On Thursday, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group, published a report showing that wages haven’t risen. “The stagnation of hourly wages is the most important economic issue facing most American families, and most of our key economic challenges hinge on whether or not hourly wages for the vast majority grow,” the author, Elise Gould, wrote.
The New Yorker
February 23, 2015
Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Wal-Mart’s move also reduces the pressure on other retailers to keep labor costs at rock-bottom levels. “It at least takes away the excuse from other firms that ‘We’d like to raise wages, but we can’t because we have to compete with Wal-Mart,'” Bivens said. “It could possibly give some competitive breathing space to other retailers to raise wages.”
Associated Press
February 23, 2015
American wages, actually across the wage distribution, fell or stagnated in 2013 and 2014, according to a report released Thursday from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
As the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould reported Thursday, among all educational categories, the greatest real wage losses between 2013 and 2014 were observed among those with bachelor’s and advanced degrees. “If demand for high-skilled workers were driving wage inequality, we would expect to see these workers’ wages increasing, or at the very least, falling less than their low-skilled counterparts.” But the demand is dwindling — even for them.
PBS News Hour
February 23, 2015
Higher wages are exactly what the financial doctors have ordered to cure America’s ailing economy. According to the Economic Policy Institute, it would take a wage growth of at least 3.5% to 4% for workers to feel the impact of the recovery. In 2014, the average hourly pay went up by just 1.7%. “Raising wages among low-wage workers shifts income into the pockets of workers and families that are highly likely to quickly spend every additional dollar they earn,” says David Cooper, economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “So even though some businesses have to pay their workers more, they see more customers coming through the door because now there’s additional dollars rippling out through local economies in a way that doesn’t really happen if those dollars just go back into the bank accounts of corporate shareholders.”
The Guardian
February 23, 2015
Anti-unionism, which has become increasingly entrenched in recent decades, correlates with stagnating and declining wages. As unions have been harmed, not only by market forces but by policies that deliberately weaken them, income has flowed increasingly to those at the top of the economic ladder rather than to workers.
The New York Times
February 20, 2015
It may be that as unions weakened, executives sometimes grabbed the gains from productivity. Perhaps that helps explain why chief executives at big companies earned, on average, 20 times as much as the typical worker in 1965, and 296 times as much in 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
February 19, 2015
David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute tells The Nation via e-mail, “Given that our economy is driven by consumer spending, the last thing we would want during a period of economic turmoil is more folks with less money to spend.“ And, he noted, “a larger moral/philosophical question that should be considered as well: should the lowest paid worker never have any change in their standard of living?… Imagine we had a revolution in production processes such that prices of staple goods fell considerably, should we legislate that the lowest-paid workers shouldn’t get to benefit from those improvements?”
The Nation
February 19, 2015
There was a time where it was plausible to argue that more education and innovation were the primary solutions to our economic problems. But that time has passed. You cannot tell that, however, to the Wall Street Democrats and their Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. They’re not ready to change just yet, even though most of the Democratic Party has. This shift was signaled by a recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Commission on Inclusive Prosperity, which is co-chaired by Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Barack Obama’s first term. The report calls for full employment (a “high pressure economy,” as Summers calls it), a more welcoming environment for collective bargaining, higher labor standards (overtime, minimum wage, earned sick and paid family leave), changes in corporate governance, and large scale public investment to address middle-class wage stagnation.
The American Prospect
February 19, 2015
Reports from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the New England Public Policy Center for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and the Economic Policy Institute have spotlighted fraud and abuse problems with the H1-B program.
Los Angeles Times
February 18, 2015
California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program (CSC) will cover workers in California who don’t currently have access to formal retirement savings via their work. “I’m a big fan,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute who recently testified before Congress on retirement security. “It’s probably the farthest along of all the retirement-reform ideas in terms of practical implementation.”
Time Magazine
February 18, 2015