The increase in the salary limit would make overtime available to 15 million more workers, Bloomberg said, citing an estimate by Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research body partly funded by unions. “It would provide a better work-family balance for millions of workers, giving some higher pay for working overtime and others reduced hours without any reduction in pay,” Eisenbrey told Reuters earlier this month.
Reuters
June 30, 2015
The overtime cutoff covered 8 percent of salaried workers last year, compared with 65 percent in 1975, according to an analysis by Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group partly funded by labor unions. The definition of a manager is ambiguous enough under current regulations that restaurant or retail workers who spend most of their time doing manual labor or serving customers can be deemed “executives” exempt from overtime, Eisenbrey said.
Bloomberg
June 30, 2015
Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens in picture.
The Washington Post
June 29, 2015
U.S. chief executives make on average 300 times what the average U.S. worker makes, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
June 29, 2015
A report released recently by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said chief executives of the country’s largest firms made 303 times more than a “typical” worker in 2014. The report attributed rising CEO salaries in recent years to improved stock market performance, which drove executive compensation higher.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 29, 2015
Rothschild’s remarks come as the income gap between chief executive and worker is wider than ever. According to the latest research from the Economic Policy Institute released this week, tops CEOs make 300 times more than typical workers. “The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, 20-to-1 in 1965, peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000 and was 303-to-1 in 2014, far higher than in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s,” the EPI said on its website. Their data also showed that average CEO compensation for the largest firms was $16.3 million in 2014, up 54.3 percent since the economic recovery began in 2009, it said.
CNBC
June 29, 2015
The sector, valued at $95.3 billion, made up 30 percent of the state’s GSP in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, roughly the same rate as in the mid-’90s. But it’s not your grandfather’s dirty plants pumping out sheets of steel under the smoggy sky of Gary anymore
CNBC
June 29, 2015
Since 1938, we’ve had laws to protect workers from being forced to work overtime without getting paid for it. It’s a simple principle: Pay people for the all work they do. The problem we face now is that the people who these laws were designed to protect are no longer being protected – millions of Americans are working overtime and not getting paid for it. Hourly workers in most service and blue-collar jobs are guaranteed the right to overtime pay. If they work more than 40 hours in a week, their employers are required by law to pay them time and a half for the additional hours. For salaried workers, the story is more complicated. Whether they are eligible for overtime pay is determined by their salary and the nature of their work. Federal overtime rules are meant to exclude from overtime protections only workers who, because of their high pay and responsibilities, have enough authority and bargaining power within their workplace that they don’t need these protections
Tribune News Service
June 26, 2015
On World Refugee Day, The Hill published a Contributors piece by the libertarian Cato Institute’s immigration policy analyst, Alex Nowrasteh, headlined, “The US should be a home for refugees.” In it, he offers a brief history of refugee policy and flows into the United States over the past century and suggests that the United States “should … allow more to settle here.” That’s a noble sentiment, but the headline is misleading because it leaves out the substance of what Nowrasteh proposes in order to help make this happen. In short, Nowrasteh wants to welcome more refugees to the United States but proposes abandoning them and letting them fend for themselves once they get here.
The Hill
June 26, 2015
The hope is that the market’s recovery and the expected gradual rise in rates will help close the trillion-dollar-plus state pension gap. But for some states, the shortfall represents years of underfunding. “It’s the indirect effect of the very concerted political pressure to not raise taxes,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “People appreciate services; they want cops, firefighters; they want teachers and all that stuff. But if you’re in a budget crunch, the one way you live on credit and not raise taxes as a modern politician is just not pay your pension bill.”
CNBC
June 26, 2015