Media clips

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• Low wages, no overtime: The downside of being a retail ‘manager’

  “That was a project to relieve as many employers as possible of their obligation to pay overtime,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions. “So they started out with something that was worse than where it ended up, but they did a lot of damage.”

  Halfway through his second term, President Obama decided to swing the pendulum back toward workers. In March, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez signaled that he planned to raise that salary threshold much higher, and over the summer held listening sessions with both workers and employers. He didn’t give an estimate of where it should end up, but labor advocates have some ideas.

  According to an analysis by EPI, 65 percent of all salaried workers fell under the threshold in 1975, and were thus entitled to overtime. By 2013, just 11 percent of salaried workers were automatically due overtime pay, leaving the rest subject to a host of exemptions. EPI proposes raising the cutoff to $984 a week, or about $50,000 a year, which is simply what it was back in 1975, adjusted for inflation.

  “If you raise the salary threshold high enough, then you catch everybody whose financial situation you really worry about,” Eisenbrey explains. That could include millions of white-collar workers in clerical and administrative roles, as well as low-level managers.

  The Washington Post September 29, 2014
• New U.S. tax rules chill ‘inversion’ deal-making; shares dive

  “This move is a good and necessary start toward discouraging corporate inversions, which cost U.S. taxpayers billions in lost revenue,” said Thomas Hungerford, a tax expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank.

  Reuters September 25, 2014
• Rich and poor alike are worried about income gap

  In 2013, CEOs at some of the U.S.’s major companies earned on average nearly 296 times their typical worker’s salary, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute published in June 2014.

  While this figure is lower than the 2000 peak of 383.4, it has recovered from the lows of 2002 – where it stood at 188.5 due to the fall in the stock market – and 2009 (193.2). In 1965, the ratio was at 20-to-1.

  CNBC September 25, 2014
• Boehner blasts America’s unemployed as lazy

  Currently, there are more than two job seekers for every job opening in the country and the severity of the recession has created a long-term unemployment problem that has made many job seekers almost unemployable.

  MSNBC.com September 25, 2014
• Those Lazy Jobless

  The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades.

  New York Times September 22, 2014
• Return of the Bums on Welfare

  Here’s unemployment benefits as a percentage of GDP:

  They’re back down to their level at the height of the “Bush boom”.

  And here, from Josh Bivens, is the recipiency rate — the percentage of the unemployed receiving any benefits at all:

  It’s at a record low, and as Bivens says, the pullback in benefits is one main reason economic expansion isn’t reducing poverty.

  New York Times September 22, 2014
• Workers deserve to benefit from their productivity, too

  Time was when American workers reaped what they sowed. Between 1947 and 1972, the nation’s productivity increased by 97 percent and median pay by 95 percent. Since then, however, as the decline of unions and a host of other factors weakened employees’ bargaining power, hardly any productivity gains have gone to workers. Between 1979 and 2011, productivity rose by 75 percent, but median pay rose by just 5 percent.

  Chief executives, however, managed to reward themselves quite handsomely for the gains in their workers’ productivity. From 1978 to 2013, CEO pay rose by a mind-boggling 937 percent.

  The Washington Post September 19, 2014
• Stuck on Inflation

  Unemployment remains historically high, growth rates are still tepid, and what expansion we have had is fragile. And some economists—notably Paul Krugman, Laurence Ball of Johns Hopkins, and the progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute—have strongly criticized the hawks. But they retain influence, especially because the media quote them frequently.

  The New York Review of Books September 18, 2014
• Deciding Who Gets Overtime Pay

  The fix is easy. Simply updating the salary threshold for inflation would raise it to nearly $1,000 a week. This change would make an additional 6.1 million salaried workers eligible for overtime, including food service managers, customer service representatives, insurance claim processors and retail supervisors, according to recent estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.

  The New York Times September 18, 2014
• New data shows Americans’ incomes still stagnant after recession

  “We are using a coffee cup to dig ourselves out of a big hole,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.

  Reuters September 18, 2014