Media clips
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The weaker-than-expected job growth could be lead the Federal Reserve to delay raising interest rates in June. US labor participation also dropped to 62.8% in April, down from 63% in March. “In general this indicator has been on the rise, and hopefully this is just a one-month blip,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Rising labor force participation is a sign that more people are getting off the sidelines and starting to look for work.”
The Guardian May 6, 2016 -
Recent trends in the participation rate have been positive, but they haven’t done much to repair broader declines that began at the start of the century and accelerated sharply after the financial crisis of 2008. “We’re digging ourselves out of that hole, but we’re still not there yet,” said Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Gould noted that although retiring baby boomers have helped to push the participation rate down, aging doesn’t explain everything. Workforce participation fell nearly as quickly for prime-age adults—aged 25 to 54—as for the broader population.
International Business Times May 6, 2016 -
The Economic Policy Institute‘s “Class of 2016″ report apparently offers grads even more grounds for optimism. “Thanks to the steady economic recovery, these young people are expected to do better than any other class since 2009,” Fast Company reports the paper as saying. On a less happy note, “wages for both high school and college grads haven’t reached pre-recession levels,” and this year’s grads will have to compete with a backlog of underemployed young people who are still struggling to get a foot on the career ladder due to the grim job market into which they graduated.
But the Economic Policy Institute paper insists that the remaining issues in the job market for young people have little to do with colleges inadequately preparing students for work. “Weak demand for goods and services, which makes it unnecessary for employers to significantly ramp up hiring,” is instead to blame for any lingering weakness is hiring, it insists.
Inc. May 6, 2016 -
All that is nothing compared to child care, though, the price of which has absolutely exploded over the past few decades. Research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that the cost of child care varies from $344 per month in the rural South to $1,472 per month in Washington, D.C. It’s also yet another thing you don’t want to cheap out on, as stories of babies being killed by neglect in day care are numerous and terrifying. Infant care is even more expensive—in 33 states and D.C., more than the cost of in-state college tuition. Try swinging that on minimum wage, on top of rent and food.
The Week May 6, 2016 -
This argument, critics of the program say, fails to acknowledge some of the reasons behind the superior work ethic of the H-2B workers. Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, said H-2B workers are effectively “indentured servants.” Their employers control their visa status, and they often arrive heavily in debt to labor recruiters who connect them to jobs like those at Crystal Seas. Losing their jobs would likely result in deportation, leaving them unable to earn back the thousands of dollars they borrowed, Costa said. “American workers who have families here, and basic labor rights in the workplace, will find it difficult to compete with the high productivity levels of indentured workers with few other options,” he said.
New Orleans Times-Picayune May 6, 2016 -
David Cooper interview. Across the country, debates over raising the minimum wage are waging—and Washington, D.C., is no exception. But often ignored in these conversations are tipped workers—those in service industries who receive far lower minimum wages and make up the difference in gratuity. In light of two separate proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2020 in the District, Kojo explores what the wage increase would mean for tipped workers—particularly those in the restaurant industry.
The Kojo Nmandi Show May 5, 2016 -
Raising the minimum wage in the District from $11.50 to $15 an hour could net 114,000 workers in the region up to $2,900 in additional wages a year, serving as “a powerful and much-needed step to ensure workers in the Washington area can achieve a decent quality of life.” That’s according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute on the impacts of incrementally raising the minimum wage in the nation’s capital to $15 by 2020, which is being proposed both in a ballot initiative backed by labor and social justice groups and in legislation introduced by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
WAMU May 5, 2016 -
The Economic Policy Institute says in a study released on Wednesday that those 114,000 represent about 14 percent of all D.C. workers and more than a fifth of its private-sector and nonprofit workers. Advocates have until July to collect more than 20,000 signatures in order for the measure to appear on the November ballot. Affected workers, EPI concludes, would receive $329 million in extra wages. David Cooper, a senior economic analyst for EPI, notes that under current law, the minimum wage will only rise to around $12.50 by 2020, so the $15-an-hour minimum would constitute a 20 percent increase over that. Demographically, almost 98 percent of those who would see their wages go up from the ballot measure would be older than 20, Cooper added, with three-quarters of them 25 or older. The majority would be women and approximately 80 percent would be people of color, he said. The report relied on 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (the authors cite a detailed methodology used in a previous study on New York’s minimum-wage boost).
Washington City Paper May 5, 2016 -
We were less surprised to find Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute similarly bearish on the inflationary effects of the overtime rule, even when combined with the various minimum wage hikes occurring around the country. “A $12 min wage would increase the nation’s entire wage bill by something like 0.3 percent in 2020 when fully phased in,” Bivens emailed Morning Shift. “If that was fully passed through to prices we’re talking a single year where inflation was about 0.2 percent higher than [it] would otherwise have been, and then no further upward pressure. And if OT redistributed that much money to workers we’d be pretty thrilled, I think.”
Politico May 5, 2016 -
The Federal Reserve should not increase interest rates in order to deflate financial asset bubbles, two progressive economists argue in a policy brief released Thursday. Dean Baker and Josh Bivens’ analysis, “The wrong tool for the right job,” tries to rebut an increasingly common argument for a Fed interest rate hike that could hit Americans in their wallets. Baker and Bivens, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute, respectively, marshal existing research to cast doubt on the idea that raising rates is an effective way to curb asset prices. And they maintain that since raising rates puts downward pressure on job growth, doing so to combat an asset bubble risks causing economic pain in the name of uncertain gains. Instead, they make the case for using targeted financial regulations to achieve the same goal without the unnecessary “collateral damage.”
The Huffington Post May 5, 2016