Media clips
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Raising the minimum wage in the District from $11.50 to $15 an hour could net 114,000 workers in the region up to $2,900 in additional wages a year, serving as “a powerful and much-needed step to ensure workers in the Washington area can achieve a decent quality of life.” That’s according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute on the impacts of incrementally raising the minimum wage in the nation’s capital to $15 by 2020, which is being proposed both in a ballot initiative backed by labor and social justice groups and in legislation introduced by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
WAMU May 5, 2016 -
The Economic Policy Institute says in a study released on Wednesday that those 114,000 represent about 14 percent of all D.C. workers and more than a fifth of its private-sector and nonprofit workers. Advocates have until July to collect more than 20,000 signatures in order for the measure to appear on the November ballot. Affected workers, EPI concludes, would receive $329 million in extra wages. David Cooper, a senior economic analyst for EPI, notes that under current law, the minimum wage will only rise to around $12.50 by 2020, so the $15-an-hour minimum would constitute a 20 percent increase over that. Demographically, almost 98 percent of those who would see their wages go up from the ballot measure would be older than 20, Cooper added, with three-quarters of them 25 or older. The majority would be women and approximately 80 percent would be people of color, he said. The report relied on 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (the authors cite a detailed methodology used in a previous study on New York’s minimum-wage boost).
Washington City Paper May 5, 2016 -
We were less surprised to find Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute similarly bearish on the inflationary effects of the overtime rule, even when combined with the various minimum wage hikes occurring around the country. “A $12 min wage would increase the nation’s entire wage bill by something like 0.3 percent in 2020 when fully phased in,” Bivens emailed Morning Shift. “If that was fully passed through to prices we’re talking a single year where inflation was about 0.2 percent higher than [it] would otherwise have been, and then no further upward pressure. And if OT redistributed that much money to workers we’d be pretty thrilled, I think.”
Politico May 5, 2016 -
The Federal Reserve should not increase interest rates in order to deflate financial asset bubbles, two progressive economists argue in a policy brief released Thursday. Dean Baker and Josh Bivens’ analysis, “The wrong tool for the right job,” tries to rebut an increasingly common argument for a Fed interest rate hike that could hit Americans in their wallets. Baker and Bivens, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute, respectively, marshal existing research to cast doubt on the idea that raising rates is an effective way to curb asset prices. And they maintain that since raising rates puts downward pressure on job growth, doing so to combat an asset bubble risks causing economic pain in the name of uncertain gains. Instead, they make the case for using targeted financial regulations to achieve the same goal without the unnecessary “collateral damage.”
The Huffington Post May 5, 2016 -
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank affiliated with labor unions, says 13.5 million workers would be directly affected. The institute claims the Department of Labor’s lower assessment is based on outdated judgments about occupations and classifications.
Cleveland Plain Dealer May 5, 2016 -
Who are the unionized construction workers and who are the nonunion construction workers? Last year, the New York Building Congress reported that the construction workforce is about 40% white, 37% Hispanic, 13% African-American and 10% Asian-American. The assumption is that union workers are primarily white and nonunion workers primarily not. However, the unions point to a 2013 blog post by the Economic Policy Institute that claimed 21% of unionized workers are black. It was admittedly preliminary research, and a follow-up study has yet to be released. This is important because this is a winners-losers situation. Who will get the jobs if union labor is required on affordable housing, and who will lose jobs?
Crain's New York May 5, 2016 -
But a new paper from Josh Bivens, director of research and policy at the Economic Policy Institute, and Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, suggests that interest rates aren’t a good tool for popping bubbles at all.
“The housing bubble was an international phenomenon,” Bivens tells The Week. “You had a lot of different countries with quite different monetary policy tightness see very large increases in home prices. So it’s a little hard to say it was all about the interest rates.”
The Week May 5, 2016 -
Amid a national debate over the $15 minimum wage and two competing proposals for implementing it in the District, a new report found that 14 percent of the D.C. workforce would be directly or indirectly affected by such an increase. And of the estimated 114,000 people who would benefit, 80 percent are workers of color, according to the Economic Policy Institute study.
The report, though, uses the example of states that already guarantee the same minimum for tipped workers to argue in favor the single wage. “This is not some radical new idea. There are eight states that have already eliminated their tipped minimum wage,” said David Cooper, the author of the report and a senior analyst at EPI, adding that all but Hawaii have data going back decades. The report cites a study that showed tipped workers made 20 percent more per hour (measuring both base pay and tips) in states that had a single minimum wage in 2013, in comparison to those that used the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour.
DCist May 5, 2016 -
The Economic Policy Institute said the rule would restore a protection that has been missing for some time. “It’s a very, very simple rule to implement,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the D.C. think tank. “All it requires is looking at your workforce and seeing how you’re paying overtime. It’s something an automated payroll processing system could do in five minutes or a human resource manager could do in a couple hours.”
The Hill May 4, 2016 -
Supporters hope the new measure will help stem a decades-long stagnation in U.S. wages. Between 1979 and 2013, middle-income wages rose just 6%, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Low-income wages did even worse, actually declining by 5%. Meanwhile very- high-income wages rose 41%.
Teen Vogue May 4, 2016
