Media clips
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In the past, ballot initiatives have been used to push minimum wage laws through especially stubborn states. Take New Jersey for example. In January 2013, Republican Governor Chris Christie vetoed minimum wage legislation that state lawmakers had passed. At the polls ten months later, New Jersey voters approved a ballot initiative to boost the state’s minimum pay from $7.25 to $8.25 with 61% of the vote.
“A higher minimum wage is incredibly poplar,’ says David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “If legislature is not being responsive to the public’s desires, advocates are going the ballot measure route because it’s been successful.”
Voters in Montana and Missouri voted down hikes in 1996, but since then, every minimum wage initiatives that have appeared on statewide ballots — 13 in total — have gained voter approval, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
Fortune August 20, 2014 -
A pending decision by President Barack Obama on whether to use his executive powers to make interim immigration reforms because Congress failed to could make the already heated immigration issue even more volatile. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal leaning, non-profit think tank, released a report Thursday aiming to dispel many myths and provide some fundamentals before politics sends things into a frenzy. Here are the five biggest takeaways from the institute’s report on immigrants:..
NBC News August 14, 2014 -
Recently, a number of upscale restaurants have eliminated tipping—in New York City, Sushi Yasuda and Restaurant Riki are among the latest—fueling debate about the subject. But the issue is complex, and there are pluses and minuses to the custom:
Restaurants may pay tipped workers a very low sub-minimum wage, which helps lower menu prices. Diners don’t pay sales tax on gratuities. And tips significantly boost the income of servers; however, diners may tip generously, poorly or not at all, and many things besides quality of service affect tips, leaving servers vulnerable to the habits of capricious diners.
“Income flows on a weekly basis are extremely erratic,” said David Cooper, an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., and co-author with Ms. Allegretto of the tipping report. “Weather impacts the number of customers. Appearance, age, and gender significantly influence how much people tip.”
As a result, said Michael Lynn, a professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, servers may have difficulty qualifying for a car loan or mortgage.
Wall Street Journal August 13, 2014 -
States that cut unemployment benefits following the Great Recession didn’t help the jobless or taxpayers, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank.
The results matter in the context of North Carolina’s handling of unemployment benefits last year, which received national media attention. In July 2013, Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature reduced the duration and weekly amount of unemployment benefits, explaining the cuts as necessary to tackle $2.5 billion in debt to the federal government. Since then, McCrory has said that kicking people off unemployment insurance compelled them to find work, a point that EPI and other research groups have disputed.
While the cuts in North Carolina were the most dramatic, other states used similar approaches to deal with accruing debt from unemployment insurance. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and South Carolina also reduced unemployment benefits some time between 2011 and 2013. Another 27 states were borrowing from the federal government to pay for unemployment benefits, but opted not to make cuts to their programs.
Governing August 13, 2014 -
According to the Labor Department, the jobless rate was 6.2 percent in July, and businesses added 209,000 workers, representing the sixth straight month of job gains greater than 200,000. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that given the pace of population growth since the recession, in July there were 5,860,000 “ missing workers,” which include potential workers who aren’t in the labor force – many because they’re discouraged. EPI estimates if these workers were looking for jobs, the actual unemployment rate would be about 9.6 percent.
US News and World Report August 13, 2014 -
Heidi Shierholz, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, agrees.
“We’ve been seeing this just long, decades long, decline in men’s labor force participation,” Shierholz says.
NPR August 13, 2014 -
In contrast with unadjusted figures that show a drop in disparity, the World Bank’s Gini coefficientmeasuring the extent of income inequality barely budged during those decades, according to preliminary adjustments by economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic.
“With a ‘top heavy’ adjustment, the decrease in inequality — present when we use all other adjustments — almost entirely dissipates,” they wrote in a December paper.
That’s surprising for a period when poverty was falling sharply: The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day dropped to 1.22 billion in 2010 from 1.91 billion in 1990 after adjusting for inflation, World Bank data show.
If earning gaps haven’t narrowed around the world even as the impoverished population declined, that could “really change the way economists think about the last 30 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, which advocates for workers’ rights.
Bloomberg August 8, 2014 -
The Labor Department characterized the unemployment rate in July as “little changed,” with an uptick of one tenth of a point to 6.2 percent. The labor-force participation rate of 62.9 percent “has been essentially unchanged since April,” the report said.
In other words, the job market is moving along at a decent, steady pace. But the upswing is still not strong enough to change the prospects for the long-term unemployed or the involuntary part-timers, or to drive significant raises for workers.
“July’s 209,000 jobs is solid, but is a decline from the strong second quarter, when 277,000 jobs were added each month on average,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “At July’s pace, it would take nearly four more years to get back to pre-recession labor market conditions.”
The White House said the report confirms that the economic recovery has made huge progress, but has left behind millions of Americans.
NPR August 8, 2014 -
Many workers aren’t even getting the pay they’ve been promised for the work they do. Complaints of wage theft, like that experienced by NFL cheerleaders, jumped by 400 percent between 2000 and 2011. It’s rampant in some industries: 89 percent of fast food workers say they’ve been made to work for free off the clock, denied overtime pay, or simply paid less than minimum wage. More is stolen from low-wage workers than is robbed from banks, gas stations, and convenience stores combined. Lawmakers in a handful of cities and two states, Colorado and New York, have passed anti-wage theft ordinances to crack down on companies that steal wages and make it easier for workers to bring claims.
But that’s just a start. There are other ways to reconnect hard work and decent pay that don’t involve government action, but instead hand employees more power so they can ask for more. Historically unions have played a significant role in this equation. But falling unionization rates have coincided with a drop in middle class incomes and an increase in income inequality. It’s become harder to unionize, but easing the way for workers to band together and demand better pay would start to balance the power. “We’re not really going to get wages to grow in line with productivity without a more robust system of collective bargaining,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told me. One way to get there would be to “develop a system where collective bargaining can emerge that covers an entire occupation or an entire industry,” he suggested, rather than shop by shop as it is now, particularly in sectors like fast food, where each location is owned by a different franchisee. (Although the path to unionizing fast food workers may now be easier with the National Labor Relations Board saying that McDonald’s is responsible for what happens in all of its stores, franchises or no.)
The New Republic August 8, 2014 -
Retail workers who don’t have a supervisory role earned an average of $14.02 an hour in 2013, according to calculations of government wage data compiled for NBC News by the Economic Policy Institute. There were 12.9 million such workers in the U.S. in 2013, according to EPI, accounting for nearly 86 percent of all retail workers.
After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 12.2 percent decrease from the average hourly wage those workers earned in 1979.
Over that same period, the overall pool of similar production and nonsupervisory workers — who accounted for nearly 83 percent of all private-sector workers in 2013 — saw hourly wages increase by 6.2 percent, according to EPI’s calculation.
The declines follow a period in which retail wages grew substantially. According to EPI, average wages for those nonsupervisory retail workers increased by 62.7 percent, after adjusting for inflation, between 1947 and 1979.
That was a time when department stores and other retail innovations were coming into vogue, providing relatively good jobs both to men and to the growing number of women coming into the workforce, Plunkett said.
Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, said the wage declines that followed are at least partly a result of the dramatic changes that took place after that, when retail became more concentrated among big-box stores competing to get Americans their favorite goods for the lowest price.
NBC News August 1, 2014