Media clips
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Obama’s minimum wage order will cover people who perform services, such as janitors or construction workers, and make less than $10.10 per hour.
David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, said the announcement of the pay hike is “a good step going forward” but is limited in its reach.
“It’s not going to have the same impact that Congress increasing the federal minimum wage for all workers would have, and because it only applies to new contracts or contracts that are renegotiated, it may take a little while before current employees of federal contractors see the increase in their pay,” said Cooper, whose organization has advocated for a minimum wage increase.
In a call with officials at the Economic Policy Institute on Monday night before the announcement, Jason Furman, a top economic adviser to the president, told the group that the White House believes the executive action could impact roughly 250,000 people, according to Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at EPI.
USA Today January 29, 2014 -
But the minimum wage order will also illustrate the limits of that approach. If Congress increases the federal minimum wage to $10.10 from $7.25 as Mr. Obama has sought, 17 million employees would eventually get a raise unless their jobs were eliminated and another 11 million would benefit indirectly as wage ladders were adjusted, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. Mr. Obama’s order, by contrast, will affect relatively few at first because it will apply only to new or renewed contracts, and even down the road at most it might affect several hundred thousand workers.
New York Times January 29, 2014 -
The rise in inequality has coincided with an enormous growth in the financial sector, which remunerates its employees extremely generously. Indeed, much of the shift in overall income to the top one per cent can be explained by the contribution of this one industry. “Executives, and workers in finance, accounted for 58 percent of the expansion of income for the top 1 percent and 67 percent of the increase in income for the top 0.1 percent from 1979 to 2005,” a 2012 paper from the liberal Economic Policy Institute pointed out.
The New Yorker January 29, 2014 -
But that’s by no means the norm. Tom Hungerford, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who used to analyze tax policy for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, says the vast majority of small business owners don’t make enough to clear the bar.
“So you’re just talking about the very top of the income distribution, probably owners of S-corps and some partnerships,” he says. “A lot of those are law firms, and I don’t think they have huge capital investments.” The rest in that bracket are mostly salaried executives, managers, financiers, lawyers and doctors — who tend to spend their personal income on themselves, not their business.
The Washington Post January 29, 2014 -
Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.
New York Times January 27, 2014 -
A major political clash over public-sector unions unfolded in Wisconsin, which imposed new restrictions on public-sector unions in 2011. The limits were blocked by the courts for part of 2012, but an impact was apparent.
Union representation among Wisconsin’s public-sector employees, including union members and workers who do not pay union dues but still enjoy union contract pay and benefits, dropped to 37.6 percent in 2013 from 53.4 percent in 2011.
The latest U.S. data suggest, “the erosion of public sector union coverage reflects the new anti-collective bargaining policies implemented in several states,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Reuters January 27, 2014 -
In Wisconsin, union membership in the public sector fell from 53.4 percent in 2011 to just 37.6 percent in 2013.
“This suggests that the erosion of public sector union coverage reflects the new anti-collective bargaining policies implemented in several states,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The overall rate of union membership has been steadily declining for decades. The share of workers belonging to unions peaked in the 1950s at about 30 percent, and dropped to about 20 percent by 1983.
AP January 27, 2014 -
These 5 maps show unions are losing ground in the states
It’s no secret that unions — especially the public-sector variety — have had a big target on them in some states lately.Fifteen state legislatures in 2011 and 2012 passed laws restricting the collective bargaining rights of public-employee unions or their ability to collect dues from nonmembers they represented, according to an analysis conducted for the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on reducing inequality and advancing pro-worker policies. The early 2011 fight in Wisconsin, under Republican Gov. Scott Walker, was perhaps the most high-profile effort. (Disclaimer: The author moderated an EPI panel for the paper’s unveiling.)
The Washington Post January 27, 2014 -
Here is a piece and chart quantifying that trend from Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute:
The minimum wage is 23 percent less than its peak inflation-adjusted value in 1968. This is despite productivity (how much output can be produced in an average hour of work in the economy) more than doubling in that time period.
The low-wage workforce has surely contributed to this rise in economy-wide productivity, since as a group they have far more education now than they did then. For the workforce overall, 37 percent in 1968 had not completed high school (or received a GED), which was true for only 9 percent in 2012 (the latest year with comparable data). We can drill down to examine low-wage workers, which we are defining for this analysis as those earning in the bottom fifth of the wage distribution.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution January 24, 2014 -
On this MLK Day nearly 46 years after King’s death, persistent discrimination means that black Americans are more likely than their white counterparts to struggle economically. And it’s much harder for them to pull themselves out of that financial insecurity. One prominent example of how racism affects black Americans’ economic prospects is in the job market, where they’re much more likely to be unemployed than white Americans.
Some of that has to do with lower rates of educational attainment and a lack of access to hiring networks. But even when you account for all of those things, “the leftover bit is the out-and-out discrimination,” said Heidi Schierholtz of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. There are a number of reasons why the playing field is so unequal.
The Huffington Post January 24, 2014