Earlier this year, New Jersey residents voted to raise the state’s minimum wage by $1 to $8.25 per hour. And lawmakers voted to hike the wage by between 25 cents and 75 cents per hour, to $8.70 in Connecticut and $8 in Rhode Island and New York.
Residents in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington will see a higher wage floor due to annual cost of living adjustments.
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, used Census data to estimate that the increases will boost the incomes of 2.5 million low-wage American workers next year.
CNNMoney
January 6, 2014
It’s smart politics. More than three-quarters of Americans support a wage higher than the current $7.25 an hour, and Republicans will be hard-pressed to explain why they oppose it. The issue might bring people to the polls who would otherwise be indifferent to midterm Congressional elections.
But more important, it’s good economics, and it would benefit tens of millions of people. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016, as the current Democratic bill would do, would directly or indirectly increase the take-home pay of 27.8 million workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, adding $35 billion in greater wages through 2016. The resulting increase in gross domestic product would create 85,000 new jobs.
The New York Times
January 6, 2014
Economic Policy Institute Vice President Ross Eisenbrey discusses the U.S. minimum wage on Bloomberg Television’s “In The Loop”
Bloomberg
January 6, 2014
“Job opportunities are, by most measure, really no better than they were a year ago,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute. The improving unemployment rate is largely due to people dropping out of the labor force, and hiring hasn’t budged from a year ago, she said. “The reason they extended it last year, that reason is still almost exactly the same right now.”
Despite more than 25 years in the retail industry, Shields said the fact that she doesn’t have a college degree makes landing a management level job challenging. “It’s such an employers’ market at this point. They seem to be more interested now in your education, if you’ve got a bachelor’s degree, than they used to be,” she said.
MSN
January 6, 2014
In a guest op-ed for CNN, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey explained that Detroit’s path to insolvency had little or nothing to do with pensions—and can be traced to Wall Street and big corporations not paying their fair share.
CNN
December 20, 2013
— The Economic Policy Institute’s Thomas Hungerford outlines six tax changes Congress can utilize to fund an extension of unemployment insurance without stepping on tax reform’s toes.http://bit.ly/1gtc6Me
Politico
December 17, 2013
Many more states are expected to take up similar fights next year, and advocates expect it to be a significant issue in the midterm elections next November.
“It’s easy, sometimes, for us to get discouraged when you see one or two states nudging the minimum wage up by a little bit here and a little bit there, but it does add up to something,” said Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network for the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “There’s a sense of momentum.”
NBC News
December 17, 2013
Another shibboleth of the naysayers of a minimum wage increase is that most minimum wage workers are teenagers. They are not. According to recent research by the Economic Policy Institute, about 30 million workers would benefit from the proposed increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Of these workers, 88 percent would be at least 20 years old with an average age of 35; 55 percent would be working full time; 56 percent of them would be female, and more than 28 percent of them would be parents.…
Putting more income into the hands of minimum-wage workers would not only reduce poverty; it would also stimulate consumer spending at a time when inadequate demand continues to impede a robust recovery and job creation. Using very different methodologies, two recent studies confirm thatan increase in the minimum wage to the $10 range would lift spending, gross domestic product and job creation.
The New York Times
December 17, 2013
A study published this year by Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute, found that much of the difference between U.S. scores and those of high-ranking nations is because the United States has a higher proportion of disadvantaged students. But the researchers found that the scores of the most disadvantaged U.S. students have been improving markedly over the years, while scores for their counterparts in many top-ranked nations have fallen precipitously.
In contrast, the highest-scoring U.S. math students are nowhere near their peers in top-ranking countries, Carnoy said.
Los Angeles Times
December 17, 2013
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that if Washington increased the minimum to $10.10 as Obama would like, some 21.3 million employees would be guaranteed a raise, assuming they kept their jobs. (Another 9 million might theoretically benefit if companies adjusted their whole wage scales upwards, which is what the light blue section on the chart shows. But that might just be wishful thinking on EPI’s part.)
In the end, we’re talking about a policy that would give roughly one in seven employed workers a raise.
The Atlantic
December 17, 2013