Even so, advocacy groups say higher wages for hourly workers are important, particularly in the Washington area, where the cost of living is among the highest in the country. For a single person in the District to make ends meet, they need to make at least $20 an hour working full-time, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. For a single worker with a child, that figure is $37 an hour.
The Washington Post
July 15, 2016
Occupy Wall Street made popular the idea of a country divided between the 99% and the 1%, but its really the chief executives of the nation’s biggest businesses that are pulling away in the income race and leaving everyone else behind, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. “CEO compensation at the largest firms dipped temporarily in 2015, but remains 940.9 percent above its 1978 level,” the report says. “This growth in CEO compensation far exceeded the growth of the stock market . . . . This shows that executives have done far better than the firms they have led and executive pay cannot be simply attributed to better firm performance.”
Fortune
July 15, 2016
As late as 1965, America’s corporate elite were in sync with Morgan’s advice. That year, the CEOs of America’s 350 largest corporations earned 20 times more than their median worker. But in the 1980s corporate boards began removing the compensation straitjacket. Last year the typical CEO earned over $15 million a year—more than 276 times the pay of their average workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Nation
July 15, 2016
But Robert Scott, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., notes that the vast majority of employment associated with new investments by foreign companies has been in the form of acquisitions of existing U.S. companies – called “insourcing.” During the 15 years between 1990 and 2005, there was a net loss of 4 million U.S. jobs as a result of insourcing, he said. “When foreign investors buy established U.S. businesses, employment overall goes down,” Scott said.
Forbes
July 15, 2016
Carlson has an uphill battle because the courts aren’t merely neutral, they favor arbitration clauses and enforce them even when they appear to be grossly unfair,” Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, said in an email.
The Huffington Post
July 15, 2016
Top CEOs took home 276 times more than a typical worker—down from 302-to-1 in 2014 but still far higher than it’s been in previous decades. The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965, and peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000. “CEO pay has grown far faster than the pay of typical workers, college graduates, or even the top 0.1 percent,” said Schieder. “Skyrocketing CEO pay isn’t about the market for talent—it’s about what executives can get away with.” From 1978 to 2015, inflation-adjusted compensation of top CEOs increased 940.9 percent, a rise 75 percent greater than stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.3 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.
The Nation
July 15, 2016
Donald Trump says the US is getting killed when it comes to trade deals, and that he would negotiate better ones. Would better trade deals really help the US? Director of trade for the Economic Policy Institute, Robert Scott, joins “News with Ed” and says that we shouldn’t have trade deals at all because of the “corrupt process” involved in negotiating them.
RT
July 14, 2016
Moreover, the raise is puny — $1.85 an hour, spread out over three whole years, meaning inflation will eat some of it up. “That’s a roughly 3.2 percent annual boost after taking projected future inflation into account,” noted Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. “This hardly seems to deserve a parade.”
New York Magazine
July 14, 2016
Not by a long way. Globally, women are only paid 52% of what men are paid, according to the World Economic Forum. The organization has only been tracking the gender gap for 10 years, but the Economic Policy Institute compared pay in the United States in 1979 and now. Back then, American women earned about two-thirds of when men did. Now, it’s a little over 80%.
CNN
July 14, 2016
We asked two trade experts for their views. Bryan Riley is a senior policy analyst in trade policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Robert E. Scott is a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Scott said American workers have suffered because of the unfavorable balance of trade the U.S. has with China and other industrialized countries. “It is certainly true that the growing trade deficit has cost the U.S. millions of jobs, including the majority of the 5.3 million manufacturing jobs that we’ve lost since 1997-98,” he said.
The Plain Dealer
July 14, 2016