Media clips
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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there’s also broad recognition that reform is needed, given several high-profile examples where American employees have been replaced by lower-paid foreign workers through the program.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 -
Wage stagnation and economic inequality: These two conditions explain a large part of the working-but-barely-making-it phenomenon. Let’s start with those stagnant wages. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), for about three decades after World War II, hourly wage increases for workers in non-supervisory roles kept pace with productivity increases: at 91.3 and 96.7 percent, respectively. Then things changed dramatically. Between 1973 and 2013, productivity increased by 74.4 percent and wages by only 9.2 percent. In other words, with wages adjusted for inflation, the average American worker made no more in 2013 than in 1973. As for economic inequality, the EPI reports that from 1980 to 2013 the income of the top 1 percent of wage earners increased by 138 percent compared with 15 percent for the bottom 90 percent. For those at the lowest end of the wage scale, it was even worse. In those years, their hourly pay actually dropped by 5 percent.
The Nation March 31, 2017 -
Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones, economists at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, took a look at labor data for black and white workers between the years 1979 and 2015. They found that both black and white workers, between 18 and 64 years old, have increased their number of paid, annual hours of work in the past 36 years. According to the analysis by Wilson and Jones, the average black worker in 2015 put in 1,805 hours, or 12.4 percent more hours than they did in 1979. By contrast, the average white worker put in 1,888 hours, for an increase of around 11 percent. While those trajectories may seem similar, the picture looks a lot different when it comes to the lowest-wage workers in each racial group. When looking at the lowest earners, black workers have seen much more significant increases.
The Atlantic March 30, 2017 -
According to a report released Wednesday, researchers at the Economic Policy Institute found that, not only do lower-income Americans have trouble affording child care costs, they also have greater difficulty accessing child care options that are high-quality. That’s not entirely surprising — the more limited your financial resources, the more likely you will be to send your children to the daycare you can afford, not necessarily the one you think would be most developmentally-enriching. But aside from being a heartbreaking reality for far too many parents, the problem is that research has proven that access to quality early care and education before the age of 5 has a measurable effect on long-term achievement. And when children miss out on those opportunities because of financial reasons, they are more likely to have poorer educational outcomes as they get older.
Romper March 30, 2017