Ross Eisenbrey warns that communities would get what they pay for. He’s vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. “The union labor that often is the higher cost labor is much better quality. The people who do the work are journeymen who’ve been through apprenticeship programs, and they’re just more skilled and more productive and more efficient. So at the end of the day, what is saved in an hourly rate calculation is lost. It takes more hours for the less skilled person to do the work,” Eisenbrey says.
Eisenbrey adds that lower wages don’t mean taxpayers would see savings. He says it’s not unfathomable to think that a company might just collect a bigger profit.
Milwaukee Public Radio
April 1, 2015
Wage stagnation is an old story, of course, having been around for about 35 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. It reported last year that hourly wages of the vast majority of Americans have either stagnated or declined since 1979 — the late 1990s being a brief exception — even as the economy surged.
Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2015
The repositioning of candidate Clinton has already begun. One of the fascinating indicators is a report of a commission on inclusive prosperity organized and released in January by the Center for American Progress. The report, co-authored by Larry Summers (!), sounds more like something Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute or Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz might have written.
Huffington Post
March 30, 2015
“A do-it-yourself retirement system isn’t any more feasible than a do-it-yourself health-care system,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute specializing in retirement security. “People need to be guided.”
CNBC
March 30, 2015
Tom Hungerford interview.
The Real News Network
March 30, 2015
Missouri and Illinois had among the highest rates of black unemployment in 2014, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. Missouri’s rise of 3.2 percentage points in black unemployment from 2013 to 2014 year was the second highest among the states, according to the study by EPI economist Valerie Wilson, which was released Thursday. Black unemployment fell in most states in 2014, according to the study, but spiked up in Wisconsin and Missouri.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
March 27, 2015
A new report on unemployment trends by the Economic Policy Institute has some sobering findings on the varying unemployment trajectories that different racial groups experienced between 2013 and 2014, and what we can expect to see this year. According to the report, in 2014 the white unemployment rate across the United States was 4.9%. But the black unemployment rate was more than double that, at 11.4%. The GIF below breaks down the disparities between white and black unemployment by state in 2014. (The sample size for unemployment broken down by race wasn’t big enough for every state; this chart includes 32 states and the District of Columbia.) You can see that black unemployment dwarfs white unemployment across the country:
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Mic
March 27, 2015
The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was 10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Think Progress
March 27, 2015
In Wisconsin, the state with the highest annual African-American unemployment rate, nearly 1 in 5 black people are unemployed. The states with the next highest rates of black unemployment were Nevada (16.1 percent) and Michigan (15.8 percent), according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The issue brief is a sobering reminder that black Americans continue to face troublingly high unemployment rates.
Huffington Post
March 26, 2015