Wages have not increased for the state’s lowest-paid workers in decades, rising 8 cents an hour between 1979 and 2013, adjusted for inflation, to $9.06 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank that advocates for lower-income families.
Boston Globe
March 4, 2015
Gordon Lafer, whose work on this issue is indispensable, points out the following: “There are many organizations that, like unions, require membership dues. For instance, an attorney who wants to appear in court must be a dues-paying member of the bar association. One may dislike the bar association, but must still pay dues if he or she wants to appear in court. Condominium or homeowners associations similarly require dues of their members. A homebuyer can’t choose to live in a condominium development without paying the association fees. Yet the national corporate lobbies supporting RTW are not proposing a ‘right to practice law’ or a ‘right to live where you want.’ They are focused solely on restricting employees’ organizations.”
Finally, economists Heidi Shierholz and Elise Gould do the rigorous statistical analysis to quantify Plumer’s “appear to tilt” point. They look at the difference in pay between RTW and non-RTW states and find that the “raw” difference, with no effort to control for the wide variety of wage determinants, is about 14 percent in favor of non-RTW states.
The Washington Post
March 3, 2015
Over the weekend, a few thousand union members gathered outside the statehouse in Wisconsin. They were there to voice their opposition to so called right-to-work legislation. If signed into law, which is expected, Wisconsin would become the 25th state with right-to-work laws on the books. These laws ban workers from having to pay union dues. Organized labor leaders say it’s another blow to their diminishing numbers. Supporters say the laws attract business and are good for economic development. Guest host Tom Gjelten and our guests discuss right-to-work laws and the future of unions.
Diane Rehm Show
March 3, 2015
This is not a unanimous point of view. Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told me he continues to see practically no pressure on wages in the US economy. Bivens thinks that Walmart reacted mostly to political and social pressure. He doesn’t see the wage decisions by Walmart and TJX having much influence on competitors over the next year or two. “Is this actually going to show up in economic data?” he asked. “The answer is pretty much ‘no.’ Walmart is big, compared with other companies, but compared with the overall economy it’s not big.”
Boston Globe
March 3, 2015
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute now is telling us that the key to economic improvement is cutting wages by adopting a so-called right-to-work law. The goal of right-to-work is to weaken or eliminate private sector unions. WPRI explains that “unionization increases labor costs (and this) makes a given location a less attractive place to invest” in. Right-to-work is supposed to solve this problem by weakening unions, thereby cutting wages and luring more companies into the state. Right-to-work succeeds in lowering wages. The premier research on the matter — whose author Heidi Shierholz is now chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor — shows that the impact of right-to-work is to lower wages for both union and nonunion workers and make it harder for people to get health insurance or pensions. But while right-to-work succeeds in cutting wages, it fails in attracting new companies.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
March 2, 2015
All this has been known for a long time, and groups like the liberal Economic Policy Institute have produced dozens of papers documenting the problem. But middle-class wage stagnation, and the inequality that has resulted as compensation at the top has surged, has never been the central economic preoccupation of Washington. It is becoming so now.
The New York Review of Books
February 27, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, if employment had followed the trend of the average recovery in the years since 1945, then an extra 1.2m manufacturing jobs would have been created by the third quarter of 2014.
The Economist
February 27, 2015
A recent Economic Policy Institute study says that eliminating currency manipulation would reduce U.S. trade deficit by as much as $500 billion in three years. This would increase annual U.S. GDP by between $288 billion and $720 billion and create as many as 5.8 Million jobs. About 40 percent of the jobs gained would be in manufacturing.
The Hill
February 27, 2015
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that real wages fell or were stagnant in 2014 in all income percentiles, except the bottom 10 percent of wage-earners. Wages for that income-decile rose 1.3 percent in 2014, because, EPI says, eighteen states raised their minimum wage above the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 per hour since 2009.
Marketplace
February 26, 2015
At the same time, there’s much national debate about what is a “living wage,” or enough money for a worker to make in order to make ends meet. Most retail workers already make more than the federal minimum wage but not much more. In fact, more than half of retail workers make $10 or less, according to David Cooper of The Economic Policy Institute.
Associated Press
February 26, 2015