For a family of four in the District of Columbia, it costs $106,493 a year to maintain a “decent yet modest standard of living” for expenses such as food, child care and housing, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator, released in August 2015.
U.S. News & World Report
July 8, 2016
But critics of the influx of foreign students to the U.S. warn that, without safeguards, the policy would turn U.S. colleges into green-card factories that crowd out American students, drive down salaries and discourage U.S.-born students from STEM careers. This is not just a Trump applause line. The labor-backed Economic Policy Institute doesn’t believe a tech-worker shortage even exists.
Bloomberg
July 8, 2016
“Employers rightly look at a paid internship as more of a real job,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “If you were paid for something, there was probably more valuable work done.” Even the unpaid interns who received full-time job offers were paid less out of the gate. At private companies, unpaid interns received a median job offer of about $34,400. Paid interns at private firms were offered jobs with a median salary of $53,521, NACE found. “An unpaid internship signals that you have been willing to work for nothing, therefore you might be willing to accept a lower job offer than a paid intern would,” says Eisenbrey. (Interns at EPI are paid, he says).
CNN Money
July 8, 2016
Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said he’d like to see NAFTA “fixed” to raise income for Mexican workers so “there is more demand for products made in the U.S.” Though Mexico was more closed before NAFTA, it’s not likely it would put up a wall to outside companies. The country benefits greatly from foreign investment. Prior to NAFTA, direct investment from the U.S. in 1993 was $2.5 billion. That grew to $9.3 billion in 2014, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “I don’t know why Mexico would push [U.S. companies] out the door,” said Scott.
CNN Money
July 7, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute released a report in June measuring the gap between the rich and everyone else, also known as income inequality. The report shows Summit County has the largest disparity of income inequality when compared with the rest of the state. Mark Price, a labor economist, said the gap in income inequality in Summit County is most likely because of the ski resort community in Park City. “The places that tend to have the most inequality, at least for the way we measured it, are places that have a large concentration of top executives,” he said.
Utah Public Radio
July 7, 2016
For all of the progress African-Americans have made in climbing from Jim Crow into the middle class, one measure is a reminder of how hard it is to catch up when you start out so far behind: No matter how high or low the white unemployment rate, the black rate always doubles it. “That’s pretty much the norm” for as long as the data has been kept, said Valerie Wilson, an Economic Policy Institute economist who began tracking the numbers quarterly and by state last year for a deeper look at the gaps.
Buffalo News
July 7, 2016
Data from the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey show that there are about three to four unemployed construction workers available for every job, Elise Gould, a labor market economist for the Economic Policy Institute, told Bloomberg BNA June 30. “We’ve made great strides in recovery,” Gould said. “There are still more unemployed workers out there for every job opening. That’s true across most sectors. If you look at something like construction, you still see that there are many multiples of unemployed construction workers for every job opening out there. It looks like there are a lot of construction workers lining up for every job.”
Bloomberg BNA
July 7, 2016
Today, the Economic Policy Institute released a brief on a student survey on internships and jobs. The survey found: Overall, an employer was far more likely to offer a job to a student prior to graduation if he or she had an internship or co-op — especially a paid position. The gap in offer rates between students with internship/co-op experience and those without such experience grew from 12.6 percent in 2011 to 20 percent in 2015 (56.5 percent versus 36.5 percent).
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
July 7, 2016
Unpaid internships are less likely to lead to paid job offers. Seventy-two percent of graduates who took paid internships got job offers, according to a survey of class of 2015 graduates released this year by the National Association of Colleges and Employers that was recirculated Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute. For unpaid internships the percentage falls to 44 percent.
The Huffington Post
July 7, 2016
A new report from Oxfam and the Economic Policy Institute reveals that nearly half of all U.S. workers earn under $15 an hour. Almost half of private sector workers lack even one single paid sick day; over 80 percent of low-wage workers have no access to earned sick leave. In fact, the United States has both the highest percentage of workers in low-paid work, and the fewest required number of sick days, of any rich country on earth.
U.S. News & World Report
July 6, 2016