Media clips
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Some corporate leaders, like Peter Georgescu (“Capitalists, Arise,” Sunday Review, Aug. 9), are now expressing concern about rising inequality. But if Mr. Georgescu is representative of our newly enlightened capitalists, they still do not understand the problem. For 40 years, the rising gap between workers’ productivity and their wages has channeled most of the benefits of economic growth to shareholders. Mr. Georgescu therefore would like companies to raise the salaries of their workers. For obvious reasons, they don’t. So he proposes tax subsidies for them to do it. Amazingly, he claims that this would not represent “an increase in government support.” Mr. Georgescu thus skips over the root cause of the productivity/wage gap: the weakened bargaining power of workers, largely a result of the political pressure from his fellow chief executives to destroy labor unions, send jobs offshore and shift the tax burden from capital to labor. Until our capitalists acknowledge their own role in the rise of inequality, it will be hard to take their professions of concern very seriously.
The New York Times August 17, 2015 -
Parents who work “irregular” hours — unpredictable shifts for which they are called in or sent home with little notice, especially at night — can inadvertently lead to psychological or developmental fallout for their children, a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, has found.
The study — part of a larger project by Morsy and Economic Policy Institute research associate Richard Rothstein, looking at how social class characteristics effect children’s development and achievement to suggest policy changes — found that kids of all ages can suffer fallout when parents are called in for erratic work hours.
The researchers note that erratic work schedules are more common among workers who are black or less educated, as well as young single mothers making low wages; one-third of moms with adolescents at home, for example, receive a week or less notice regarding their weekly schedules, adding to anxiety, exhaustion, and stress levels. “Anything that causes stress to parents is going to do harm to their children,” Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, tells Yahoo Parenting. “In this case, it deprives children of the time they need with a parent at important moments, such as getting ready for school or at bedtime.”
Yahoo News August 17, 2015 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute (also a member of the Fed Up coalition), returning to the economy of December 2007 would mean adding three million more jobs. In other words, there are millions of Americans the recovery has not yet reached, and whom it may never reach if the Fed hits the brakes too quickly.
The American Prospect August 17, 2015 -
Estimates of the share of American workers with irregular and on-call work schedules range from 10 percent to nearly 20 percent, according to government and private surveys cited in a recent paperby Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University. In one survey, almost 20 percent of workers said they had “a day or less” advance notice of their work hours and days. An additional 12 percent reported advance notice of two to three days and 12 percent had notice of four days to a week.
The New York Times August 14, 2015 -
That’s according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute that focuses on children whose parents have unusual work schedules that vary weekly, rotate or feature hours outside 8 a.m to 4 p.m. Toddlers whose mothers hold schedules like those may suffer from problem-solving skills and their language skills may falter; teens are more likely to be depressed and engage in risky behavior. Meanwhile fathers risk having a less close relationship with their children. “Parents need to have regular schedules for their children,” says EPI research associate Richard Rothstein. “Children need to be read to before bedtime. They need high-quality early childhood experiences.”
Today Show August 14, 2015 -
Even working a strict 9-to-5 schedule can make taking care of young children difficult. But when parents have a schedule that is different every week, or even every day, it has an outsized impact on children, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). In a policy brief, the EPI summarizes the research into non-standard work shifts, defined as “non-daytime shifts in which most hours do not fall between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., when shifts rotate, or when schedules vary weekly or otherwise.”
Boston.com August 14, 2015 -
Companies like Guitar Center would not pay labor relations consultants top dollar if meetings like Ciabattoni’s were not generally effective. According to a 2009 study done by Cornell labor expert Kate Bronfenbrenner and published by the Economic Policy Institute, workers who sat through anti-union meetings at work were significantly more likely to vote against the union in their election.
The Huffington Post August 14, 2015 -
For years, executive pay has increased much faster than pay for workers. Twenty years ago, executive pay was 20 times higher than employees’ pay. In 2013, executive pay was 300 times higher than workers pay, according to the nonpartisan research group, the Economic Policy Institute.
The Chicago Tribune August 14, 2015 -
Already, it’s clear that CEOs have been profiting handsomely during the past few decades, while average worker pay has stagnated. CEO pay has surged 937 percent from 1978 through 2013, compared with a 10.2 percent increase in a typical employee’s paycheck during the same period, the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute found in June. CEOs in 2014 earned 296 times the average worker, compared with a 30-to-1 ratio in 1978, the EPI found.
CBS Moneywatch August 14, 2015 -
Under their methodology, Piketty and Saez’s average inflation-adjusted incomes for the bottom 90 percent (which includes some of the upper middle class) in 2013 were about the same that they were in 1968 and 6 percent lower in 2013 than they were in 1979. Similarly, in terms of earnings, Larry Mishel and his colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute report that real median hourly pay increased by just 6 percent from 1979 to 2013.
Washington Monthly August 14, 2015