The Labor Department’s “mission is to improve the wages and working conditions of job holders, job seekers, retirees,” said Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist at Obama’s Department of Labor, who just recently joined the Economic Policy Institute. “There is nothing in his record or any of the public statements that (indicate) he would lead in developing policies to further that mission.”
St. Louis Post Dispatch
February 1, 2017
An analysis in January by the Economic Policy Institute found that the share of apprenticeships going to minorities overall rose from 36.3% in 1994 to 61.8% in 2014, a 70% increase.
New York Daily News
February 1, 2017
President Donald Trump has made Mexico the central focus of his push to reform U.S. trade policy, singling out the neighboring nation Thursday with a proposed 20 percent import tax that the White House subsequently walked back. If Trump is truly committed to saving American jobs lost to unfair trade practices, though, reshaping trade with China should be the priority, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
Huffington Post
January 31, 2017
Donald Trump relentlessly bashed China on his way to the White House, and not without reason. Between 2001 and 2015, the US lost 3.4 million jobs due to its trade deficit with China, nearly three-quarters of them in manufacturing, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.
Quartz
January 31, 2017
“Having skilled immigration to the U.S. is undeniably a good thing,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “But the H-1B program in particular is: one, not actually immigration, and two, is structured in a way that it’s a very useful tool for corporate exploitation.” Costa said the visas are great for companies who want to pay lower wages or outsource information technology functions — indeed, the majority of the visas do end up going to outsourcing companies, many based in India, that flood the H-1B visa lottery system with requests.
Marketplace
January 31, 2017
A repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is popularly known, could reduce job growth by almost 1.2 million in 2019, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Although Republicans, who voted in favor of a repeal, say that cutting taxes associated with Obamacare would stimulate the economy, the report found that cuts for the ultra-wealthy are simply not enough, and would actually slow economic growth.
Think Progress
January 31, 2017
MIT professor David Autor found that U.S. trade with China killed 985,000 American manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011. And Robert Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that trade with Mexico cost roughly 800,000 U.S. jobs between 1997 and 2013.
CNN Money
January 31, 2017
There’s only one problem with this. It isn’t really true. Trade deals, you see, matter, but they don’t matter that much. What does is how strong or weak the dollar is. But let’s back up a minute. This isn’t to say that NAFTA, for example, has had no effect on our economy. It clearly has. Indeed, a decent chunk of our manufacturing base has migrated south of the border the past 24 years, although it would be an exaggeration to say that it was accompanied by a giant sucking sound, as Perot did. Even the most pessimistic estimates from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute say that it cost us something like 400,000 manufacturing jobs and 100,000 jobs over this time. As economist Brad DeLong points out, those aren’t even 0.3 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively, of our total jobs.
The Washington Post
January 30, 2017
Merchandise trade between the two countries soared six-fold to $480 billion in 2015 as a small U.S. trade surplus morphed into a $110 billion deficit. The U.S. lost 850,000 jobs as a result between 1993 and 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
January 30, 2017
Heidi Shierholz, the former chief Labor Department economist under President Obama, said she isn’t worried about the threat of tampering, due to extensive safeguards. Still, she said there could be other risks to the integrity of economic statistics. “The thing that is a much deeper concern in my mind is how those agencies are respected, and the undermining of the public’s faith in the quality of the data is a real threat,” said Shierholz, now a director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “When your president is saying, ‘Oh the unemployment rate is not what they say it is,’ people don’t know what to believe. And that’s a real problem.” The other threat, according to Shierholz, would be a cut in the bureau’s funding. “There’s not room to cut anymore. It would severely damage our data resources,” she said.
The Washington Post
January 27, 2017