The Economic Policy Institute has calculated that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour, as the White House has recommended, would benefit workers who are on average 35 years old. Over a third are 40 or older. Most work their low-paying jobs full time, and on average earn half of their family’s income.
PolicyMic
April 22, 2015
The overtime cutoff salary of $23,660 now only covers 11 percent of salaried workers compared with 65 percent in 1975, according to an analysis by Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group partly funded by labor unions.
Bloomberg
April 22, 2015
Labor advocates, however, complain that NAFTA was a handout to big corporations that came at the expense of workers. A report in 2011 from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute claimed the agreement had cost the U.S. nearly 700,000 jobs.
Fiscal Times
April 22, 2015
This chart from the Economic Policy Institute shows the issue to which Clinton was referring. It displays the change in real annual wages by wage group from 1979-2012.
Fusion
April 22, 2015
According to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute, an income of $385,000 puts you in the national 1 percent. You’d need to make $539,000 to qualify for New Jersey’s 1 percent club — Christie fits the bill in either case.
The Washington Post
April 21, 2015
Conservatives often claim that lazy and unskilled workers are to blame for wage stagnation. But that argument has been debunked by economists such as Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, who point to government minimum-wage and anti-union policies that have weakened the bargaining position of low- and middle-wage workers as the real culprit.
A report by the Economic Policy Institute finds that raising the minimum wage would help reduce inequality, particularly as it affects lower-wage women and, by extension, the families they support. Stiglitz and other experts have pointed out that boosting the minimum wage would lift living standards for up to 25 million people in America without leading to significant job losses or other costs.
Al Jazeera America
April 21, 2015
Josh Bivens of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute argues, trade deals like these will drive down wages, since they rely on boosting America’s capital-intensive sectors at the expensive of labor intensive ones. Economists would expect an increase in higher-paying white-collar and creative work, but perhaps not enough to balance out negative pressure on manufacturing and other tradable sectors.
Quartz
April 21, 2015
The Washington Post
April 20, 2015
For one, women-owned businesses make only about 25 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. That’s a much larger gap than the one that exists in the overall labor market, where the median earnings of women were about 83 percent of men’s, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
April 17, 2015
The leaked drafts describe a tribunals system called Investor-state Dispute Settlement (ISDS) that would allow corporate interests to sue countries over an alarming range of actions intended to defend the public interest. ISDS represents a warped version of a basically reasonable idea, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens. Traditional trade tribunals are meant to protect foreign businesspeople from having their investments in a country snapped up by soldiers and nationalized. “If a US corporation opens a big production facility somewhere else you don’t want foreign governments to just come in and take it from them,” Bivens said.
But the ISDS system used in modern trade deals goes far beyond protecting investors from forceful expropriation of their factories. It allows corporations to punish countries for things like environmental regulations and work safety laws. “Corporations have been known to bring suit based on, ‘You have passed a regulation that I did not expect when I opened this factory, so my return is lower than I expected,’” Bivens said.
Think Progress
April 17, 2015