Media clips
-
For instance, new research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, fell for nearly everyone. An exception was a small gain for the bottom 10 percent of wage earners, which was because of minimum-wage increases in 13 states this year.
That’s clear evidence that raising the federal minimum wage, while only a first step toward better pay, would have a powerful effect. A lift from the current $7.25 an hour to the modest $10.10 called for by President Obama and Democrats in Congress would put an estimated additional $35 billion in the pockets of affected workers over a three-year phase-in period.
Unionization is also associated with higher wages and benefits, especially for low-wage workers, which argues for greater legal enforcement of the right to organize without retaliation.
New York Times September 3, 2014 -
The White House is encouraging Democrats to draw attention to the recovery as they head into the November mid-term elections.
In an August memo to House and Senate Democrats, Obama’s top two economic advisers underscored the positive news: more than 200,000 jobs created per month for six consecutive months, a six-year high in auto sales, second-quarter economic growth that exceeded expectations and an expanding manufacturing sector.
The unemployment rate stands at 6.2 percent, dropping 1.1 points over the past year, and the stock market has nearly tripled in five years.
Even so, there is still significant weakness in the labor market, underscored by the long-term unemployed. Labor participation has dropped. As well, real hourly wages fell from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014 for all income groups, except for a 2-cent increase for the lowest income level, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Americans seem caught between confidence and worry.
In July, the Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to its highest reading since October 2007, two months before the Great Recession began. But a new survey by Rutgers University found that Americans are more anxious about the economy now than they were right after the recession ended.
Associated Press September 3, 2014 -
Veronique de Rugy and Lawrence Mishel talked about the state of the America worker and examined national trends in wages and productivity as well as the overall strength of the job market.
C-SPAN September 3, 2014 -
“That’s something that is really missing in today’s workforce,” says Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project. “People of all economic levels increasingly feel like cogs in the wheel, that they don’t matter, that they’re expendable.”
The sense of appreciation Market Basket offered its workers became threatened when one of the board members began siding with Arthur D. Demoulas’s side of the family, changing the balance of power. In June, Arthur T. was pushed out as president and his responsibilities were handed over to co-executives Felicia Thornton and James F. Gooch. The assumption was that Market Basket’s business model would be changed to allow more profits to flow to the top at the expense of its workers, upsetting not only low-level employees, but their mid-level bosses — managers of 68 stores at one point said they would work for no one but Arthur T. — and even customers who boycotted the chain in the last 10 weeks.
“The management was really looking out for the workers leading up to this battle, so when the fight happened, you had workers sticking up for management,” says David Cooper, an economic analyst at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
US News and World Report August 29, 2014 -
Also in Herald Net
The median hourly wage paid to women is less than it is for men in all but one of the eleven jobs surveyed in a report by the Economic Policy Institute. In some cases, the gap is slight—for cashiers, dishwashers, food preparation workers, and hosts and hostesses, it’s a matter of cents. But in others, including supervisors and bartenders, the difference is well over a dollar. For managers, the highest earning occupation, the disparity was nearly three dollars per hour.“This is what we identify as pay discrimination,” said Valerie Wilson, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “The work women are doing is being valued at less than the work men do in the same job.”
Washington Post August 29, 2014 -
Real hourly wages are down for workers at all education levels in the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute paper. Pay fell by 1.1 percent for people with high school diplomas, by 1 percent for people with some college, 1.6 percent for people with college degrees and by 2.7 percent for people with advanced degrees. “The last year has been a poor one for American workers’ wages,” writes Elise Gould, an economist with the institute, in the report.
Gould notes the pay decreases seen over the last year are part of a longer trend: Wages have pretty much been flat or on the decline since the start of the recession. In fact, the only group that hasn’t seen a drop in real wages since 2007 is workers with advanced degrees, for which wages are basically flat.
Washington Post August 29, 2014 -
Giving overtime a healthy raise
A March presidential memorandum called for raising the threshold for salaried workers who can’t claim overtime pay, currently about $23,000. More than 6 million people would benefit from a roughly $50,000 cap, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Business groups and conservatives say that the action will increase costs for employers and force them to more closely track white-collar workers’ hours, which could curb telecommuting and other flexible work options. “My concern is that this overtime initiative will have the unintentional but quite destructive effect of making sure that anyone who makes less than the overtime threshold will be unable to work remotely,” says James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Fortune August 29, 2014 -
From 1979 to 2007—we look to 2007 because it was the economic high point before the most recent downturn and the deep recession—median household income in the United States grew by a paltry 18 percent. Meanwhile, productivity grew by roughly 65 percent. Moreover, the 18 percent household income growth was not because workers were being paid more, a just reward for that increased productivity. Instead, that 18 percent gain happened almost entirely due to women in American households working more hours. Annual work hours for married women increased over that time period by more than 45 percent, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal labor data. For married women in the middle of the nation’s income scale , the increase was nearly 60 percent. (For comparison, married men’s hours grew by 1.7 percent in total, 2.6 percent for men in the middle of the income scale.)
A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center found that in 40 percent of U.S. households with children, women are the sole or primary earners of income. This share has grown fourfold since 1960. Yet despite their increasingly central role as breadwinners in U.S. families, too many women continue to be paid far too little. Women still make only 83 percent of what men earn at the median; women are disproportionately represented in low-wage occupations; and nearly one in every three working women earns a poverty-level wage—far too little to support a family, White House and Economic Policy Institute analyses of federal data have found.
National Journal August 29, 2014 -
The rich have gotten richer at the expense of the rest of us.
The rise in income inequality of the past few decades has taken money from the pockets of the lower and middle class and added it to the coffers of the rich, according to a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on worker issues.
There was income inequality 30 years ago, to be sure. But inequality has widened dramatically since then, not because the top 1 percent have suddenly gotten more talented or lucky, but because of economic policies designed to help the top 1 percent suck up more of the value being created in the economy by higher productivity. Meanwhile, the wages of average workers — the ones who keep producing more and generating much of that extra wealth — have stagnated.
Huffington Post August 28, 2014 -
Here’s a number to remember for those who feel that their financial prospects have hit a wall: $18,000.
That’s how much the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says middle-class Americans are losing in annual wages because of rising income inequality.
The liberal-leaning think-tank estimates missing wages by considering real average annual household income, which rose by 53.4 percent from 1979 to 2007. While that might seem healthy, the increase was mostly due to huge gains by the country’s wealthiest earners. For 90 percent of American households, income growth was actually below that average rate.
If inequality hadn’t worsened during those years, middle-class households would have had annual incomes that were $18,000 higher by 2007, the study notes.
“This growing inequality of income has a real effect on everyday people,” said Elise Gould, author of a new study and director of health policy research at EPI. “The top 1 percent and top 1/10th of 1 percent have grown so much that it pulls up average wages” but that fails to reflect the reality for most Americans, who have suffered from stagnating wage growth.
CBS Moneywatch August 28, 2014