Media clips
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As Republicans stonewall President Obama’s initiative to raise the federal minimum wage from$7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour by 2016, some state lawmakers have taken the matter into their own hands, passing legislation that increases the salaries for America’s most vulnerable workers. But there’s one group that is still largely left out of the minimum wage battle: people who work for tips.
As it stands, only seven states require employers to pay tipped workers the same minimum wage as nontipped workers. The federal minimum wage for the latter is $7.25, but the federal minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnate at $2.13 since 1991, with no adjustment for inflation. Employers are supposed to make up the difference if tipped workers aren’t earning the regular minimum wage through their tips, but it doesn’t always happen. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found in 2011 that tipped workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to fall under the federal poverty line.
The Minimum Wage Fairness Act, which Obama endorsed, would have gradually raised tipped workers’ minimum wage to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage. But the bill has faced steep opposition from Republicans and the restaurant lobby. According to Open Secrets, the National Restaurant Association, which opposed the minimum-wage hike, spent more than $2.2 million on lobbying last year.
Mother Jones May 12, 2014 -
The short story is that wealth inequality is growing right along with income inequality, especially at the very top. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in the early 1960s, the wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S. had 125 times the wealth of a median household. In 2010, that ratio had doubled, reaching 288 to 1.
It’s worth noting that data on wealth and wealth inequality is harder to come by than data on incomes. The census measures income, not wealth. Tax returns don’t paint a full picture of a person’s net holdings. Surveys like the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances have trouble capturing the super-rich.
Part of what makes the work of Thomas Piketty and his colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman so ground-breaking is that they have developed new ways to measure private wealth and wealth inequality over time. Their method involves taking tax returns, which record the income generated from assets (in dividends, interest payments or rental income), and teasing out the underlying value of those assets.
Marketplace May 12, 2014 -
Here is the situation in two graphs.
The first graph shows the “college premium,” which is basically the percentage difference between the pay of college grads and high school grads. The graph is widely misinterpreted — by students and parents — to mean that wages for college-educated workers go nowhere but up.
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 12, 2014 -
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