Media clips
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The trends mirror those in the country at large, where labor has similarly stumbled. Real hourly wages fell for almost everyone nationwide in 2014, according to the Economic Policy Institute, except for the low-wage sector, bolstered by minimum wage increases at the state and local level.
Salon February 24, 2015 -
With the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign underway and millions of Americans still hurting financially, both parties are looking for ways to address wage stagnation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that both parties are offering tax cuts as a solution. What has hurt workers’ paychecks is not what the government takes out, but what their employers no longer put in — a dynamic that tax cuts cannot eliminate. Wage stagnation is a decades-long phenomenon. Between 1979 and 2014, while the gross domestic product grew 150 percent and productivity grew 75 percent, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the median worker rose just 5.6 percent — less than 0.2 percent a year. And since 2002, the bottom 80 percent of wage earners, including both male and female college graduates, have actually seen their wages stagnate or fall. At the same time, taxation does not explain why middle-income families are having a harder time making ends meet, even as they increase their education and become ever more productive. According to the latest Congressional Budget Office data, the middle 60 percent of families paid just 3.2 percent of their income in federal income taxes in 2011, less than half what they paid in 1979.
The New York Times February 23, 2015 -
On Thursday, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group, published a report showing that wages haven’t risen. “The stagnation of hourly wages is the most important economic issue facing most American families, and most of our key economic challenges hinge on whether or not hourly wages for the vast majority grow,” the author, Elise Gould, wrote.
The New Yorker February 23, 2015 -
Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Wal-Mart’s move also reduces the pressure on other retailers to keep labor costs at rock-bottom levels. “It at least takes away the excuse from other firms that ‘We’d like to raise wages, but we can’t because we have to compete with Wal-Mart,'” Bivens said. “It could possibly give some competitive breathing space to other retailers to raise wages.”
Associated Press February 23, 2015 -
American wages, actually across the wage distribution, fell or stagnated in 2013 and 2014, according to a report released Thursday from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
As the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould reported Thursday, among all educational categories, the greatest real wage losses between 2013 and 2014 were observed among those with bachelor’s and advanced degrees. “If demand for high-skilled workers were driving wage inequality, we would expect to see these workers’ wages increasing, or at the very least, falling less than their low-skilled counterparts.” But the demand is dwindling — even for them.
PBS News Hour February 23, 2015 -
Higher wages are exactly what the financial doctors have ordered to cure America’s ailing economy. According to the Economic Policy Institute, it would take a wage growth of at least 3.5% to 4% for workers to feel the impact of the recovery. In 2014, the average hourly pay went up by just 1.7%. “Raising wages among low-wage workers shifts income into the pockets of workers and families that are highly likely to quickly spend every additional dollar they earn,” says David Cooper, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “So even though some businesses have to pay their workers more, they see more customers coming through the door because now there’s additional dollars rippling out through local economies in a way that doesn’t really happen if those dollars just go back into the bank accounts of corporate shareholders.”
The Guardian February 23, 2015 -
Anti-unionism, which has become increasingly entrenched in recent decades, correlates with stagnating and declining wages. As unions have been harmed, not only by market forces but by policies that deliberately weaken them, income has flowed increasingly to those at the top of the economic ladder rather than to workers.
The New York Times February 20, 2015 -
It may be that as unions weakened, executives sometimes grabbed the gains from productivity. Perhaps that helps explain why chief executives at big companies earned, on average, 20 times as much as the typical worker in 1965, and 296 times as much in 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times February 19, 2015 -
David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute tells The Nation via e-mail, “Given that our economy is driven by consumer spending, the last thing we would want during a period of economic turmoil is more folks with less money to spend.“ And, he noted, “a larger moral/philosophical question that should be considered as well: should the lowest paid worker never have any change in their standard of living?… Imagine we had a revolution in production processes such that prices of staple goods fell considerably, should we legislate that the lowest-paid workers shouldn’t get to benefit from those improvements?”
The Nation February 19, 2015 -
There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems. But that time has passed. You cannot tell that, however, to the Wall Street Democrats and their Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. They’re not ready to change just yet, even though most of the Democratic Party has. This shift was signaled by a recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, which is co-chaired by Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Barack Obama’s first term. The report calls for full employment (a “high pressure economy,” as Summers calls it), a more welcoming environment for collective bargaining, higher labor standards (overtime, minimum wage, earned sick and paid family leave), changes in corporate governance, and large scale public investment to address middle-class wage stagnation.
The American Prospect February 19, 2015