Media clips
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According to the Labor Department, the jobless rate was 6.2 percent in July, and businesses added 209,000 workers, representing the sixth straight month of job gains greater than 200,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that given the pace of population growth since the recession, in July there were 5,860,000 “ missing workers,” which include potential workers who aren’t in the labor force – many because they’re discouraged. EPI estimates if these workers were looking for jobs, the actual unemployment rate would be about 9.6 percent.
US News and World Report August 13, 2014 -
Heidi Shierholz, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, agrees.
“We’ve been seeing this just long, decades long, decline in men’s labor force participation,” Shierholz says.
NPR August 13, 2014 -
In contrast with unadjusted figures that show a drop in disparity, the World Bank’s Gini coefficientmeasuring the extent of income inequality barely budged during those decades, according to preliminary adjustments by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic.
“With a ‘top heavy’ adjustment, the decrease in inequality — present when we use all other adjustments — almost entirely dissipates,” they wrote in a December paper.
That’s surprising for a period when poverty was falling sharply: The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day dropped to 1.22 billion in 2010 from 1.91 billion in 1990 after adjusting for inflation, World Bank data show.
If earning gaps haven’t narrowed around the world even as the impoverished population declined, that could “really change the way economists think about the last 30 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which advocates for workers’ rights.
Bloomberg August 8, 2014 -
The Labor Department characterized the unemployment rate in July as “little changed,” with an uptick of one tenth of a point to 6.2 percent. The labor-force participation rate of 62.9 percent “has been essentially unchanged since April,” the report said.
In other words, the job market is moving along at a decent, steady pace. But the upswing is still not strong enough to change the prospects for the long-term unemployed or the involuntary part-timers, or to drive significant raises for workers.
“July’s 209,000 jobs is solid, but is a decline from the strong second quarter, when 277,000 jobs were added each month on average,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “At July’s pace, it would take nearly four more years to get back to pre-recession labor market conditions.”
The White House said the report confirms that the economic recovery has made huge progress, but has left behind millions of Americans.
NPR August 8, 2014 -
Many workers aren’t even getting the pay they’ve been promised for the work they do. Complaints of wage theft, like that experienced by NFL cheerleaders, jumped by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011. It’s rampant in some industries: 89 percent of fast food workers say they’ve been made to work for free off the clock, denied overtime pay, or simply paid less than minimum wage. More is stolen from low-wage workers than is robbed from banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined. Lawmakers in a handful of cities and two states, Colorado and New York, have passed anti-wage theft ordinances to crack down on companies that steal wages and make it easier for workers to bring claims.
But that’s just a start. There are other ways to reconnect hard work and decent pay that don’t involve government action, but instead hand employees more power so they can ask for more. Historically unions have played a significant role in this equation. But falling unionization rates have coincided with a drop in middle class incomes and an increase in income inequality. It’s become harder to unionize, but easing the way for workers to band together and demand better pay would start to balance the power. “We’re not really going to get wages to grow in line with productivity without a more robust system of collective bargaining,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told me. One way to get there would be to “develop a system where collective bargaining can emerge that covers an entire occupation or an entire industry,” he suggested, rather than shop by shop as it is now, particularly in sectors like fast food, where each location is owned by a different franchisee. (Although the path to unionizing fast food workers may now be easier with the National Labor Relations Board saying that McDonald’s is responsible for what happens in all of its stores, franchises or no.)
The New Republic August 8, 2014 -
Retail workers who don’t have a supervisory role earned an average of $14.02 an hour in 2013, according to calculations of government wage data compiled for NBC News by the Economic Policy Institute. There were 12.9 million such workers in the U.S. in 2013, according to EPI, accounting for nearly 86 percent of all retail workers.
After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 12.2 percent decrease from the average hourly wage those workers earned in 1979.
Over that same period, the overall pool of similar production and nonsupervisory workers — who accounted for nearly 83 percent of all private-sector workers in 2013 — saw hourly wages increase by 6.2 percent, according to EPI’s calculation.
The declines follow a period in which retail wages grew substantially. According to EPI, average wages for those nonsupervisory retail workers increased by 62.7 percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 1947 and 1979.
That was a time when department stores and other retail innovations were coming into vogue, providing relatively good jobs both to men and to the growing number of women coming into the workforce, Plunkett said.
Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, said the wage declines that followed are at least partly a result of the dramatic changes that took place after that, when retail became more concentrated among big-box stores competing to get Americans their favorite goods for the lowest price.
NBC News August 1, 2014 -
Nearly 40 million Americans — almost 40% of the private-sector workforce — don’t have paid sick leave, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. And two-thirds of them are at the bottom 25% of the pay scale — the country’s lowest earners, according to the Labor Department.
CNNMoney July 31, 2014 -
In fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, the vast majority of unaccompanied children crossing the border are designated for deportation once they come before a judge. The problem is that wait time for a hearing in immigration court is measured not in weeks or months, but in years.
According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), there was a backlog of 375,503 cases in the immigration court system as of the end of June. That’s more than twice the number of pending cases in 2008. It also translates into an average wait time, according to TRAC, of 587 days for an initial hearing, with wait times in some jurisdictions averaging much longer.
The Fiscal Times July 28, 2014 -
If you’re familiar with American history and housing policy, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The explicit housing discrimination of the mid-20th century has left a mark—arguably a scar—on the landscape of American homeownership. The combination of redlining, block-busting, racial covenants, and other discriminatory measures means that, even now, a majority of blacks live in neighborhoods with relatively poor access to capital and mortgage loans. What’s more, this systematic discrimination has left many black households unable to afford down payments or other housing costs, even if loans are available.
And in the event that black households are able to save and afford a home, they aren’t as financially secure as their white counterparts. To wit, middle-class African-Americans are more likely to belong to the lower middle class of civil servants and government workers—professions that, in the last five years, have been slashed as a consequence of mass public-sector downsizing. All else being equal, a black schoolteacher who loses her job to budget cuts is less likely to have savings—and thus a safety net—than her white counterpart.
Slate July 28, 2014 -
US poverty (less than $19,090 for a family of three): 46.5 million people, 15 percent
Children in poverty: 16.4 million, 23 percent of all children, including 39.6 percent of African-American children and 33.7 percent of Latino children. Children are the poorest age group in the US
Deep poverty (less than $11,510 for a family of four): 20.4 million people, 1 in 15 Americans, including 7.1 million children
People who would have been in poverty if not for Social Security, 2012: 61.8 million (program kept 15.3 million people out of poverty)
Moyers & Company July 28, 2014