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
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
May 12, 2014
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
The top graph is embedded from an article by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz for Economic Policy Institute. I found it in an article by Lydia Depillis on Wonkblog, which is a column of The Washington Post. The visual with the cartoon people was made by yours truly using numbers from the same Economic Policy Institute article and images from Thinkstock. Thumbnail photo of dear ol’ Donald via Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license.
Upworthy
May 12, 2014
1. My pay is rising much faster than yours.
While American workers grapple with stagnant wages and an uncertain job market, there’s one group that doesn’t need to worry about pay raises: CEOs.
At the country’s largest 350 companies by revenue, average CEO compensation — including salary and the value of stock options exercised — was $14.1 million in 2012, up nearly 13% since 2011 and 37% since 2009, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute , a think tank in Washington, D.C.
MarketWatch
May 12, 2014