Average CEO compensation for the top 350 U.S. firms by revenue has climbed to $16.3 million last year, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. That’s up from $15.7 million in 2013.
Bloomberg
July 7, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, Vice President of the Economic Policy Institute joins Rick to talk about President Obama’s recent directive to the Department of Labor to fix the abusive management loophole and give workers back their overtime protection
The Rick Smith Show
July 7, 2015
A study by the progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that currently, only about 8 percent of salaried workers qualify for overtime. When the law was written in 1975, it covered about half of salaried workers.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
July 7, 2015
How can The Hill run an op-ed about an OSHA standard that never once mentions the fact that the substance the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is regulating — silica — kills or cripples thousands of workers every year? Pamela Volm, the national chair of the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), is obviously concerned about only one thing: the profit margin for her business and others like hers (“Regulatory reform that works for the ‘real world’ of construction,” June 24). The workers’ lives are their own problem — not hers. The closest Ms. Volm gets to addressing the hazards of breathing in silica dust all day while drilling, cutting or grinding rock, pouring sand, making bricks or doing dozens of other tasks that involve prolonged exposure is the following: “Silica is a naturally occurring substance found in sand, quartz and many construction materials including asphalt, bricks, concrete, stone and tile.” So, it’s natural! Why is OSHA bothering businesses with rules and new costs?
The Hill
July 7, 2015
FBN’s Gerri Willi, Charles Payne and David Asman and Christian Dorsey of the Economic Policy Institute and ‘Demographic Cliff’ author Harry Dent discuss the Greek debt problems.
Fox Business
July 7, 2015
A 2013 paper by Mr. Autor and two other scholars concluded that a quarter of the decline in manufacturing employment between 1990 and 2007 could be explained by a surge of imports from China. And Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, estimated that increased trade with developing nations lowered wages by 5.5 percent for workers without college degrees.
The New York Times
July 6, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute, also said lawmakers should pay congressional interns, but he called the study a “distraction” from the need to raise the minimum wage for workers who are mostly adults. “The vast majority of minimum wage workers are adults and many of them have children, and that’s very different from the interns that work on Capitol Hill, by and large,” he said.
USA Today
July 6, 2015
On this Fourth of July, we gather with friends and family around barbeques and picnic tables across the country to celebrate the American patriots who built this country. But as many of us enjoy a well-deserved day off, millions of low- and middle-income workers are being required to work on a federal holiday without any sort of overtime compensation. This is the result of outdated overtime rules that cover fewer and fewer salaried workers each year. Most people don’t know that many salaried workers, not just employees paid by the hour, are entitled to overtime pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. The rules are complicated if you earn more than $23,660 a year, but below that threshold, it’s simple: You’re entitled to time-and-a-half pay for every hour past 40 in a week.
US News and World Report
July 6, 2015
Teens looking for a summer job may have a slightly better outlook than last year, but there are a lot of “missing workers” in prime-age range of 25 to 54, says Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She says these are potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor seeking a job. Gould believes the fact that over two-thirds of missing workers are prime age is a “sign that economy is not that strong, and they don’t see a place for themselves in it right now.”
Marketplace
July 6, 2015
Alongside the modest June job growth, what were considered strong reports in April and May were revised lower. “It is clear that the economy is continuing to leave workers high and dry,” said Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute. “It is more than obvious that the Federal Reserve needs to stay the course.”
Reuters
July 6, 2015