Media clips
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Given these mixed signals, the experts at the National Women’s Law Center view the job market for women as decidedly in the hands of Congress. Renewing unemployment insurance will inject money into the economy and improve the job market, according to their analysis. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would create more demand and provide a particular boost for women, who make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers, according to the NWLC.
Senate Democrats have tried to alleviate this situation. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has tried several times to restore long-term unemployment insurance benefits, with the most recent attempt occurring on Tuesday, but each time has failed to secure enough votes.
Economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute has a way to try and make sense of the mixed signals from the labor report. She has a data point that she refers to as her “desert island” data, meaning that if she could take only one labor market measure to gauge the strength of the labor market, she’d put the employment to population (EPOP) ratio into her spreadsheet.
The Washington Post March 14, 2014 -
Productivity growth and employment growth tracked each other closely for decades but began to split in 2000. Lawrence Mishel, head of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, argues that the widening gap we’ve seen in recent years—often blamed on technology—isn’t due to their spread at all, but rather to weak growth and demand. Robots could theoretically be behind the weak demand (if people are earning lower wages and being otherwise muscled out of the labor market, they’re less inclined to buy things), Bernstein says, but that’s not something economists can tease out of the data until the economy returns to full employment.
Another place you’d expect to see signs of the robot “job-apocalypse” is in businesses’ investment in equipment, says Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics. That pace has actually been declining over the past 14 years, he says.
National Journal March 14, 2014 -
In person, thanks to good genes, people often assume I’m younger than I am. On paper, however, I’m just another overeducated, middle-aged, middle-class refugee whose last retail experience dates to the Reagan administration.
Not to mention retail employers these days have their pick of applicants: the Great Recession added countless numbers of desperate workers like me to the annual labor-market influx of college students and high schoolers. According to an Economic Policy Institute report, “In 1968, 48 percent of low-wage workers had a high school degree, compared to 79 percent in 2012.” Likewise, the percentage of people in these jobs who have spent some time in college has skyrocketed, jumping from under 17 percent to more than 45 percent in the same time. All of us are in a race to the bottom of the wage pool.
Although older job candidates bring experience and skills to the table, their job applications typically blink like red warning lights to retail managers:overqualified, overpaid, and probably harder to manage than some high school or college kid. In a word: trouble.
“Think about it, Joey—that’s why there are online applications,” my sister, a veteran human-resources professional, told me. “If you apply online, and you never hear back, they don’t have to tell you why they rejected you and face a discrimination lawsuit.”
The Atlantic March 14, 2014 -
Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said there are about 10 million more workers who would qualify for overtime under that higher threshold. But he said not all work overtime and he estimated that such an increase would more than likely actually affect about 5 million salaried workers.
The current salary limit —equal to $23,660 a year —is below the poverty level for a family of four. “It’s so far from being an executive salary as to be a joke,” Eisenbrey said.
Associated Press March 14, 2014 -
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, and Jared Bernstein, a former White House economist, recently proposed the limit be increased to $984 a week, or roughly $50,000 a year.
“That would mean between five- and 10-million people could be affected, but they might choose a lower number,” Mr. Eisenbrey said about the White House plans.
Economists like Mr. Eisenbrey point to stagnant wages as one cause behind the U.S.’s sluggish growth. Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, rose 0.4% from January 2013 to January 2014. A bump in the threshold would “move more money from employers into employee pockets. That will be good for the economy,” Mr. Eisenbrey said.
Wall Street Journal March 14, 2014 -
EPI’s Richard Rothstein presented research at the Atlantic’s Reinventing the War on Poverty conference on March 6th. Watch the video.
The Atlantic March 7, 2014 -
A rising minimum wage is a tide that lifts all ships. This is common sense: If a shift worker gets a raise and is now making what the line manager has earned, the line manager is also going to get a bump in pay. Raise the minimum wage, and the bottom 20 percent of wage earners soon enjoy larger paychecks, says Dube of UMass.
A $10.10 minimum wage would boost the incomes of 27.8 million workers, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Far from the image of a teen flipping burgers at Jack in the Box, the median worker who would benefit is a full-time working woman in her thirties, responsible for half of her family’s income.
Because these workers spend all the money they make, the $35 billion in extra wages they would earn as $10.10 is phased in would get pumped right back into the U.S. economy – doing far more to stimulate growth than if the same dollars were bloating some billionaire’s bank account.
Rolling Stone March 7, 2014 -
Recent college graduates are ending up in more low-wage and part-time positions as it’s become harder to find education-level appropriate jobs, according to a January study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The share of Americans ages 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree in jobs that don’t require that level of education was 44 percent in 2012, up from 34 percent in 2001, the study found.
Competition can leave less-educated — yet still qualified — individuals with few employment options, said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
“College graduates might not be in a job that requires a college degree, but they’re more likely to have a job,” she said.
Less-educated young adults are then more likely to drop out of the labor market, said Paul Beaudry, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who studies U.S. employment trends.
Bloomberg March 7, 2014 -
As part of an effort to revamp America’s complex tax code, U.S. Congressman Dave Camp last week proposed to curb CEO pay by tightening a tax giveaway created in the 1990s. Perhaps unexpected for a Republican, Camp’s plan would raise $12.1 billion in taxes over 10 years by prohibiting U.S. companies from taking income-tax deductions for their top executives’ pay exceeding $1 million, even if it’s based on performance.
Currently, laws exempt performance-based pay from the $1 million limit. The problem with that is it has encouraged companies to raise base salaries to that level and reward executives with options.
Camp’s proposal is a welcome move to help tame the ballooning CEO pay we’ve seen over the years. CEO pay began to escalate in the early 1980s, but salaries took off in big ways after the passage of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (OBRA) in 1993, which allowed unlimited deducibility of executive pay based on performance; at the time, President Bill Clinton signed it into law and it has been one of his greatest follies. In 2000, CEO pay was 383 times that of the average worker, compared with 123 times in 1995, according to a June 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute.
CNNMoney March 7, 2014 -
The U.S. is among only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave (the other two are Papua New Guinea and Swaziland). This means many poor American mothers must choose between raising their children and keeping their jobs. The U.S. education system is plagued with structural racial biases, like the fact that schools are funded at the local, rather than national level. That means that schools attended by poor black people get far less funding than the schools attended by wealthier students. The Department of Education has confirmed that schools with high concentrations of poor students have lower levels of funding. It’s no wonder America has one of the highest achievement gaps between high income and low income students, as measured by the OECD. Schools today are actually more racially segregated than they were in the 1970s. Our higher education system is unique among developed nations in that is funded almost entirely privately, by debt. Students in the average OECD country can expect about 70 percent of their college tuition to be publicly funded; in the United States, only about 40 percent of the cost of education is publicly-funded. That’s one reason the U.S. has the highest tuition costs of any OECD country.
Rolling Stone March 7, 2014