Media clips
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Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said blacks lagged whites for a number of reasons. They include slightly lower levels of education, weaker business networking and the U.S. failure to create good-paying jobs since the 1970s.
But discrimination also plays a role, she said. Studies have shown, for example, that on identical job applications those with white-sounding names are more likely to get callbacks than those with black-sounding names.
Such studies “show that discrimination is still alive and well,” she said.
In 1963, the jobless rate among blacks was 10.9 percent, more than twice that for whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Reuters August 27, 2013 -
“In the 1960s, there were a number of occupations that blacks just couldn’t get — you were categorically blocked,” said Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “Now you can see blacks in almost every occupation — including in the White House.”
But fighting discrimination is like trying to inoculate against a mutating disease: The socially and legally sanctioned discrimination of the 1960s gave way to stealthier-but-still-dangerous forms of bias.
“It’s still the case that while there’s little categorical exclusion, we still see evidence that employers prefer white workers,” Austin said. He pointed to much-cited research that found that people with “black-sounding” names were less likely to be hired for jobs than people without them, even when their qualifications were about the same, and that a white man with a criminal record applying for a job was more likely to receive a response from an employer than a black man without one.
The march’s organizers also hoped to put a dent in the double-digit unemployment rate among blacks (10 percent). That figure hasn’t improved in the 50 years since, according to the Economic Policy Institute; indeed, the black unemployment rate over the last half-century — 11.6 percent — suggests that black America is operating in a permanent economic recession. And since 1963, the average rate of black unemployment has hovered at more than twice the unemployment for whites.
(During the recent recession, black unemployment crept up to nearly 15 percent.)
Those dismal numbers might still understate just how bad the employment situation is. “To be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively looking for work,” Austin said. ” In communities where it’s very difficult for people to find work, people drop out of the labor work because their chances are so small.” In other words, there are untold numbers of unemployed black folks we’ve just ceased to count.
NPR August 27, 2013 -
Thomas J. Sugrue reminds us, in an excellent essay about why the call for economic justice resonated so loudly in August of 1963, that the full title of the event was “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The Economic Policy Institute examines the context for the march’s demand for a higher minimum wage.
For the marchers, an increase in the minimum wage was one way to address the high poverty rate among black Americans.
NBC News August 27, 2013 -
The trend toward lousy wages began before the Great Recession. According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, weak wage growth between 2000 and 2007, combined with wage losses for most workers since then, means that the bottom 60 percent of working Americans are earning less now than thirteen years ago.
The Christian Science Monitor August 27, 2013 -
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 27, 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 27, 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 August 27, 2013 -
CNN columnist John Sutter called EPI’s Inequality.Is “the best online primer I’ve found” on economic inequality. He wrote, “It explains why inequality is a problem, how it was created and what might fix it.”
CNN August 23, 2013 -
A new report from EPI President Lawrence Mishel and Economist Heidi Shierholz shows that the vast majority of American workers have seen their wages stagnate for a decade. A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class is a comprehensive analysis of wage trends that shows that most Americans have not experienced real wage gains, regardless of occupation, race, ethnicity, or education level—including workers with a college degree. At the same time, corporate profits have soared, and the earnings of the top 1 percent have skyrocketed.
August 23, 2013 -
The Rev. Al Sharpton used EPI’s work in a Huffington Post column about the unmet goals of the March on Washington. After citing EPI data on persistent disparities between unemployment rates of blacks and whites, he wrote, “When such blatant inequality exists, how can we ever believe that our work is finished? Dr. King and the over 250,000 gathered with him on that historic day marched for jobs, and today we will continue marching for jobs as inequity persists. Millions of Americans are still desperately seeking work, and yet Congress will not support a jobs bill. So we march.”
The Huffington Post August 23, 2013