Media clips
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The bottom-up lift has been a long time coming. You don’t have to be Karl Marx to get worked up over the wage chasm. According to the Economic Policy Institute, worker pay increased 10 percent in the past 35 years – while the average CEO pocketed 937 percent more. Minimum-wage workers have less buying power today than 45 years ago. The rich got richer, while the middle class paddled in place and the bottom of the pool deepened.
Buffalo News November 23, 2015 -
Left-leaning economists, however, dismissed the American Action Forum report, saying it was based on poor methodology and using preliminary data that could be revised significantly in the coming months. “Everything that they’re documenting could be statistical noise,” said David Cooper, an analyst at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic November 20, 2015 -
How might the gap be closed sooner than 2133? The Economic Policy Institute recently released a “Women’s Economic Agenda,” which includes 12 recommendations that would help align men’s and women’s pay. The agenda is mindful of the fact that low-wage jobs are held disproportionately by women, and so prescribes many of the things that are often proposed to support lower-paid workers in general: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and instating family- and sick-leave policies. Hopefully, some of these policies will work and women won’t have to wait more than 100 years until equal pay becomes a reality.
The Atlantic November 20, 2015 -
This week the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported that the gender pay gap is still going strong. In the U.S., women are taking home only 82.9 cents for every dollar earned by men, and the discrepancy is worse for minorities and for those at the high end of the pay scale.
Forbes November 20, 2015 -
But critics also argue that large trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement hurt the U.S. economy by sending jobs outside its borders where labor is cheaper. “I would urge your Congressman to look very closely at the entire deal and, in particular, to see how it’s going to affect jobs and wages,” said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research with the Economic Policy institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. One of Scott’s studies that compared jobs gained to jobs lost calculated that the North American Free Trade Agreement displaced nearly 700,000 U.S. workers, and similar studies have tallied even greater figures. “I think what NAFTA has primarily done is hurt workers in the United States,” he said.
NPR November 20, 2015 -
For each city, population figures are 2014 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, and housing prices are based on calculations from real estate website Zillow. Cost of living was calculated by CareerTrends, using 2013 data from the Economic Policy Institute. The cost of living index is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 representing the national average. Numbers under 100 mean average cost of living expenses are lower than the national average.
U.S. News & World Report November 20, 2015 -
Now open your eyes and look at the sobering reality. Women’s real hourly earnings in 2014 were just $15.21. That translates to a 71% “gender and inequality wage gap,” the key finding of a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Economist Elise Gould and researcher Alyssa Davis calculated that gap by combining EPI’s favorite bugaboo, the pay-productivity gap, and that old standby, the gender pay gap. (A previous report on productivity and wages kicked off a vigorous back-and-forth between economists—how you measure matters.)
Wall Street Journal November 19, 2015 -
No matter your preferred source of news, you already know all about how terrible the wage gap is between men and women. By now, both Us Weekly and the New York Times have covered it. Less obvious than the fact that women in every business take home smaller salaries than men, however, is what the hell they should do about it. Thankfully, Elise Gould, a senior economist and the director of health policy research at the Economic Policy institute, and researcher Alyssa Davis have a few ideas. Together, they just released the Women’s Economic Agenda to outline a strategy they say will raise women’s wages and address stagnant workers’ salaries. While they acknowledge that progress has been made over the past three decades, they’re not sugarcoating it: We have serious work to do. Did you know that 40% of the reason that the pay gap has narrowed is because men’s wages have fallen? Yikes. Davis and Gould find that had we closed the pay gap and increased typical workers’ salaries at pace with the productivity growth over the last 30 years, women’s wages would be 70% higher.
Elle November 19, 2015 -
The liberal first-term senator spoke at an event on Capitol Hill unveiling a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank, that highlighted the persistent wage gap between men and women. The report found that women are still paid about 20 percent less than men, and that the small decrease in that gap has occurred largely due to stagnant wages for men, not significant gains by women.
“Over the last several decades women have entered the workforce in record numbers and made great strides in educational attainment,” begins the report, written by EPI’s Alyssa Davis and Elise Gould. “Nevertheless, when compared with men, women are still paid less, are more likely to hold low-wage jobs, and are more likely to live in poverty.”
Mother Jones November 19, 2015 -
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., may not be running for president in 2016, but she was campaigning hard Wednesday to be an agenda-setting power broker. At 9:30 a.m., she joined the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute to release the Women’s Economic Agenda, a list of 12 proposals aimed at closing the gender wage gap. It covers issues such as raising the minimum wage, providing paid family leave and increasing access to child care.
NPR November 19, 2015