The widening chasm between workers’ pay and productivity since the 1970s is “the central component of the wage stagnation story” in the United States, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said in a report issued Wednesday ahead of the Labor Day weekend. Drawing on data from the Social Security Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EPI economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens found that median hourly compensation, adjusted for inflation, grew by 8.7 percent between 1973 and 2014. Productivity rose 72.2 percent over the same time period, the EPI report said. “Productivity and compensation — all wages and benefits for a typical worker — used to grow together from 1948 to 1973, but since 1973 they have diverged,” Mishel said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “That’s very important.”
Al Jazeera America
September 3, 2015
The oft spoken refrain about New York best serving childless young people is as true as the summer air is muggy, as a new report via the Economic Policy Institute could compel young New York families to skip town in favor of the radiant pastures of Toledo, Ohio. While the general outlay of living in New York is reflected constantly in what you hear, read and experience daily, the EPI’s report highlights the relative affordability of basically everywhere else in the country.
Brooklyn Magazine
September 2, 2015
Teenagers, however, represent only a fraction of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage, argue proponents of increasing the federally mandated minimum. “That ad simply displays employers’ contempt for their low-wage workers, portraying them as young workers not needing to feed their families,” Lawrence Mishel told the Guardian. Mischel is president of the other EPI – the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “How can that be accurate when more than 40% of America’s workers earn less than $15 an hour? When the minimum wage is more than 25% below its 1968 value, almost 50 years ago and when the productivity was just half of what it is today?” According to the Economic Policy Institute, if a federally mandated minimum wage were raised to $12 an hour as proposed by some Democratic lawmakers, the average age of an affected worker would be 36 years old. About 15.3% of affected workers would be aged 55 or older, compared with just 10.7% teenagers. The majority of workers – at 55.9% – would be women, including 40% of working single mothers.
The Guardian
September 2, 2015
At $11 hourly and no more than 30 hours per week, a tollbooth worker on the Skyway would earn $17,160 in a year — and that’s before payroll taxes are taken out. Even for a single adult with no dependents in the Chicago metro area, the cost of living is over $31,000 annually, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator.
Think Progress
September 2, 2015
Over on real estate blog Candy’s Dirt, Jon Anderson spent some time with a Family Budget Calculator recently updated by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. It uses market-specific date to estimate the income necessary for living in various cities not just at the subsistence level of the federal poverty line ($24,250 for a family of four) but at a standard of living that most of us would consider a bare minimum to, as Anderson puts it, “live like a human” with (according to EPI’s guidelines) “structurally safe, and sanitary rental housing of a modest nature with suitable amenities,” “nutritionally adequate diets,” as well as adequate health care coverage and meeting transportation needs.
Dallas Magazine
September 2, 2015
“They were very weak on getting people into their positions in the first term,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research and advocacy group. “They lost many years of potential fruitful activity.” (The White House says that the president was prompt in naming appointees, whose nominations then became bogged down in the Senate.)
“We’re really digging out of a 40-year hole,” Mr. Mishel said. “The Clinton years were ones where they more triangulated between business and workers rather than weigh in on the side of workers.”
The New York Times
September 1, 2015
The bad news: The ranks of underemployed and unemployed grads have soared since 2008. Job prospects have certainly improved lately, but the number of college grads earning the minimum wage alone hovers at around 250,000. For college graduates ages 21 to 24, the unemployment rate is 7.2 percent (vs. 5.3 percent for the general population), according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New York Post
September 1, 2015
A smarter move might be a whole new labor regime – something that acknowledges employment has changed a lot since the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. “The NLRA should be overhauled completely,” Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an email.
Politico
September 1, 2015
“I would much rather have the Fed engage in slowdown and recession prevention by getting us to reach levels at which a rate hike would not be premature,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said earlier this week.
The Huffington Post
September 1, 2015
In 2013, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, responded strongly to Duncan’s arguments, pointing out that “no education secretary has been as deft as Arne Duncan in creating incentives—both carrots and sticks—to get states to follow his favored policies that are technically voluntary.”
“Only in this area, apparently, does Secretary Duncan believe that progress must be entirely voluntary, unforced by carrots and sticks,” Rothstein wrote. There have been plenty of opportunities to incentivize racial integration, such as rewarding states that prohibit all-white suburbs from excluding poor people through zoning ordinances, or withholding No Child Left Behind waivers from states that allow landlords to discriminate against families using federal housing vouchers. “Adoption of such ‘voluntary’ policies could make a contribution to narrowing the academic achievement gap that is so much a focus of Secretary Duncan’s rhetoric,” Rothstein said.
The American Prospect
September 1, 2015