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
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
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
“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
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average age of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage today is thirty-five. Eighty-eight per cent are over the age of twenty. “The typical worker who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2015 looks nothing like the part-time, teen stereotype: She is in her early thirties, works full-time, and may have a family to support.”
The New Yorker
September 18, 2014
This isn’t just a matter of trauma among lower-skilled or lower-wage workers. Anemic wage growth has plagued virtually all professions for well over a decade. A crunching of data last year found average pay for managers and professionals had nudged up just 2.2% between 2001 and 2012, while it had gone up 2.4% for office administrators and down 1.2% for workers across the rest of the service sector.
Wall Street Journal
September 18, 2014
“We basically have 13 to 14 years of lost incomes for the most part, and that’s the bigger picture,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, during a conference call with reporters.
The rise in median income which took place between 2012 and 2013 was not “statistically significant,” he went on.
“We’re very slowly digging ourselves out of a very deep hole. We’re using a coffee cup to dig ourselves out of a deep hole,” he said. “Families are just getting a taste of what a recovery looks like.”
MSNBC
September 18, 2014
“The generation-long trend towards ever-greater income inequality seems to be firmly underway again, after only the briefest interruption caused by the Great Recession,” read a blog by economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal economic research center.
McClatchy
September 18, 2014
As the economy slowly recovers, it’s become increasingly clear that it’s not just unemployed Americans who need help from the government. It’s those that are employed as well.
That’s the main finding of a new report from the Economic Policy Institute on wage theft. What is wage theft? It’s when employers refuse to pay their workers their rightful wages and benefits, such as refusing to pay overtime. It’s a major problem across the United States. One study, which EPI cites, examined three cities (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) and found that two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries had experienced a pay-related offense in any given week in 2008. Those violations cost workers more than $2,600 a year on average—nearly 15 percent of their total earnings. If wage theft is as prevalent in the rest of the United States as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, then it costs workers more than $50 billion a year.
The New Republic
September 12, 2014
“You don’t pay an independent contractor by the hour,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a former U.S. Department of Labor official and a lawyer with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
He said he was surprised the forms passed muster with regulators.
“The extent, the open, brazen way that people are filling out forms and saying ‘I’m breaking the law’… the flagrancy of it does surprise me,” Eisenbrey said.
McClatchy
September 9, 2014