The U.S. Census Bureau at 10 a.m. will release its annual report on U.S. incomes, poverty levels and health insurance coverage. Then, the think tanks digest it, starting with the Economic Policy Institute, which will debrief on the report at12:30 p.m. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities President Robert Greenstein and expert Jared Bernstein will do the same at 1:30 p.m., and at 2 p.m., Brookings Institution follows suit.
Politico
September 17, 2013
And she told CNNMoney’s Steve Hargreaves that “we know there’s a lot of hardworking people that want to be productive; we just don’t have work for them to do.”
CNNMoney
September 13, 2013
Shierholz touched upon this topic in a conversation with NPR’s Sonari Glinton, in which she explained that new graduates have a very high unemployment rate because the overall labor market remains weak.
NPR
September 13, 2013
The New Yorker’s John Cassidy looked to EPI Economist Heidi Shierholz’s research to explain why the fall in the labor force participation rate in recent years is mostly cyclical and not structural; in other words, it is due to the weak job opportunities in the Great Recession and its aftermath. He wrote, “Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, published a paper in which she concluded that about two-thirds of the fall in the participation rate was due to a weak job market, and about a third was due to structural factors.”
The New Yorker
September 13, 2013
In a post on the New York Times Economix blog, Jared Bernstein cited EPI’s research to show how labor’s declining share of income is increasing inequality.
The New York Times
September 13, 2013
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Josh Eidelson cited EPI’s research to show that though there are protections for workers seeking to bargain collectively, they are illegally fired in at least a third of unionization election campaigns supervised by the government.
The Washington Post
September 13, 2013
New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall looked to research by EPI President Lawrence Mishel and Research and Policy Director Josh Bivens to help ascertain whether government can actually do anything about economic inequality.
The New York Times
September 13, 2013
In a guest op-ed for USA Today, David Cooper, EPI economic analyst, explained the positive impact raising the minimum wage would have on low-wage workers and the economy. “When wages are so low that full-time workers can’t make ends meet, consumer spending weakens. Raising wages for low-wage workers can strengthen economy-wide demand by putting more money in the pockets of consumers who will spend it right away,” wrote Cooper.
USA Today
September 6, 2013
That’s exactly what’s happening now. According to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, the bottom 60 percent of workers are earning less than they did 13 years ago. According to a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, black Americans — who have earned much higher average levels of education over recent decades — have lower chances of earning a living wage today than they had 30 years ago.
The Huffington Post
September 6, 2013
On this Labor Day, American workers face a buyers’ market. Employers have the upper hand and, given today’s languid pace of hiring, the advantage shows few signs of ending. What looms, at best, is a sluggish descent from high unemployment (7.4 percent in July) and a prolonged period of stagnant or slow-growing wages. Since 2007, there has been no gain in average inflation-adjusted wages and total compensation, including fringes, notes the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
The weak job market has a semi-permanence unlike anything seen since World War II, and the effects on public opinion extend beyond the unemployed. “People’s expectations have been really ratcheted down for what they can expect for themselves and their children,” says EPI economist Lawrence Mishel. There’s a sense “that the economy just doesn’t produce good jobs anymore.” Possible job loss becomes more threatening because finding a new job is harder. Says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center: “Security is valued more than money because it’s so fragile.”
The Washington Post
September 6, 2013