As a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, highlights, too many part-time workers who want full-time jobs aren’t able to find such work. “Over six years into an economic recovery, the share of people working part time because they can only get part-time hours remains at recessionary levels,” writes the EPI’s Lonnie Golden. “The number working part time involuntarily remains 44.6 percent higher than it was in 2007.”
Pacific Standard
December 8, 2016
According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, 6.4 million workers nationwide wanted full-time hours last year, but were involuntarily stuck working part-time. That’s up 44.6 percent since 2007 and most of those workers are minorities.
San Jose Mercury News
December 8, 2016
The current unemployment rate of 4.7 percent is touted as evidence of Obama’s successful economic policies, but progressive economist Robert Reich’s Economic Policy Institute places real unemployment at 6.5 percent when missing workers from the labor force are accounted for. Underemployment, where workers depend on unsteady work from gig operators like Uber, further deflates unemployment rates, and leaves out the ongoing struggles of the working and middle class.
New York Observer
December 8, 2016
A 2015 study from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that wages in right-to-work states are 3.1 percent, or $1,558 lower, than they are in non-right-to-work states. Non-unionized workers are often affected by union pay, because non-unionized workforces are pressured to raise wages or lose workers to union shops, studies show.
The Atlantic
December 8, 2016
Still, other economists have pointed to wages as contributing to widening income inequality, with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute arguing that wage growth is key for evening out income disparities. While the federal minimum wage remains mired at $7.25 an hour, labor activists are successfully championing ballot measures and legislation at the state and municipal levels to boost the baseline wages locally.
CBS Moneywatch
December 8, 2016
A study published this year by Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, found that much of the difference between U.S. scores and those of high-ranking nations is because the United States has a higher proportion of disadvantaged students. But the researchers found that the scores of the most disadvantaged U.S. students have been improving markedly over the years, while scores for their counterparts in many top-ranked nations have fallen precipitously.
Los Angeles Times
December 8, 2016
It’s a familiar story across America: Since the recession, people are working again, but their jobs just aren’t good enough. Often, it’s because they’re forced to work part-time, and their employer won’t give them enough hours to make ends meet. “What we hear in the field a lot is that people are hired with the assumption, if not promise, that they’ll get full-time hours. And most weeks they don’t,” said Lonnie Golden, an economics professor at Pennsylvania State University and the author of new research into part-time work published Monday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
December 7, 2016
Aside from the issues with finding manufacturing capacity in the U.S., there are the issues of cost. Consumer goods have largely declined in price during the past decade, or what Economic Policy Institute research and policy director Josh Bivens has called “one of the few good news stories” of the current American economy.
CBS Moneywatch
December 7, 2016
“Tariffs are imposed on products, not on companies,” says Robert Scott, a trade expert at the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN Money
December 7, 2016
And the agency can apply tariffs based on country and product-specific categories, notes Robert Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. What can a president really do? Company-specific penalties are imposed only when the Commerce Department concludes that a foreign exporter is under-cutting prices in the U.S. or being unfairly subsidized, thus violating U.S. anti-dumping and countervailing duty laws “I have no knowledge of any existing executive authority that will allow the president to apply any company-specific tariffs,” Scott says…Reimported goods made by American companies abroad, carrying a 35% tariff, would obviously be priced higher, and that could also move domestic competitors to raises prices and generally lower consumers’ buying power. “It would push us into a recession,” Scott says.
USA Today
December 7, 2016