Productivity is closely tied to wages. Employers pay workers more with increased profits they can get from workers being more efficient and productive. Right now, productivity and wages are both stuck, and one reason is lack of business investment in new plant and equipment and technology, said analyst Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute. Businesses “are not very convinced they should open new factories and open new hotels,” said Bivens, “because the ones they have are not running at full capacity, so they need to see more customers and more demand growth before they’ll do that investment.” Bivens pointed out that U.S. businesses have a lot of cash on hand, and it’s cheap to borrow for productivity-enhancing workplace improvements, with interest rates still historically low. But he said they aren’t likely to make that investment unless the economy heats up a lot more.
Marketplace
February 5, 2016
A student with an empty stomach or a toothache won’t learn as well as one who is healthy. “All kids can learn, and they can learn at high levels, but it’s very conditional on kids having the right opportunities,” said Elaine Weiss, an education expert at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “Those opportunities to learn tend to be extremely disparate, based in particular on social class and also, to a large extent, on race.”
The Atlantic
February 5, 2016
EPI Family Budget Calculator.
The Huffington Post
February 5, 2016
A report issued last year by the Economic Policy Institute argues the negative side-effects of on-call shifts take an even broader toll on the economy. The non-partisan group said at least 10 percent of the workforce is assigned to irregular or on-call hours, and these employees are more likely to have work-family conflicts. This has the potential to hinder their children’s education and future, said Leila Morsy, who co-authored the report.
CNBC
February 5, 2016
Some members of the European parliament have cited calculations by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington that up to 3.5m jobs could be lost in the EU. The commission sharply rejects such claims and estimates that some 211,000 jobs would be at risk if there were no mitigating measures.
Financial Times
February 5, 2016
Democrats Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Bill Nelson of Florida, senators from states with some of the most high-profile accusations of H-1B abuse, have cosponsored the legislation. “Fixes are so easy,” says Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “Require that the market wage be paid and require employers to prove they recruited US workers first.” “Have a Labor Department database that requires you post the job for 30 days [in the US],” he continues. “If you really can’t find anybody, you get your worker. If that is going to destroy the program, that means it really is just a tool for exploitable labor.”
Christian Science Monitor
February 4, 2016
According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the guestworker labor force provides US employers jobs on the cheap, offering less in wages and virtually nothing in terms of labor rights or benefits. EPI’s analysis of a decade of data on guestworkers under the H-2B visa program, which pipes immigrants into temporary low-wage service-industry jobs, shows that the visa allows bosses to employ guestworkers at “hourly wage rates that are far lower than state and national averages in the overwhelming majority of cases.” For example, in the most popular H-2B industry, landscaping and groundskeeping, “employers saved on average between $2.59 and $3.37 per hour by hiring an H-2B worker instead of a worker earning the national average wage.”
The Nation
February 4, 2016
Demographically, tipped workers are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as the rest of the workforce, according to numbers from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. They’re nearly twice as likely to rely on food stamps, and among those who have families, 40% of their children qualify for free lunches. Of the 10 lowest-paid jobs in America, seven are in the restaurant industry, according to the Department of Labor.
Buzzfeed
February 4, 2016
The authors used what’s known as the United Nations Global Policy Model, which unlike the classical model does not assume TPP trading partners are at full employment. “From the starting gate, they’re beginning from two very different assumptions,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, also based in Washington.
International Business Times
February 4, 2016
Two-thirds of people on needs-based public assistance are either working or have a family member who’s working, a briefing paper published Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute states. Additionally, about half of all recipients of public assistance are working full-time. Indolence and apathy aren’t driving up the welfare rolls, according to the research. Low pay is the more likely culprit. “As corporations achieve extraordinarily high profit levels and executive pay reaches new heights, it is appropriate to question whether employers are effectively passing off a portion of their societal responsibilities on to taxpayers,” wrote the paper’s author, David Cooper.
International Business Times
February 4, 2016