Unbalanced trade leads to more job loss. As the Economic Policy Institute recently surmised, increased trade deficits push jobs out of better-paying industries. And at a time when income inequality is running rampant in the U.S., workers don’t need even more “free” trade agreements that will further strip this nation’s economy of middle-income jobs. Enough is enough!
The Huffington Post
April 17, 2015
Simply raising the hourly minimum in line with wage and price inflation would put it at about $11 today; adjusting it for productivity growth would put it at about $18.
The New York Times
April 17, 2015
Big employers, cutting back on full-coverage health care as Obamacare’s ‘Cadillac Tax’ begins to bite.
NPR
April 16, 2015
According to a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, this is life for about 17 percent of the labor force. So called “just-in-time scheduling” is far more common for those who work for hourly wages or are part-time employees, or both. Part-time workers—more than six million Americans—are more than twice as likely to have unpredictable hours than full-time employees.
The Atlantic
April 16, 2015
That language struck a chord with members of the alliance. As part of a new five-year plan, the organization is urging donors to contribute to an expanded suite of advocacy groups and think tanks devoted to economic inequality including Americans for Financial Reform, the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project.
The Washington Post
April 16, 2015
The Clinton campaign said she was relying on a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, which found that at the top 350 U.S. firms, in terms of sales, average chief executive compensation in 2013 was $15.2 million. It concluded that this was 295.9 times higher than the average compensation of workers at those companies, which was a decline from a peak of 383.4-to-1 in 2000 but far higher than a 20-to-1 ratio in 1965.
So how does the organization come up with this ratio?
EPI has published a fairly detailed description of its methodology. For chief executives, it originally used an annual survey published by the Wall Street Journal, and then later switched to buying the information –at a cost of $10,000 a year, according EPI president Lawrence Mishel—from Compustat, a division of Standard & Poor’s. The database includes data on the compensation of the companies in the S&P 1500 Index dating back to 1992, but Mishel says they focus on the top 350 in order to remain consistent with the WSJ data going back to the 1960s.
The Washington Post
April 16, 2015
Traditionally, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has emphasized promoting “opportunity” over reducing inequality. As Lawrence Mishel, the president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, pointed out in a blog post last week, that approach has sometimes enabled centrist Democrats to “avoid confronting the top 1 percent’s capture of the lion’s share of income growth. After all, addressing runaway executive pay and a runaway financial sector—the main causes of the top 1 percent’s income gains—smacks of redistribution; and besides, those folks are their donor base.” With Hillary and her staff about to hit up hedge-fund managers, investment bankers, tech moguls, and other rich folks for hefty campaign contributions, the suspicion lingers that, when it comes down to it, her campaign will punt, rather than directly confront, the entrenched problems of income and wealth inequality.
The New Yorker
April 14, 2015
For example, recent research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that men still outearn women at every rung of the income ladder. The higher up the ladder, the bigger the gap. In 2014, women in the 95th percentile of female earners made 79 percent of wages for men at the 95th percentile, while women in the lowest 10th percentile made 91 cents for each $1 earned by their male counterparts.
The New York Times
April 14, 2015
Last week, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute released a report on irregular scheduling. It found that 17 percent of the U.S. workforce has “unstable work shift schedules” of some kind, whether due to on-call work schedules or rotating shifts. The report suggests the actual percentage may be higher.
“Just to get even one hour paid for if someone is sent home before their shift time ends or if they show and there’s no work at all, which I think is the most common complain, that would get employers to reconsider those kind of practices,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor-employment relations at Penn State University and the author of the EPI report.
The New Republic
April 14, 2015
In 1965, CEOs earned about 20 times what a typical worker brought home, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. In 2013, CEO compensation was nearly 300 times the pay of the average worker, the EPI study said.
Reuters
April 14, 2015