Media clips
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The liberal wing of the Democratic party has come out swinging against the agreement, with Warren, Senator Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi all voicing opposition. Robert Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, told VICE News that the public portions of the TPP point to a deal that could erode US jobs and put downward pressure on US wages.
“Certainly, experience tells us that when we negotiate trade and investment deals — like the Korea deal, like NAFTA, like the agreement to bring China into the WTO — what we’ve experienced is not just growing exports but imports, and as a result the losses of millions of jobs,” Scott said. The TPP could affect the wages of 100 million American workers, costing each an average of about $1,800 per year, Scott said, citing EPI research. “Everybody with a similar skill set, essentially all workers in the domestic economy who don’t have a college degree… could lose $1,800 a year,” he said. “Those are the most salient statistics for most working Americans. That’s why there’s such broad public concern about the effects of these trade deals.”
Vice News May 13, 2015 -
Job prospects for college graduates have been pretty terrible for a long time, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The average young college graduate, between the ages of 21 and 24, makes just under $18/hour, or $36,000 a year, according to new data that EPI is set to release later this month. As an average, that figure is probably skewed a little high, said Bivens. Since 2000, grads have actually seen their pay fall from $18.41 an hour to $17.94, according to the new EPI data. A lot of college graduates wind up “underemployed” in jobs that don’t require a degree, said Bivens. The unemployment rate for young college graduates was 8.5 percent, according to a 2014 report from EPI, but the underemployment rate was nearly double that. “There’s a reason there’s a stereotype of college grads working as baristas in coffee shops,” he said.
The Huffington Post May 13, 2015 -
We’ll look at the white-hot politics of trade as President Obama and Congress go to the mat on the TPP.
On Point May 13, 2015 -
Although the exact extent of wage theft and underpayment nationwide isn’t recorded in any one place, “survey evidence suggests that wage theft is widespread and costs workers billions of dollars a year,” says a September report by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, citing a study of conditions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The phenomenon extends well beyond big cities. The Economic Policy Institute surveyed federal and local agencies that regulate wage conditions and found that “state departments of labor in 44 states recovered $172 million; state attorneys general in 45 states recovered $14 million; and private attorneys recovered $467 million in wage and hour class action lawsuits.”
CNN May 13, 2015 -
The true costs of goods and services is a secondary issue to stagnant and exploitative wages: The cost of certain goods might go up, but more people would be able to afford them with better compensation. The current price of low-cost goods and services in the United States is low-income, exploited workers living in poverty. But the country as a whole isn’t broke, only its workers are — while corporations and C.E.O.s are richer than ever. The value of the federal minimum wage has declined 24 percent since 1968. If we re-established the relationship between the minimum wage and the overall median wage to its 1968 level, we would raise wages for 35 million people, a full quarter of the workforce.
The situation is even worse for those earning tips, such as nail salon workers. Their pay is set at $2.13 an hour by the federal government. If tips don’t supplement these workers’ paycheck to the regular minimum, they have to ask their employers for the difference. (And good luck with that.)
The New York Times May 12, 2015 -
The impact of the bolder proposal for America’s workforce would be widely felt. According to recent estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, the new wage rate of $12 per hour will boost earnings for some 10 million parents, 21 million women and nearly 18 million workers of color.
CNN May 12, 2015 -
But the Economic Policy Institute points out that this ignores imports, and therefore the ballooning trade deficit, which weighs down economic growth and wages.
Salon May 12, 2015 -
The system accelerated urban decline and ghettoization. It also prevented a generation of black citizens from gaining the wealth that typically flows from homeownership. Writing of Baltimore just last month, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, argued that “the distressed condition of African-American working- and lower-middle-class families” in Maryland’s largest city and elsewhere “is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s — and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.”
The New York Times May 11, 2015 -
According to a brief by the Economic Policy Institute, the Walton Family’s total wealth equals that of 79 percent of the combined wealth of all African American families (or almost 78 percent of the combined wealth of all Latino families).
The Washington Post May 11, 2015 -
The average U.S. worker hasn’t done as well. For the 12 months ended in April, wages rose 2.2%. That’s well above inflation but below the 3.5% to 4% that marks a healthy economy, said Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers.
The economy needs stronger jobs growth to increase demand for workers and push up pay, he said. “It’s too slow to have spurred any increase in wage growth yet, and I still think it’s going to be a while,” he said of April’s employment gains. Given that the economy appears to be stuck in another year of modest 2% to 2.5% economic growth, Bivens said, the Fed should not raise its benchmark interest rate yet.
Los Angeles Times May 11, 2015