Media clips
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Real hourly wages declined for almost every segment of the U.S. workforce in the first half of 2014, according to a briefing paper released Wednesday morning by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
“The last year has been a poor one for American workers’ wages,” economist Elise Gould, who directs EPI’s health policy research, writes in the report. Analyzing data from the government’s Current Population Survey, Gould found that workers at the 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th, 80th, 90th, and 95th percentiles all experienced declines (ranging from 0.5 percent to 2.0 percent) in their real wages in the first half of 2014 compared with the same period last year. Real wages declined among workers with no high school degree (0.6 percent), with just a high school degree (1.1 percent), with some college (1.0 percent), with a college degree (1.6 percent), and with an advanced degree, too (2.7 percent).
Bloomberg BusinessWeek August 28, 2014 -
Consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy, and although businesses have added more than 200,000 jobs a month for the past six months, incomes have remained stagnant.
“Many consumers still have very tight budgets,” says Jack Kleinhenz, chief economist at the National Retail Federation. “Wages haven’t increased as fast as we would like them to. At that end, it puts more pressure on them for making purchases and certainly it’s expected that they’re going to trade off purchases from time to time.”
Kleinhenz says cheaper prices at the pump could start freeing up spending power for Americans with cars. At $3.45 a gallon, the national average price of gas on Monday was the cheapest it’s been since February and was the lowest August price since 2010, according to AAA.
“You could definitely say the desire to find the cheapest prices possible is a coping mechanism people use when economic times are tough, and they certainly have been for most Americans, let alone those at the bottom half of the wage distribution and labor market,” says Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute.
US News and World Report August 22, 2014 -
Fed Chair Janet Yellen will deliver the keynote address at an annual economic symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this week at a gathering of central bankers and academics that will focus on labor markets. All attendees, which include central bankers, academics and the media, pay their own entrance fee of $1,000 as well as their own travel costs to attend.
Including the rather exclusive Jackson Hole summit, many worry there isn’t enough access for “everyday” Americans to share their stories to policymakers as they make monetary policy decisions.
“Low-wage and middle-income working folks don’t necessarily understand what the Fed does, and even people who are unemployed and underemployed have other pressing concerns,” says Peter Brownell, research director at the Center on Policy Initiatives. “Efforts need to be made to actually affirmatively reach out to people and get their perspective, whereas Wall Street and business leaders are not shy about putting their views forward.”
Brownell’s organization is one of about 60 – including the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project – that cosigned a letter to Fed policymakers saying that the job market remains weak enough – particularly in light of the flat wages for hourly workers – to necessitate its easy-money policies.
US News and World Report August 22, 2014 -
Josh Smith, The Economic Policy Institute, and Jim Pethokoukis, The American Enterprise Institute, discuss why tax inversions are receiving so much attention.
NBC News August 20, 2014 -
Hourly wages for most Americans either stagnated or declined from 2000 to 2013, the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, said in a June report. Like the National Employment Law Project, the EPI found that the worst-hit groups were those at the lowest of the wage distribution.
CBS Moneywatch August 20, 2014 -
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why some people are saying yes to silence: many of us are starved for quiet time, thanks to our increasingly hectic lives. According to a 2013 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the average American worker works 181 more hours in a year than he did in 1979, which represents a nearly 11% increase in work hours over roughly 30 years. That’s the equivalent of every worker working an additional 4.5 weeks per year.
Wall Street Journal August 20, 2014 -
“Too many workers continue to be sidelined from the workforce for an exceptionally long period of time,” Hilary Wething, a senior research assistant at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington, wrote in a research note. “Though the labor market is improving across the country, job growth has yet to meaningfully accelerate for most states.”
Wall Street Journal August 20, 2014 -
The Center for Popular Democracy is slated to release a letter Tuesday signed by more than 60 left-leaning organizations, ranging from community groups to bigger players such as the Economic Policy Institute, Public Citizen and Demos. They are calling on the Fed to keep its easy-money policies in place until wages start to rise and what has been an exceptionally uneven recovery begins to broaden out. Butler, along with several other workers and activists, intend to trek through the mountains to deliver that message in person before the conference begins Thursday.
The Washington Post August 20, 2014 -
In the past, ballot initiatives have been used to push minimum wage laws through especially stubborn states. Take New Jersey for example. In January 2013, Republican Governor Chris Christie vetoed minimum wage legislation that state lawmakers had passed. At the polls ten months later, New Jersey voters approved a ballot initiative to boost the state’s minimum pay from $7.25 to $8.25 with 61% of the vote.
“A higher minimum wage is incredibly poplar,’ says David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “If legislature is not being responsive to the public’s desires, advocates are going the ballot measure route because it’s been successful.”
Voters in Montana and Missouri voted down hikes in 1996, but since then, every minimum wage initiatives that have appeared on statewide ballots — 13 in total — have gained voter approval, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.
Fortune August 20, 2014 -
A pending decision by President Barack Obama on whether to use his executive powers to make interim immigration reforms because Congress failed to could make the already heated immigration issue even more volatile. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal leaning, non-profit think tank, released a report Thursday aiming to dispel many myths and provide some fundamentals before politics sends things into a frenzy. Here are the five biggest takeaways from the institute’s report on immigrants:..
NBC News August 14, 2014