Media clips
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“When businesses give this anecdotal evidence that they can’t find the workers they want, the first thing I would ask them is: Have you increased your pay?” says economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. … Gould’s advice to businesses is to “be less picky” and, in some cases, to stop discriminating. She notes that the unemployment rate for black workers (7.3 percent) is still much higher than for whites (3.7 percent). There are people ready to work. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Contrera followed Donna Maria Osborne, a 59-year-old African-American woman in Washington, to a recent job fair. Despite years of experience as an administrative assistant, she was routinely told she wasn’t what employers were looking for. “I think it’s my age,” she says.
The Washington Post August 9, 2017 -
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While on the campaign trail, Trump portrayed the US economy as a shit pit that only a businessman like him could save, so he took the opposite tack and ragged on the BLS and its job reports. For two years, he insisted that the agency cooked their books to mask the fact that unemployment was really at up to 42 percent—an outrageous number that would have to encompass every retired, disabled, or non-job-seeking adult and most children in the US to be true. (Unemployment in the US during the recent economic crisis actually peaked at about 10 percent in 2009.) Trump’s “attack on the BLS prior to becoming president was entirely unprecedented,” said Heidi Shierholz, the chief economist at Obama’s Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017 who is currently at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute.
Vice News August 9, 2017 -
You’re not imagining it: the rich really are hoarding economic growth
Vox/Dylan Matthews
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has been producing that graphic, and ones like it, for years now. It shows that in the aftermath of World War II through the early 1970s, workers got paid more as the economy grew. Median hourly compensation rose in tandem with productivity (the amount of economic output workers could produce per hour).
VOX August 9, 2017 -
If history is any indication, the Republican board would likely reverse some union-friendly rulings and draw tighter boundaries around who’s eligible to unionize. Celine McNicholas, a labor policy expert at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said the board is one way Trump could chip away at what she considered modest gains made for lower-income workers during the Obama years. “These potential setbacks are going to prove to be incredibly damaging, particularly for folks who are low-wage workers,” McNicholas said. “They are certainly losers under the Trump administration.”
The Huffington Post August 7, 2017 -
David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank whose mission is to consider the economy through the lens of how policies affect working people, described the PFM report as “absolute junk” because of methodology flaws. “I don’t think anyone in the county should pay any attention to it when thinking about whether Montgomery County should be raising its minimum wage,” Cooper said in an interview with Bethesda Beat Thursday. “There are so many methodological problems that it’s hard not to think either the firm had no idea what they were doing or were intentionally trying to arrive at a predetermined outcome.” He said the study, which relied on publicly available labor statistics combined with survey responses from business owners in the county, is “divorced from decades of research on the minimum wage.” In an analysis of the study on EPI’s website, he wrote that the authors relied on the survey results of business owners to estimate the percentage of jobs that would be lost over the next five years if the county’s current minimum wage of $11.50 per hour rose to $15 per hour. “The closest analogy I can think of would be if the [Food and Drug Administration] was considering approval of a new drug and instead of reviewing any studies or trials, they instead simply asked the drug company, ‘what percentage of patients do you think this drug will harm versus help?’” Cooper wrote.
Bethesda Magazine August 7, 2017 -
“To put it bluntly, this is junk research,” wrote David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “The closest analogy I can think of would be if the FDA was considering approval of a new drug and instead of reviewing any studies or trials, they instead simply asked the drug company, “What percentage of patients do you think this drug will harm versus help?”
Rewire August 7, 2017 -
Even though we’re well into the second half of 2017, one demographic group is just catching up to what another achieved in 2016. July 31st was Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, which the Economic Policy Institute describes as “the day that marks how long into 2017 an African-American woman would have to work in order to be paid the same wages as her white male counterpart was paid last year.” That means it took 19 months for black women to make what white men would have made in just the 12 months that made up 2016.“We’ve had Valentine’s Day, we’ve had Easter, we’ve had Mothers Day, we’ve had July 4th, and all of this time into the year, black women still are just now catching up with what white men earned last year,” said Janelle Jones, economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute.
Wisconsin Public Radio August 7, 2017 -
“Overall, this morning’s report shows the recovery continues, but with wage growth below target levels, it is abundantly clear that we have a ways to go before we reach genuine full employment – where workers including young and old, and workers of all races can fully benefit from the economy,” wrote Economics Policy Institute senior economist Elise Gould.
The Guardian August 4, 2017 -
Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that “we are still steadily moving toward full employment,” but estimated that “we need to add at least 223,000 jobs per month over the next year to lower the unemployment rate to 4 percent and bring another million workers back in from the sidelines.”
Politico August 4, 2017 -
The income of low-skilled workers in the U.S. has indeed dropped in recent decades. From 1979 to 2013, the average wage of workers in the bottom 10 percentile of incomes fell by 5%, after adjusting for inflation, while wages rose an average 6% for middle-income workers and 41% for high-income earners, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today August 4, 2017