“It’s a huge signal that Congress needs to step up and do something at the federal level.…The fact that advocates are targeting levels beyond what we’ve done before, and winning, reflects people’s frustration with the lack of any effort to deal with the problem of wage stagnation at the federal level.”—David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute
Wall Street Journal
March 29, 2016
Those proposals also would leave the federal minimum wage well below the level it would have reached if it tracked increases in U.S. productivity or real average wages for rank-and-file workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which is associated with labor organizations and other progressive groups.
Los Angeles Times
March 29, 2016
Partly driving the push for a higher wage floor is the argument that raising wages would help “undo all the wage inequality that has happened in the last 45 years,” says David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal research group based in Washington.
Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2016
According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank specializing in labor issues, a $15 minimum wage in New York City would boost the wages of 1.4 million workers—about 35 percent of the city’s workforce.
Vice News
March 29, 2016
Assuming 2 percent inflation, $15 in 2022 is approximately equal to $13.30 today. But California’s not doing it in one leap. The gradual increase keeps the wage floor in line with what liberal economists believe would benefit the broad mass of workers. For example, the Economic Policy Institute endorsed raising the national minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, saying it would lift wages for 35 million workers. The California deal would get to $12 by 2019, meaning that the wage wouldn’t accelerate past the EPI benchmark for three years.
Salon
March 29, 2016
In the absence of action on a national scale, a number of states and localities have made their own moves. Last year 11 states and the District of Columbia lifted their minimum wages through legislation, and 11 states increased them via regular indexing to inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington DC think-tank.
Financial Times
March 29, 2016
The job market can be a tough place, particularly for new college graduates. While the unemployment rate for new grads (age 21 to 24) has dropped — falling to 7.2 percent in 2014 from 9.9 percent in 2011—according to the Economic Policy Institute, it remains significantly elevated, particularly as new graduates are forced to contend with those from the previous six years who are still searching for positions.
CNBC
March 29, 2016
Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank critical of free-trade deals, estimates these deficits with Mexico alone have cost 850,000 Americans their jobs. This, in turn, has a “chilling effect,” Scott said. “It actually causes wage losses for everybody who doesn’t have a college degree.” After accounting for inflation, hourly pay at U.S. factories has been stagnant since the early 1970s.
Bloomberg
March 29, 2016
“What we see in those states is that the poverty rate among tipped workers is dramatically lower than in the states where they’re getting $2.13 per hour as their base wage,” David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute said.
PBS News Hour
March 29, 2016
From other research, we know two important facts about black public sector workers: 1) Black workers make up a disproportionate share of the public sector workforce; and 2) Black public employees were more likely than other public employees to lose their jobs during the Great Recession. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that the reduction in state and local public employment disproportionately affected African-Americans.
U.S. News & World Report
March 29, 2016