It’s not the first time Clinton’s campaign has taken a shot at that remark. Her campaign tweeted a graph by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute showing stagnating wages as productivity has risen over the past four decades.
Politico
July 14, 2015
A recent study out of the Economic Policy Institute found the unemployment rate of workers less than 25 years old is typically about twice the rate of the country’s overall unemployment rate. Youth underemployment, meanwhile, ballooned during and in the aftermath of the Great Recession, so a larger number of young adults are either employed part-time when they’d like to have full-time work or are working a low-wage job for which they may be overqualified.
US News and World Report
July 14, 2015
The New York Times
July 13, 2015
Since President Obama announced a bold update to the rules determining who gets overtime pay, a variety of critiques have surfaced. While some of these critiques raise germane concerns — those of us who favor the policy raised them ourselves — others reflect a poor understanding of overtime rules, unrealistic predictions regarding employer reactions, and muddled logic. Below, we try to provide a more balanced set of expectations as to how the new rule might play out in the job market. The new rule significantly increases the salary threshold below which most workers must be covered by overtime pay, from about $24,000 to about $50,000. Since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, covered workers must be paid 1.5 times their hourly wage for time worked beyond 40 hours per week. We should also note that the updated threshold simply restores its inflation-adjusted value to its 1975 level.
The Washington Post
July 13, 2015
That led Democratic candidates to fire back. Mrs. Clinton said Americans have increased their productivity faster than their wages, sharing a chart from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) said on Twitter that “Americans already work the longest hours in the western industrialized world.” Sen. Sanders didn’t cite a source for his statement.
Wall Street Journal
July 13, 2015
But residents of Baltimore and housing policy experts say that all depends on the determination of the nation’s cities to tackle the issue honestly and aggressively and the federal government’s willingness to get tough with communities that violate policies. “The assumption is that every jurisdiction wants to integrate and they don’t have the info to do so and that’s a very optimistic viewpoint,” said Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and author whose work examines the history of state-sponsored residential segregation and racial educational inequities. “It’s a good first step,” he said “but I wouldn’t personally get too excited.”
NBC News
July 13, 2015
It’s true that many people are working fewer hours than they’d like, but that’s not for want of trying: they’ve been unable to secure full-time work so they take up part-time gigs. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the number of “involuntary part-time” workers has grown since the recession hit to more than 6.6 million.
The Nation
July 13, 2015
Last week, the Labor Department reported that, even as the jobless rate fell to 5.3% in June, hourly wages remained stuck—part of a long-running pattern that has left “the vast majority of workers,” in the words of the Economic Policy Institute, without a real raise for more than three decades.
Fortune
July 13, 2015
Productivity is measured by how much stuff a worker can churn out for every hour of labor. While it’s fluctuated over the years, lately it’s been pretty lousy since a decade-long boom ending in about 2004, according to Wells Fargo Securities LLC. So recent productivity trends haven’t really looked as rosy as the chart that Clinton tweeted out, which dates to 1948 and ends around 2010. It’s also worth noting that it was supplied by the Economic Policy Institute, which is partly funded by labor unions.
Bloomberg
July 13, 2015