Media clips
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“Whenever it comes to the issue of the day, whether it’s labor or energy, you can’t ignore what they are doing because they have a measurable effect on the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal May 16, 2014 -
I asked the Economic Policy Institute to annotate the graph to show how much of the premium is from real wage gains for college grads, and how much is from wage declines for high school grads. In the 1980s and 1990s, college grads strongly outpaced high school grads. But since then, the better pay performance of college grads is due to high school students losing ground, not to college grads pulling ahead.
The New York Times May 16, 2014 -
• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.
The New York Times May 16, 2014 -
Cheap imports have resulted in net losses for the steel industry in four of the last five years, said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research for the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the report. The other authors are attorneys for Stewart and Stewart, a Washington, D.C., law firm whose specialties include trade issues.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette May 16, 2014 -
But the U.S. companies — as well as the unions whose membership depends on domestic production — haven’t given up. They’ve asked the Department of Commerce to reevaluate its decision, and on Tuesday they put out a report by the Economic Policy Institute making the case for why America ought to fight back. In a rare moment of accord, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — both from heavy steel-producing states — got on a call with reporters to drive that message home.
The Washington Post May 16, 2014 -
The latest jobs report released last week showed the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent in April. Private-sector employment in March surpassed the prerecession peak. Though the unemployment rate for 20- to 29-year-olds who graduated from college in 2013 was still 10.9 percent, that figure was down from 15.5 percent in 2009 when the recession was ending, the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
“All of these trends bode well for those entering the job market this spring,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Not everyone is so optimistic. Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., doubts that the economy has really turned around for young college grads. “Since the unemployment rate of young college graduates remains significantly elevated, the class of 2014 will join a sizable backlog of unemployed college graduates from the last five graduating classes in an extremely difficult job market,” Shierholz said in a new report.
Stateline May 13, 2014 -
The class of 2014 is graduating into a job market that might charitably be described as a disaster.
NEARLY 17 PERCENT OF 2014 GRADS WILL BE UNDEREMPLOYED
There’s plenty of evidence on this point, as several commentators have pointed out. The class of 2014 will emerge into an economy with a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, and new grads’ prospects will be even worse than that. Young college graduates face a jobless rate of 8.5 percent, according to recent data from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington, DC-based think tank.
Not only that, but EPI finds that 16.8 percent will be underemployed, meaning they will either be working part-time despite wanting full-time work, or they will have stopped looking for work despite wanting a job (this is what is called the U-6 unemployment rate in the monthly jobs report).
VOX May 13, 2014 -
Bloomberg May 12, 2014
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 12, 2014
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The visit to the Mountain View, Calif., Wal-Mart underscores Mr. Obama’s complex relationship with the nation’s biggest retailer, accused alternately by Mr. Obama and his political allies of offering substandard wages and inadequate health-care, but also praised for hiring veterans, selling healthy food and embracing solar power.
“I want to thank the folks at Wal-Mart,” Mr. Obama said Friday at an event to highlight the administration’s climate change agenda. “Because more and more companies like Walmart are realizing that wasting less energy isn’t just good for the planet, it’s good for business. It’s good for the bottom line.”
The contrasting views may simply reflect Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s size. With about 1.3 million employees at more than 4,800 U.S. stores and clubs, and more than $473 billion in world-wide net sales last year, the company is simply too big to ignore. Wal-Mart’s corporate decisions can also ripple through the country.
“Whenever it comes to the issue of the day, whether it’s labor or energy, you can’t ignore what they are doing because they have a measurable effect on the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal May 12, 2014