Media clips
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The Pew Research Center last year found that women earned 84 percent of what men earned in its study of the hourly wages of all workers, including those who work part time. Similarly, a 2013 review by the Economic Policy Institute of annual hourly wages for men and women with college degrees, including salaried and hourly workers, found that the men earned on average $33.71 per hour and the women just $25.35 an hour.
The New York Times April 10, 2014 -
(Also in The Herald Business, Inside Bay Area)
Just a few days ago, representatives from Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and other Bay Area companies met with about 65 members of Congress to discuss H-1B and related issues, Lam said. Most of the lawmakers they talked to were in the House, she said, since the Senate already has passed a bill, which besides reforming various aspects of immigration law would increase the number of visas to between 115,000 and 180,000 a year, depending on economic factors.But immigration reform has faced a more difficult road in the Republican-controlled House and critics of the proposed H-1B expansion contend it would be detrimental to U.S.-born workers.
“It undercuts the American labor market,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor and immigration expert at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, citing studies that have found many firms pay their H-1B workers extremely low pay. “It reduces wages and job opportunities for Americans. It reduces our standard of living. So it’s a bad idea.”
Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, agreed, and said he sees “a very, very small chance” of Congress expanding the program this year.
Bloomberg Businesweek April 8, 2014 -
This current reality clashes with our own recent past. For three decades following World War II, wages rose in tandem with increases in productivity — that was the essence of the old “Social Contract.” But in the 30 years since 1980, earnings have essentially flatlined: While the productivity of American workers grew by a healthy 80%, family income grew by only about 10%, and average hourly wages inched up by about 6%.
The first decade of this century — sometimes called “the lost decade” — has been even worse. Real wages (wages adjusted for increases in the cost of living) either declined or did not increase for high school or college graduates. Only those at the top of the occupational ladder with advanced degrees experienced modest wage growth. The “Occupy” movement had its facts right: Most of the income growth went to the top 1% or less of the population. America is now suffering from the highest level of income inequality of any time since the 1920s.
CNNMoney April 8, 2014 -
The figure below, using numbers developed by the economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, shows where we are compared with where we should be (the figure uses total payrolls, including government). The gap between the two lines last month amounts to over seven million jobs; that’s how many jobs short we are in the labor market once you adjust for the fact that just by dint of population growth, there are a lot more people who need work.
So sure, March posted decent job gains, and as the figure shows, we’re slowly catching up to the trend line. But the operative word there, especially for policy makers, is “slowly.”The New York Times April 8, 2014 -
“Where we have not had as much job growth is in the public sector because of cuts in education, public safety and the rest. So that is a place where there still is a gap, and that is a reflection of the policy that is there,” Pelosi said.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the numbers may have political or psychological value, but not much else. There are still nearly 3 million more unemployed people than when the recession started.
“I cannot think of anything economically meaningful about passing the December 2007 employment level,” Shierholz said.
The Huffington Post April 8, 2014 -
It’s the million-worker mystery.
A large chunk of American adults are no longer in the labor force. That has left economists divided over how many of them are voluntarily not working — or even looking for work — because they wanted to retire, go to school or take care of family members, versus how many have been forced out because they couldn’t find a job.
“Almost everyone who’s looked rigorously at the numbers thinks both of those things are going on,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
What they can’t agree on is what is more prevalent — leaving the workplace on purpose, or getting left out even as the economy improves.
The distinction is important because it would help economists understand whether the job market is on its way to a healthy recovery, or whether the current unemployment rate of 6.7 percent vastly underestimates how many Americans actually need a job.
NBC News April 8, 2014 -
Here’s a roundup of reactions to Friday’s report from the Labor Department showing that the U.S. added 192,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate held steady at 6.7%. Read MarketWatch’s story about the March jobs data.
“6.7% unemp rate means nothing when we include missing workers- including them increases unemp to 9.8%.” — Hilary Wething, senior research assistant, Economic Policy Institute. @hilweth
MarketWatch April 8, 2014 -
“The U.S. economy is trending close to our multi-year labor market target, but the underlying long term narrative remains decidedly negative,” Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at Janney Capital Markets, wrote in a client note Friday. “In fairness, this numbers/narrative dichotomy exists in large part because the quality of jobs created have fallen a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”
As Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, noted in a blog post Thursday, “re-attaining pre-recession employment levels is a pretty meaningless benchmark economically.” We’re back to where we were, but not back to where we should be. “Because the working-age population (and with it, the potential labor force) is growing all the time, the private sector should have added millions of jobs over the last six-plus years just to hold steady,” Shierholz wrote. She puts the jobs gap at nearly 6 million.
The Fiscal Times April 8, 2014 -
“We’ll be eclipsing the prior peak [for private sector jobs], and finally entering the expansion part of this recovery,” Simons said. “We think this is a very significant milestone.”
So why doesn’t it feel like a recovery?
Given it took four years to get this point, this jobs recovery has been the slowest on record since the Labor Department started tracking the data in 1939.
The private sector data also misses an important piece of the puzzle: It does not factor in the growing population.
For that reason, Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, calls the private sector jobs number little more than a “psychological milestone.”
“I think it’s an economically meaningless benchmark,” she said. “We need so many more jobs to have the same job market conditions.”
CNNMoney April 8, 2014 -
Economist Bill Rodgers has a name for the recovery — and it’s not a very nice one.
Rodgers, a professor at Rutgers University, calls it “bifurcated” because people who have college degrees are getting hired, but those who didn’t finish school are sitting on the sidelines. Many have given up on their search for work.
“This horrible recession, combined with this weak recovery, has lead to this bifurcated set of outcomes,” he says.
The nation’s unemployment rate fell slightly in March to 8.8 percent; more than 200,000 jobs were added to the payroll. But the unemployment rate leaves out many people — including those who have stopped looking for jobs and have dropped out of the labor force.
“One of the things that I think is sort of an intuitive idea is that if the unemployment rate is improving, that’s really only good news if we see a bigger share of the labor force that’s working,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
Shierholz says she thinks the employment-to-population ratio, which measures the share of the U.S. population that has a job, is a more accurate reflection of the unemployment picture. The ratio has hardly budged over the past year. That means the percentage of people working in this country hasn’t changed though the unemployment rate has ticked down.
NPR April 8, 2014