Barack Obama in 2016, according to congressional staff. “It seems like there is less here than meets the eye,” said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Together, the orders appear to be a symbolic shot at China, which accounted for $347 billion of last year’s $502 billion trade deficit
The Associated Press
March 31, 2017
NAFTA went into effect in January 1994, and it worked. Trade grew exponentially. Agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico tripled from $7.3 billion in 1994 to $20.1 billion in 2006. And the job cuts didn’t come. But the Congressional Research Service said that the “net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest, primarily because trade with Canada and Mexico accounts for a small percentage of U.S. GDP.” The Economic Policy Institute pegs the jobs loss from NAFTA at about 700,000 through 2010. It did not, however, keep Mexican immigrants out. Americans got more militant in response. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents at the border increased by 67 percent between 1994 and 1997, and it became much more militarized — at some points, as many as 10,000 U.S. soldiers were deployed to secure the border.
The Washington Post
March 31, 2017
But not everyone is feeling gains, particularly in the wage department. According to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, the bottom half of wage earners with college degrees have lower wages than they did in 2000 or 2007. So how is it that many college grads are making less than they were over 10 years ago? “What we’ve seen is a pulling away of the very top, and that’s been growing wage inequality, income inequality, wealth inequality,” said Elise Gould, an EPI senior economist and author of the report. “By any measure of economics, we’ve seen this growing inequality happen. And what that means is that the vast majority of workers have really not seen gains in wages over the last several years, and that affects college grads too.”
Marketplace
March 31, 2017