Media clips
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They are your neighbors, your fellow congregants, some of the men and women crammed beside you on the subway or bus. Day in and day out, they are coping with upended lives, struggling to squeeze back into a work force that has squeezed them out.
Nationally, more than three million unemployed people have been searching for work for longer than six months, nearly three times more than there were in 2007, before the Great Recession began, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group based in Washington.
The numbers tell part of the story. The rest often remains unspoken: the emotional and financial burdens of joblessness; the mounting sense of self-doubt, the awkward silences among friends who grasp for words of comfort and the job offers that vaporize after seeming so tantalizingly within reach.
The New York Times May 23, 2014 -
(Also in Port Clinton News Heralds, htrnews, The Des Moines Register, Courier-Post, Cincinnati.com
The latest jobs report for April gave grads a puzzling picture. Employers added the most jobs in more than two years, 288,000. Unemployment dropped from 6.7% to 6.3%, the first time it was that low since September 2008. Young adults still face higher unemployment, but the rate for 25-29 year-olds fell from 7.5% in March to 6.9%. The unemployment rate for those 20-24 dropped from 12.2% to 10.6%.Still, the portion of Americans 25-34 who were working in April fell to a five-month low of 75.5%, down from 75.9% in March.
“The entire drop (in unemployment) was due to people dropping out of the labor force, in particular young people,” says Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist who writes an annual report on the state of employment for young adults for Economic Policy Institute.
And despite the number of jobs added last month, Shierholz calls the gradual improvement “agonizingly slow.”
USA Today May 23, 2014 -
(Also in Star Tribune, NBC News, News Times, Reading Eagle)
Labor leaders and many economists worry. Contract workers have less job security and don’t contribute to the economy through spending as much as permanent, full-time workers. Nor do they have the same job protections. Few are union members.“It is not hugely clear that we’re coming into a temp-worker, contract-worker, contingent-worker nation. But it’s something to keep an eye on,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute. “There’s definitely been an increase in the share of those working part time.”
Associated Press May 23, 2014 -
“After all these years, it’s no wonder people are still feeling the weight of the Great Recession,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which tracks the well-being of the poor and the working class, “because the weight is still there.”
The New York Times May 23, 2014 -
Retirement saving aside, many young potential first-time homebuyers largely just can’t afford to purchase a home. They point to insufficient credit history or score and a lack of funds to cover a down payment and closing costs as the biggest obstacles to purchasing a home, according to a May report from Fannie Mae.
Further compromising their financial stability, the unemployment of Americans under 25 is likely higher given the scarcity of job opportunities, a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute showed. There are about 1 million “missing” young workers, which means they’re not employed, in school or actively seeking work. They’re not counted in the jobless rate, which was 10.6 percent in April for Americans 20-24. Almost five years after the recession ended, there should be 7.1 million more jobs to match the growth of the labor force.
US News and World Report May 23, 2014 -
“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