Media clips
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Mr. Sanders’s campaign has said previously that he is using research from the Economic Policy Institute that uses a different, broader definition of unemployment that includes people with a part-time job who want full-time work and people who are not actively looking for a job because they think there are few opportunities. The E.P.I. data also uses a slightly different age bracket to calculate “youth unemployment” — from age 17 to 20 — and the data is limited to high school graduates.
The New York Times October 14, 2015 -
Sanders’s figures come from a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. (Our friends at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have fact-checked this claim, and Sanders’s staff has pointed to this report.) The report shows that minority youths are less likely to have a job than white youths, and that black youths traditionally have had high unemployment rates.
Sanders’s statistics refer to high school graduates between 17 and 20 years old and not enrolled in additional schooling. This report is different from the official unemployment rate as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. BLS does not specifically break out data for the 17- to 20-year-old age range. Instead, this report looks at employment status for high school graduates who are unemployed, working part-time and “marginally attached to the labor force” (meaning, “those who want a job and have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work in the last four weeks”).
The Washington Post October 14, 2015 -
There is certainly an employment crisis among minority youth. But as he has done in the past, Sanders may have misspoken when he cited those statistics. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute has found that 51.3% of black and 36.1% Hispanic high school graduates, age 17 to 20, are underemployed. That means they either don’t have a job, aren’t working as many hours as they would like or aren’t currently looking for work but would like a job.
CNN October 14, 2015 -
For most Americans who are paid by the hour, wages have either fallen or remained flat for more than a decade, according to a report issued by the Economic Policy Institute, a pro-labor think tank based in Washington. The institute called wage stagnation “the country’s central economic challenge.”
“It tends to be assumed that if we have growth, people’s hourly wages will improve,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute. “In fact, that has not been the case since 2002, whether you have a college degree or not. And for the most part, this issue has not been confronted by economic policy makers.”
The New York Times October 13, 2015 -
After a catastrophic financial crisis and 15 years of declining incomes for typical American households, Democrats seem to have diminishing confidence in the potential of the free market to provide an improving standard of living. “Bill Clinton said, ‘The era of big government is over,’ ” recalled Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, citing the former president’s State of the Union address in 1996. “Democrats for a long time have run from the notion that government can be — often is — the only solution to certain problems.”
The Washington Post October 13, 2015 -
Roughly 8.7 million jobs vanished during the last recession. Since the downturn ended, however, men have encountered less trouble getting back to work, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Between February 2010 and June 2014, men gained 5.5 million jobs while women gained 3.6 million.
The Washington Post October 13, 2015 -
According to some experts, the American system is not only bad for workers, but for the entire economy. Employment in the restaurant industry has grown by 80 percent since 1990, and because those workers are making less than the regular minimum wage, the country as a whole has lost spending power. “Restaurants have never had to internalize their real labor costs,” David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, said. “The restaurant industry is still the Wild West in terms of labor standards.”
Vice News October 13, 2015 -
The reasons for declines in US labour force participation, which measures people in work or looking for a post, are complex and heavily contested. However, experts believe one driver is threadbare support for working parents. “We don’t have the same incentives other countries have for women to stay in the labour force after they have kids,” said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC.
Financial Times October 13, 2015 -
The issues of stagnant wages and wealth inequity will dominate the discussion before next year’s presidential election — and unleash some unusual political dynamics, predicts a leading labor economist. “It will be one of the main topics in the presidential election next year,” said Lawrence Mishel, who has closely studied the issue. Mishel is president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a liberal think tank. But he criticized Democrats and Republicans alike at the Pathways From Poverty breakfast, sponsored by the Colorado Center on Law & Policy, on Friday at the History Colorado Center. Since 1973, worker productivity has risen 73 percent, according to an EPI analysis. Higher productivity should result in higher wages, Mishel said, but that link is broken, a reflection of deliberate policy decisions by both parties over several administrations.
The Denver Post October 13, 2015 -
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute took a look at the current minimum wage in each state, compared it to the average cost of child care and computed how much of the annual income those costs eat up. It’s not a pretty picture. While federal guidelines say child care should consume no more than 10 percent of a family’s income, the cost of infant care is more than half of a full-time minimum-wage worker’s total earnings in 37 states. The cost of care for a 4-year-old is more than half of total salary in 20 states, according to the study released this week. “Child care is simply out of reach for workers who support their families on minimum-wage jobs,” the institute says.
Sacramento Bee October 13, 2015