The New York Times
January 6, 2017
Hornstein, Kudlyak and Lange are not the only researchers to have taken issue with the unemployment rate. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) publishes an alternative unemployment rate that includes “missing workers.” EPI contends that demographic trends suggest that two million more people would be participating in the job market if it were significantly stronger, but that these people are instead counted as out of the labor force.
Quartz
January 6, 2017
Other experts agree: On its blog, the Economic Policy Institute recently declared 401(k)s “a poor substitute” for the defined benefit pension plans many workers primarily relied on, which provide a fixed payout for employees at retirement, and which have now become increasingly rare. Nowadays, “just 13% of all private-sector workers have a traditional pension, compared with 38% in 1979,” reports The Journal.
CNBC
January 5, 2017
Minimum wages in 19 states went up on January 1, adding more than $4.2 billion in additional wages, according to an analysis by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. In seven of these states, the increases were modest — just 5 to 10 cents — the result of inflation indexing as measured by the federal Consumer Price Index.
KQED
January 5, 2017
Nominal wage growth — a key measure of whether workers are seeing adequate growth in their incomes — remains perniciously low, at 12-month accumulated growth rate of 2.36 percent for non-managerial employees; that rate needs to be 4 percent before average workers to begin to feel the benefits of this post-recession recovery, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
Salon
January 5, 2017
Ron Hira, an Economic Policy Institute research associate and associate professor of public policy at Howard University, sees a change in the first 100 days of the Trump administration as likely. “Obviously Trump has had this as a priority … for executive action for [the first] 100 days,” he said. Beyond that, Hira points to regulatory changes that could come about through the Administrative Procedures Act. He said there’s a possibility of policy guidance from the administration, such as cracking down on visa abuse and changes to immigration enforcement… Hira is doubtful. “The reality of what’s going on is that if they can offshore the work easily, they would already do it,” he said. “There’s nothing that restricts that.”
Politico
January 4, 2017
A 2015 study by the Economic Policy Institute also showed that it is the lowest-income workers who face the most irregular schedules. And retail is one of the industries where it is used most prevalently.
New York Daily News
January 4, 2017
Rob Scott, director of trade and manufacturing at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, DC, says the pick shows Trump means business on possibly renegotiating existing trade deals like NAFTA, the agreement that virtually eliminates all border taxes on goods flowing between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Lighthizer, who has a reputation for being a tough negotiator and worked on high-level trade negotiations under Ronald Reagan, has the knowledge and the knowhow to deliver on Trump’s trade agenda.
VOX
January 4, 2017
In 2017, we know that this historic accident isn’t working out for many people. The Center for Retirement Research currently estimates that about 52 percent of households are “at risk of not having enough to maintain their living standards in retirement” with “the outlook for retiring Baby Boomers and Generation Xers far less sanguine than for current retirees.” The Economic Policy Institute says just under half of households headed by someone between the ages of 32 and 61 have nothing saved for retirement.
Slate
January 4, 2017
A left-leaning think tank is firing back at a 2015 report that concluded state employees in Connecticut receive far richer compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. The Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C., said the report from the conservative Yankee Institute, which found public-sector workers in Connecticut receive total pay and benefits between 25 and 46 percent higher than comparable private-sector workers, “is simply not correct” and that the two groups’ compensation is close to equal.
Hartford Courant
January 2, 2017