The tepid demand for workers and weak wage growth that continues to hamper the U.S. job market is forcing many newly minted college graduates into low-paying, low-skilled jobs, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. And that’s for those who are lucky enough to find a full-time job, given that the ranks of recent college grads who are underemployed have continued to swell in recent years.
“The class of 2015 is entering an economy that’s still recovering from the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, on a conference call to discuss the study. They are joining “six other classes of students who have graduated into a weak economy in recent years.
CBS Moneywatch
May 28, 2015
The findings demonstrate that the hangover from the financial crisis and downturn of 2007 to 2009 still weighs heavily on family balance sheets. “We are failing as an economy if we have a huge swath of American households who can’t come up with $400,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The really dire financial situations” of many survey respondents can be largely attributed to “the fact that we’re still far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.”
Bloomberg
May 28, 2015
Since the 1970s, there’s been a disconnect between productivity and wages, so even as workers produce more, they don’t necessarily see the benefits. “We have created lots of income, lots of output, lots of wealth over the last three decades,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute. “The problem is it has not accrued to the vast majority.”
Virtually all of the gains have gone to those at the top of the income scale. In the past, politicians have sometimes tried to address that through the tax code: taking a slightly larger cut from the wealthy and using tax credits to pad the pockets of the poor. But there are political limits to that approach. Some people consider such government redistribution akin to adding or taking away points after the whistle has blown. Mishel and others argue that policymakers need to focus more on shaping the rules of the economic game, so average workers can command higher pretax wages. “The problems with people’s paychecks is not what the federal government is taking out in taxes. It’s what employers are not putting in,” Mishel said.
NPR
May 27, 2015
The resulting plans present a menu of options — some unexpectedly overlapping, some radically and predictably diverging — prepared by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nascent 2016 campaign would benefit if candidates were asked to identify which of these plans best expresses their governing priorities — or what their alternative would be.
The Washington Post
May 27, 2015
Minimum wage as starter salary? Nonsense. The average age of a minimum wage worker in the United States is about 35, and 88% are over 20 years old, according to a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI also found that 55% are full-time workers, and 28% have children.
Los Angeles Times
May 27, 2015
Still, according to research coming out on Wednesday from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young college graduates is down to 7.2 percent, lower than it was during the worst of the Great Recession but still well above historical norms.
Politico
May 27, 2015
The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.
The New York Times
May 26, 2015
This week, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, analyzed federal data and found that despite widespread notions that the poor eat really well and work very little, the latter is indisputably false.
The Washington Post
May 26, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute: “Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would return the federal minimum wage to roughly the same inflation-adjusted value it had in the late 1960s.”
New York Daily News
May 26, 2015
It started, as these things often do, with a two-part exposé in the New York Times, one focusing on the lousy pay and the other on the health threats. This provoked howls of outrage, and was in turn followed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo invoking “emergency measures,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) citing federal legislation on product safety she’s introduced and of course New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio presiding over a “day of action.” The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute declares nail salon abuses a function of “national policy failures.”
Wall Street Journal
May 26, 2015