For Josh Bivens, the Economic Policy Institute’s research and policy director, however, the discrepancy is not a mystery. The low official unemployment rate conceals the degree to which workers have settled for part-time work when they want to work full time, or those who have given up looking for a job altogether. “This is not a puzzle,” Bivens said at the briefing on Tuesday. “It is the evidence for why it is too soon to start putting the brakes on the economy.”
The Huffington Post
December 2, 2015
Landscaping companies, for example, were approved for more than 30,000 H-2 visas in the 2014 fiscal year. Yet Daniel Costa, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions, found that over the same period, unemployment in landscaping was more than twice as high as the national average. “The problem with the system is that the H-2 workers who are coming in are not tied to actual, demonstrated labor shortages,” Costa said.
Buzzfeed
December 2, 2015
Southern California Public Radio
December 2, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, with the Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan, non-profit Economic Policy Institute, disagrees. “I think this will get a lot of national attention,” he said. Eisenbrey’s studied the U.S. health system compared to Canada’s, which does have a single-payer system. He found the U.S. pays far more for healthcare than our northern neighbor. In part, that’s because of all the money our insurance industry spends on administration, management and marketing, he said. If Colorado voters pass this measure “costs would go down the way they have in Canada.” But he says there would be a different kind of cost: “I’d say the biggest problem is there are a lot of people could lose jobs.” “All of that marketing, advertising, accounting, all of the management of the various private insurance companies is done by people, who are employed to do it,” he said.
Colorado Public Radio
December 2, 2015
Exactly half of states have returned to their pre-recession employment levels, according to a report issued last month by the Economic Policy Institute. Additionally, employers planned to hire more new college grads this year versus last year, according to a spring survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
The Fiscal Times
December 2, 2015
He pointed to a study this month by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy and the Economic Policy Institute. That study found that some 700,000 state residents make less than $11.36 an hour, the amount it says is needed to keep a family of four out of poverty. That study found that the “13 states that raised the minimum wage at the beginning of 2014 experienced subsequent job growth equal to or better than states that did not.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
December 2, 2015
The Great Recession began in December 2007, and ended officially in June 2009. As of October 2015, the unemployment rates in half the states in the country had fallen to or below their pre-recession levels. In the other half, unemployment rates were still higher than before the recession.
The New York Times
December 1, 2015
With a national unemployment rate of 5 percent as of October, they want to see if the low rates can spur further gains before the Fed heads in the other direction. “This, to me, is just a potential huge wasted opportunity, because we have a lot of uncertainty about how low unemployment can be before sparking inflation,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “There’s no particular reason to think that we can’t go as low as four percent. That’s a million and a half workers.”
The Hill
December 1, 2015
A good overview of the decline of SBTC is Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz, and John Schmitt, “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality,” EPI – CEPR working paper, November 2013.
The New York Review of Books
November 30, 2015
That may be smart politics. But on the policy side, the elision makes considerably less sense. And a new initiative from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the Women’s Economic Agenda, helps explain why. Because as is made clear in the new EPI report “Closing the pay gap and beyond: A comprehensive strategy for improving economic security for women and families,” many of the flaws in the structure of the American economy that hurt all workers hurt women workers especially. And righting these wrongs must be seen as part of the broader effort to make women’s station in the U.S. truly equal.
Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Alyssa Davis and Elise Gould, the two EPI experts who authored the report. In addition to discussing their recent work, we also talked about the gender wage gap as well as the right — and wrong — ways to approach these important social and economic questions. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.
Salon
November 30, 2015