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
The tweet included a chart from the Economic Policy Institute showing the economy’s productivity increasing while hourly compensation of production and non-supervisory workers in the private sector remained relatively flat.
Wall Street Journal
July 10, 2015
In fact, a study released this year from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found worker productivity rose 74% between 1973 and 2013, while wages were only up 9%. In other words, Americans were indeed doing more work with scant increase to their compensation. And among the top earners—the 1%—incomes were up 138% since 1980, while the bottom 90% of workers saw wages rise just 15%.
Time Magazine
July 10, 2015
But while Jeb has explained he was talking about part-time work, here’s the macroeconomic problem with his quote from yesterday: The U.S. workforce has been plenty productive, but wages haven’t kept up. The Atlantic: “Though productivity (defined as the output of goods and services per hours worked) grew by about 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, compensation for workers grew at a much slower rate of only 9 percent during the same time period, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.”
NBC News
July 10, 2015
Analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, shows productivity growing 240% between 1948 and 2013, while wages of non-supervisory workers grew only 108% during the same period. There has been little gain in real wages of those workers since 1978.
CNN Money
July 10, 2015
The unemployment rate has dropped to 5.3%, but there are still 8.3 million unemployed Americans and about 3.3 million “missing workers”. Missing workers are people who have stopped looking for work because they have given up hope of finding it. If these missing workers were counted, the unemployment rate would be closer to 7.3%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian
July 10, 2015
Hillary Clinton slammed Jeb Bush late Wednesday for remarking that “people should work longer hours” during his meeting with The Union Leader in New Hampshire — though not by name. In a tweet, Clinton shared a graph from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute showing wages stagnating as productivity has risen over the last four decades.
Politico
July 9, 2015
Both skeptics and supporters alike acknowledge that they are waiting to see how vigorously HUD enforces these rules to determine how significant their impact will be. “In my view, it’s a very modest first step because there’s no content in these rules about what HUD is going to do if jurisdictions don’t do something to desegregate,” Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, said ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.
Los Angeles Times
July 9, 2015