Media clips
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“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 -
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