Despite soaring corporate profits and nearly 25 percent gains in overall workforce productivity, 60 percent of American workers saw their wages stagnate or decline from 2000 to 2012 according to the latest study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank based in Washington D.C. The period has been termed by some economists as the “lost decade” of wage growth for most Americans.
The EPI data validates the claims of the burgeoning fast-food workers movement, uniting low-wage workers behind demands for better pay. In a $200-billion-per-year fast-food industry, paltry wages have become a central grievance of the growing protest movement that could change an industry employing roughly 4 million across the United States.
Mint News
August 29, 2013
Over at the Economic Policy Institute, however, Josh Bivens argues that this sort of tech-driven polarization isn’t enough to explain stagnant median wages over the past decade. “We would argue,” he writes, “that institutional factors like the eroding value of the minimum wage as a labor standard and eroding protections for willing workers that want to form a union are more important drivers of inequality and disappointing middle-class living standards over the past generation.”
The Washington Post Wonkblog
August 29, 2013
A new paper from the Economic Policy Institute provides both diagnosis and prescription of what is arguably the fundamental problem of the United States economy in recent years: wage stagnation. I’ll briefly describe the findings, but given that these trends have persisted for a long time, it’s more important to think about solutions, particularly ones that go beyond conventional wisdom.
The New York Times
August 29, 2013
Inequality: Jared Bernstein summarizes a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute on the hollowing out of the middle class. The debate has focused too much on how to reverse inequality and not enough on how to prevent it, Mr. Bernstein says. “This poses a serious problem.
Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics
August 29, 2013
But it is not hard to figure out the motivations behind it. The idea was to shame companies that had excessively high executive compensation to either pay their chief executives less or their workers more. The provision also comes in light of the increasing income disparity between the two. Pay for chief executives has risen to 277 times the average workers’ pay, from 20 times in 1965, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
August 29, 2013
The mass layoffs and sky-high unemployment levels of the Great Recession have mostly receded. What’s left is a bigger issue: the fact that wages basically haven’t moved in a decade for the majority of American workers.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute, highlighted by economist Jared Bernstein in The New York Times, finds that for many there’s been basically no progress in a decade.
From the report:
“Between 2002 and 2012, wages were stagnant or declined for the entire bottom 70 percent of the wage distribution. In other words, the vast majority of wage earners have already experienced a lost decade, one where real wages were either flat or in decline.”
Business Insider
August 29, 2013
The march 50 years ago was, after all, a march “For Jobs and Freedom,” and its focus was every bit as economic as it was juridical and social. Even more directly, one of the demands highlighted by the march’s leaders and organizers was to raise the federal minimum wage — then $1.15 an hour — to $2. According to Sylvia Allegretto and Steven Pitts of the Economic Policy Institute, that comes out to $13.39 today. (This week, fast-food workers will march seeking an hourly wage of $15.)
The Washington Post
August 29, 2013
Although median household income for blacks has gone up, the income gap between blacks and whites has widened. And improvements in productivity have vastly outpaced wage growth for workers of all races. Read related article.
The Washington Post
August 29, 2013
The march took place at a time when the benefits of American economic growth were widely shared. Between 1947 and 1979, the wages of workers at all salary levels grew by roughly the same percentage.
But between 1979 and 2007, incomes shifted drastically, with the top 5 percent of earners seeing annual salary increases more than three times the size of those in the middle, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. Overall, 63 percent of total income growth went to the top 10 percent of households between 1979 and 2007, according to Algernon Austin, an EPI economist.
The Washington Post
August 29, 2013
Part of the reason is that the country has become more economically segregated. Poor black children are more likely to live in communities with concentrated poverty — some 45 percent do so, as opposed to 12 percent for poor white children, as the Economic Policy Institute has pointed out.
The New York Times
August 29, 2013