Media clips
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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 -
The pro-labor Economic Policy Institute contends that from 2001 to 2013, trade with China resulted in the loss of 3.2 million American jobs, 2.4 million of them in manufacturing, particularly in information technology and electronics. Academic research has found similar, though not quite as high, numbers of job losses, with ranges from 2.0 to 2.4 million (using the years 1999 to 2011).
Josh Bivens, the research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, put his finger on the problem for unions that expanding trade between China and the United States poses. While acknowledging some of the benefits of free trade, Bivens points out the danger of the global expansion of competition: Reducing trade barriers allows each to specialize in what they do more efficiently, and this specialization generally leads to national-level gains for both countries — that is, increased efficiency, worldwide production and total consumption. This is essentially chapter one in trade textbooks. However, a later chapter in the textbook points out that, when the United States exports financial services and aircraft while importing apparel and electronics, it is implicitly exchanging the services of capital for labor. This exchange bids up capital’s price — profits and high-end salaries — and bids down wages for the broad working and middle class, leading to rising inequality and wage pressure for many Americans.
According to Bivens, the downside is immense: Even if trade flows begin to balance and there is less job loss in the future, the integration of the U.S. economy with those of its low-wage trading partners will pull down wages for many American workers, and will contribute to the ever rising inequality of incomes in the U.S. economy.The employment declines resulting from China trade have been analyzed in several papers by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, economists at M.I.T., the University of Zurich, and the University of California, San Diego, respectively; a National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment,” by Justin R. Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter K. Schott of the Yale School of Management; and by Robert E. Scott, the director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, who worked with Will Kimball, a research assistant.
The New York Times July 8, 2015 -
The rate of workers quitting remains 9.2 percent lower than it was in 2007, shortly before the Great Recession started, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
Associated Press July 8, 2015 -
On June 22, The Wall Street Journal published a piece with the headline, “Top CEO Pay Isn’t Driven by Talent,” citing a study by the Economic Policy Institute. The Journal quotes the study’s authors, saying “The growth of CEO and executive compensation overall was a major factor driving the doubling of the income shares [i.e. the share of total income] of the top 1% and top 0.1% of U.S. households from 1979 to 2007.”
Fortune July 8, 2015 -
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