A CNN/ORC poll last week showed that jobs and the economy were the top concerns of 42 percent of the likely voters in each primary here. In 2015, Ohio lost 115,000 jobs due to free-trade deals such as NAFTA and normalized trading relations with China, according to a study released this month by the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank.
Philadelphia Inquirer
March 14, 2016
It can be costly for employers who get caught. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said government and private attorneys recovered nearly $1 billion dollars on behalf of wage theft victims in 2012.
Minnesota Public Radio
March 14, 2016
If you ask whether big trade agreements kill more jobs than they create, you get different answers. Take the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). “My estimate is that it eliminated almost 700,000 jobs in the United States, that is a net estimate,” said Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. He attributes the loss to rising trade deficits with Mexico.
Marketplace
March 14, 2016
By 2000, black unemployment had fallen to 7.6 percent, the lowest rate in recorded history, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis. The median wage for blacks rose even faster than for whites, propelling a higher percentage of African-Americans into the middle class than in any economic recovery since 1982.
Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, said he would “love” for Clinton to speak out about prioritizing filling the two vacant seats on the Fed Board of Governors.
“She could even talk about it in terms of the late 1990s,” Bivens said. “There are reasons to feel warmly about that period and a big part of that is the Fed did not take away the punch bowl too early.”
The Huffington Post
March 14, 2016
Men in the top 5% of income distribution saw their wages grow 15% between 2007 and 2015. But men in the bottom 70% have had no wage gains over the last 8 years, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s no surprise that typical workers are frustrated with the economy since wage growth has been slow for so long,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI and author of the report.
CNN Money
March 14, 2016
So if not an absence of a marriage license, what is keeping families in poverty? No surprises here: Though the economy may be growing, very few people are seeing that money show up in their paychecks, and that means people are struggling. According to Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute, rising inequality accounts for a far greater percentage of the country’s poverty problem than does the rising rate of single parenthood.
The Atlantic
March 11, 2016
According to a recent study by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, black unemployment in Michigan (12.4%) is 3.4 times higher than the rate for whites—the largest racial gap in the country. Illinois has the highest black unemployment rate in the country at 13.1% compared to 4.2% for whites. Louisiana’s 10.7% black unemployment rate, the highest in the South, is still lower than Ohio’s (10.8%).
Wall Street Journal
March 11, 2016
While the economy has been doing better in general, one very important indicator of economic health remains painfully elusive: wage growth. For the majority of Americans, wages have remained fairly stagnant during the bulk of the recovery, and a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute suggests that even recent upticks are likely less substantive than they seem.
The Atlantic
March 11, 2016
Despite growth in wages over the past several months, wage inequality rose in 2015, according to a report released Thursday by Economic Policy Institute senior economist Elise Gould. The wage gap has been widening for the past 35 years, and the impact is most pronounced for women, blacks, and Hispanics. The report draws chiefly upon statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. While the gulf between the middle- and lower-class wages has held stable since 2000, the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else is expanding.
Christian Science Monitor
March 11, 2016
While more blacks are aspiring to culinary greatness, those students have a disadvantage as soon as they graduate. That’s because the median hourly wages for blacks in the restaurant industry are 9 percent less than for whites, according to a 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute compiled using figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
March 11, 2016