The new provision blows that compromise out of the water. It could lead to a doubling or tripling of the 66,000 seasonal workers who come under the existing program, will weaken the requirements that employers seek out American workers first, lower the wages paid to many foreign workers, and reduce federal oversight of employers. Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute says the new provision will “create a huge incentive to hire temporary foreign workers instead of the local U.S. workers who reside in communities where the jobs are located.”
Council on Foreign Relations
December 23, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute gets the nod for a figure that captures a) the growth of inequality, as a huge gap has evolved between the typical worker’s compensation and the productivity growth they themselves are helping to create, and b) what we believe will be a key issue in the 2016 campaign.
The Washington Post
December 22, 2015
The black unemployment rate is about twice the white unemployment rate regardless of education status, the Economic Policy Institute has found in a recent article. However, the black unemployment rate has always been twice the rate of whites.
The rate for blacks with only a high school diploma is 9.6 percent — without a diploma, the jobless rate shoots up to 16.6 percent. In comparison to white workers who only have a high school diploma or less, the numbers were at 4.6 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.
“The broader significance of this disparity suggests a race penalty whereby blacks at each level of education have unemployment rates that are the same as or higher than less educated whites,” Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, wrote. “Persistent disparities in unemployment are constant reminders of how race continues to have an undue influence on life in this country.”
The Huffington Post
December 22, 2015
A higher percentage of white Americans obtain college degrees: 41 percent, compared to the black population’s 22 percent. But data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) show that differences in education can’t explain fully the entirety of the unemployment gap. According to research from Valerie Wilson, an economist at EPI, for black Americans with the same level of education level as white Americans, the unemployment rate is consistently nearly twice as high. Wilson looks at census data and finds, unsurprisingly, unemployment is highest for those who didn’t attend college at all. Among those who hadn’t completed high school, whites had an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent. But for black Americans, the situation was much more extreme: Their unemployment rate was almost two-and-a-half times higher, at 16.6 percent.
The Atlantic
December 22, 2015
Louisiana is among the biggest users per capita of the H-2B program. It attracted 2,648 H-2B workers in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank that advocates for low- to middle-income families in the U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., was a co-sponsor of Mikulski’s language. But in contrast to Mikulski, the Economic Policy Institute said there is no evidence of an employee shortage in landscaping, seafood processing or hospitality jobs, the main occupations for which employers hire H-2B workers. The institute says the bill will drive down wages that H-2B employers must pay, providing a strong incentive for U.S. businesses to employ foreign seasonal workers at the expense of U.S. citizens.
New Orleans Times-Picayune
December 22, 2015
But not everyone agrees with that 5% threshold. “While most indicators have been trending in the right direction, nominal wage growth and the prime-age employment-to-population ratio remain far outside of target ranges, and provide ample evidence that the economy has a way to go before reaching full employment,” said Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
December 21, 2015
While women of that demographic were earning about 88 cents for every dollar men of the same age made in 2004, those women were making just 81 cents for every dollar men earned in 2014. “You would think as women get more experienced in the labor force, as they get more skilled, they’d have a similar increase to men, but they simply don’t,” said Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
December 21, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, which showed that women are today paid 20% less than men – a tiny gain, which was accounted for not by an increase in women’s remuneration but by stagnant wages for men.
Forbes
December 21, 2015
The national unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, if this large pool of “missing workers” were registered as looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 7 percent and not the official rate of 5 percent.
U.S. News & World Report
December 21, 2015
Here, from the Economic Policy Institute, is something very easy to understand. Black Americans suffer from significantly higher levels of unemployment even when they have the same level of education as white people.
Gawker
December 21, 2015