Media clips
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Bernard Brock thought his work life in Logansport, Ind., would begin soon after he graduated from high school earlier this year. The 21-year-old has since applied for factory work and at multiple fast-food restaurants, all with no luck.
A generation ago, Mr. Brock’s diploma might have secured him a decent blue-collar job. But for a rising number of high-school students, that piece of sheepskin has led to nothing.
More than one million students under 21 who completed high school are not working, looking for work, or pursuing further education, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a left-leaning think tank.
The study examines the rising number of young adults who have emerged from high school into the sluggish, postrecession economy and are now caught between diminished job prospects and soaring costs for higher education.
Wall Street Journal May 2, 2014 -
AMERICAN IDLE: College wasn’t necessarily a refuge for young people unable to find work during the Great Recession, the Economic Policy Institute concludes in a new paper out today, and enrollment at colleges and universities didn’t grow at a rate faster than before the recession. “This means there has been a large increase in the share of young high school and college graduates who are idled — neither employed nor enrolled in school — by the weak economy,” EPI economist Heidi Shierholz writes along with research assistants Alyssa Davis and Will Kimball.
— The paper says there are nearly a million “missing” young workers who are neither employed nor actively looking for jobs because job opportunities remain scarce. If they were in the labor market, the unemployment rate of workers under 25 would be 18.1 percent, not 14.5 percent.
— The recession will have a lasting effect on these young people, the report says. For the next 10 to 15 years, those in the “Class of 2014” will likely earn less than if they had graduated when job opportunities were plentiful. A solution? More public sector employment and safety net programs, the authors said. Find the full report later today: http://bit.ly/1u6C7FV.
Politico May 2, 2014 -
According to an analysis of Harkin’s bill by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the bill would “directly or indirectly raise the wages of 27.8 million workers,” resulting in about $35 billion in additional wages in the next 30 months. EPI also says the bill would create “roughly 85,000 net new jobs” over that same period of time.
The EPI analysis argues that higher wages for lower-income workers will equal more spending, which will subsequently result in higher demand that would boost the economy and could result in the need to hire more workers.
“Senate Republicans assert that increasing the minimum wage will not help working families, that assertion is not only wrong, Mr. President, it makes no sense, it’s illogical,” Reid said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “Twenty-eight million Americans stand to benefit from an increase in the minimum wage.”
NBC News May 2, 2014 -
The Economic Policy Institute calculates that in 1979 the share of wealth-derived income that went to the top 1% (33.5%) was actually lower than the share of wealth-derived income that went to the bottom 90% (36.2%). Three decades later, after government deregulation and financial innovation had “democratized” the market, the top 1%’s share had risen to 54% and the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 22.9%. Some revolution!
What explains this strange outcome? Mainly that, while a lot of people entered the stock market, not many acquired significant holdings. Half the nation’s households may be in the market, but only one third of that half (i.e., one-sixth of the nation’s households) own stock holdings worth $7,000 or more. Nearly 70% of all stocks are held by the top 5%.
Examining Piketty’s figures, one is struck by the fact that, since 1810, the only period during which wealth distribution grew more egalitarian was between 1910 and 1950, during the reign of the old elitist white-shoe investment firms. Credit belongs not to the old WASP hierarchy but to a series of cataclysmic world events (World War I, the Great Depression, World War II) and the more egalitarian government policies they brought about (a rise in the newly-established income tax, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, wage and price controls, etc.).
MSNBC April 28, 2014 -
(Note: Shout out to Dan Essrow and Eric Shansby for interviewing Bob Solow – their interview was quoted here)
In a recent interview at the Economic Policy Institute, Nobel Prize-Winning economist and MIT professor Robert Solow riffed on the political effects of increasing inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top. “If that kind of concentration of wealth continues, then we get to be more and more an oligarchical country, a country that’s run from the top,” he said.
The Atlantic April 28, 2014 -
This current reality clashes with our own recent past. For three decades following World War II, wages rose in tandem with increases in productivity — that was the essence of the old “Social Contract.” But in the 30 years since 1980, earnings have essentially flatlined: While the productivity of American workers grew by a healthy 80%, family income grew by only about 10%, and average hourly wages inched up by about 6%.
The first decade of this century — sometimes called “the lost decade” — has been even worse. Real wages (wages adjusted for increases in the cost of living) either declined or did not increase for high school or college graduates. Only those at the top of the occupational ladder with advanced degrees experienced modest wage growth. The “Occupy” movement had its facts right: Most of the income growth went to the top 1% or less of the population. America is now suffering from the highest level of income inequality of any time since the 1920s.
CNNMoney April 28, 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 April 28, 2014 -
Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week. That was down from 66.2 percent the previous year and was the lowest figure in a decade. The high point came in 2009, when 70.1 percent of new graduates had gone on to college.
“Falling college enrollment indicates that upward mobility may become more difficult for working-class and disadvantaged high school graduates,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “It’s another part of the long-term scarring process of the Great Recession that has been partly hidden.” She said that might reflect poorer employment prospects for parents and students who would have worked their way through college a few years ago, and added that many parents in the past paid for college by refinancing mortgages, an alternative no longer available to many families.
The New York Times April 28, 2014 -
The Labor Department reports that 260,000 college graduates were stuck last year working at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. That’s down from a peak of 327,000 in 2010. But it’s more than double the 127,000 in 2007, the year the recession began.
“Every way you cut it, young college grads are really having trouble — much more trouble than they used to have,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “The labor market is not producing decent jobs.”
Associated Press April 25, 2014 -
“It’s remarkable how poorly the middle class has done since the end of the 1990s boom,” Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, told CBS MoneyWatch. “We have an economic regime that’s not working to raise wages for most workers.”
CBS Moneywatch April 24, 2014