Media clips
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You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recentchartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.
Slate May 9, 2014 -
This weekend, college seniors and their families will hear a lot of stirring words from commencement speakers as graduation season gets into full swing.
What comes next for many will be a little less stirring: the job hunt.
“The Class of 2014 is a little bit better off than the few classes who came before,” says researcher Alyssa Davis, co-author of a report, ‘The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy is Idling Too Many Young Graduates,’ for the Economic Policy Institute. “Since the recession, this has become the new normal, with a weak job market, stagnant wages, high unemployment and underemployment.”
Unemployment for young college graduates is 8.5 percent, compared to 5.5 percent in 2007. For young high school graduates, the comparison is 22.9 percent to 15.9 percent.
Marketplace May 9, 2014 -
April’s strong numbers brought us just about back to the total number of jobs we had before the recession struck. The problem, as this chart from the liberal Economic Policy Institute shows, is that in the intervening six and a half years of economic weakness the population has grown considerably:
VOX May 7, 2014 -
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: This was one of the stranger reports I’ve seen in a long time.
NOGUCHI: Shierholz is an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
SHIERHOLZ: At first blush, it looked great. The unemployment rate dropped substantially to 6.3 percent. But you look one level deeper and you find that that drop in the unemployment rate was not for good reasons.
NPR May 7, 2014 -
“We do not yet have a jobs recovery that is strong enough to really pull people in,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. The number of people who began seeking work for the first time fell 126,000 from March to roughly 1 million. The figure for new grads and parents who began looking was even bleaker: Down 417,000 to 2.6 million.
Associated Press May 7, 2014 -
Moreover, even if job growth continued at last month’s solid, steady pace, the country would not have a labor market as healthy as the one it had before the recession started in December 2007 until the end of 2016, according to calculations by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Put differently, it would take the economy nine years to recoup the jobs lost during the recession plus those needed to employ new workers during the slow recovery.
The economic recovery that began in June 2009 has been the weakest the country has experienced since World War II, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. But it did not have to be. Lawmakers in Washington have repeatedly undermined the recovery by emphasizing deficit reduction rather than economic growth. They have also stood in the way of proposals that would have helped the unemployed and workers at the lowest rungs of the economy.
The New York Times May 7, 2014 -
The issue of 401(k) loans highlights the poor state of retirement savings of many Americans. The TransAmerica Center estimates that 62 percent of Generation Xers and 44 percent of baby boomers were at risk of seeing a “significant” drop in their living standards after retirement.
“In 2010, 40 percent of families in their peak saving years (age 55-64) had nothing saved in retirement accounts and 10 percent had $12,000 or less, according to data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances,” the Economic Policy Institute noted in a recent report.
CBS News May 7, 2014 -
A worker that’s more productive, Peri adds, is a worker who can demand more money.
But it’s important to remember here that immigrants aren’t what matter in this story; STEM workers are, wherever they come from. By this study’s logic, if suddenly US universities started cranking out more STEM graduates tomorrow, those workers could theoretically boost productivity in the same way as foreign STEM graduates.
In addition, not everyone agrees that the US economy needs more foreign STEM workers. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found in 2013 that high-skilled foreign workers would be detrimental to other US workers: “Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.”
If H-1B visa-holders are indeed boosting native-born Americans’ wages, that information could inspire lawmakers to pass immigration reform.
VOX May 7, 2014 -
“I think the Administration can continue to investigate ways to make improvements, but ultimately Congress must pass top–to–bottom immigration reform if we are going to fix our country’s broken immigration system,” Lofgren said.
Some critics of immigration reform have said that tech firms use the visa program to offshore jobs out of the country.
A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute last year found that the top 10 recipients of the visas in 2012 “were all in the business of outsources and offshoring high-tech American jobs.”“Far from keeping top talent in the U.S., the administration is working to put more talented Americans out of work,” said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Session (R-Ala.), who opposed the new DHS action. “Meanwhile, the administration continues to look the other way as companies use the guest worker visas to facilitate offshoring, laying off U.S. workers and tasking guest workers with coordinating offshoring centers.”
The Hill May 7, 2014 -
Over time, the creep of off-hours messages from our bosses and colleagues has led us to tolerate these intrusions as an inevitable part of the job, which is why it’s so startling when an employer is actually straightforward with his lunatic demands, as with the notorious email a Quinn Emanuel law partner sent to his underlings back in 2009: “Unless you have very good reason not to (for example when you are asleep, in court or in a tunnel), you should be checking your emails every hour.”
Constant access may work out great for employers, since it continues to ratchet up the pressure for turning off-the-clock, away-from-the-desk hours into just another part of the workday. But any corresponding economic gains likely aren’t being passed on to workers: During the great internet-age boom in productivity, which is up 23 percent since 2000, the inflation-adjusted wages and benefits for college graduates climbed just 4 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Mother Jones May 7, 2014