And according to an Economic Policy Institute study released earlier this month, the overall wage gap between white and black workers is now the worst its been in 40 years ― 26.7 percent.
The Huffington Post
September 30, 2016
Among workaday families, retirement piggy banks tend to be quite small. Half of all families in the United States have less than $5,000 in retirement accounts, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers. Only about one in five families can boast $100,000 or more — still not much to last through decades of retirement.
The Boston Globe
September 30, 2016
Daniel Costa, an immigration expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that studies issues involving low- and middle-income workers, argues that it makes no sense to fill a permanent labor shortage with temporary personnel. Unless they have equal standing to their American counterparts, immigrants will continue to be subject to exploitation. “They should have the option to stay if they want,” he says.
Quartz
September 29, 2016
In case there is any doubt, arbitration is a less favorable venue for parties pushed into arbitration agreements than the ordinary court system. An Economic Policy Institute study, for example, compared arbitration in employment cases to similar court cases. It found that employees were significantly less likely to prevail in arbitration, and that they received significantly less money when they did prevail:
Think Progress
September 29, 2016
Private pension funds with expertise in infrastructure have a role to play in such schemes. Rich-country central banks, notably the Federal Reserve, can afford to be more relaxed about the threat of inflation. An economy at full pelt begins to draw people into the workforce who were thought to have opted out for good. “Ex-felons were doing pretty well in 2000,” notes Larry Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. The risks of slamming the brakes on too quickly outweigh those of excessive policy stimulus.
The Economist
September 29, 2016
Economists warned during a panel discussion Tuesday that black workers are being paid less than their white colleagues at an increasing rate. Research has shown there has been a wage gap between white and black workers for decades. New data shows that the wage difference has been getting increasingly worse. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) hosted a panel of experts to discuss the trend. “The black-white wage gap is larger now than it was in 1979,” EPI Economist Valerie Wilson said. “It’s also important to understand the context of this expansion and to understand that this expansion has not occurred in a vacuum. There has been growing economic inequality, and near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers.”
Inside Sources
September 28, 2016
The wage gap between Black and white people who work is wider today than it was nearly four decades ago, according to research released last week. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report, “Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality,” revealed that the disparity has ebbed and flowed over three distinct time periods rather than occurring along a straight line.
Rewire
September 27, 2016
After a long period of rising inequality, Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington, added, the benefits of the improving economy finally began to seep downward. Wage increases were “even stronger at the bottom than in the middle,” she said.
The New York Times
September 26, 2016
To be in the top 1 percent of incomes nationally, families need to take in a minimum of $389,436. The average income of America’s 1-percenters is $1,153,293, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Yet when incomes are measured state by state, the study shows wildly diverging fortunes for 1-percenters…“All high incomes are going up, but they’re going up much faster in places like New York, Maryland and California,” said Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center and co-author of the Economic Policy Institute study.
The New York Times
September 25, 2016
A clear divide has emerged between productivity and compensation. A report from the Economic Policy Institute shows from 1973 to 2013, productivity rose 74%, while the hourly pay of a typical worker increased just 9%. For some perspective, from 1948 to 1973, productivity rose 96.7%, while hourly salary increased 91.3%. And sluggish wage growth isn’t a crisis faced only by the unskilled or undereducated—when adjusted for inflation, hourly-wages of recent college graduates who earned a four-year degree were lower in 2013 than 1998. Authors of the EPI report attribute this to the high unemployment rates that plagued the United States through the past few decades. Although America’s unemployment rate in August 2016 was 4.9%—its lowest since August 2007 when it rested at 4.5% just before December’s economic downturn—higher unemployment rates still exist in 21 states.
Forbes
September 25, 2016