Media clips
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Yet the Golden State is also coming up with some of the most forward-thinking ideas. De León’s approach, called the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program (CSC), was signed into law in 2012 by Governor Jerry Brown. It aims to combine the best of old-style defined-benefit plans (traditional pensions that guarantee workers a set level of yearly income in retirement) with the flexibility and mobility of a 401(k). 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 June 20, 2014 -
(also in Morningstar)
“One not surprising result is that employees are more satisfied in metro areas with very low unemployment,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “These cities have unemployment at least one percentage point below the national average.” And all of Glassdoor’s five most popular cities for employee satisfaction are also on the 10 highest ranking cities for social mobility, according to a separate survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, D.C.Market Watch June 17, 2014 -
According to Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute, this was the biggest discrepancy since 2007. Her explanation for this? African Americans don’t give up. Yes, African American employment has not recovered at the rate of White employment, but that’s not all.
The other factor to consider, Wilson wrote last month, is that unemployed African Americans are more resilient and less likely to give up their job searches.
Ebony June 17, 2014 -
A study conducted by Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute found that the discrepancy between Black and white unemployment is the highest it has been since 2007, and that Black resiliency is to blame.
Over the past year, without fail, African-American unemployment has exceeded white unemployment by at least 200 percent. In the past two months, the Black unemployment rate was 2.2 times greater than the overall rate.
Researchers say that part of the disparity is a result of African-Americans being “less likely to give up the search for a job than other unemployed workers.”
Explained simply, there are more unemployed Blacks who continue to seek work, stay in the labor force and are labeled as “unemployed.”
“Discouraged workers” aren’t calculated in the unemployment rate. These workers are “those persons not in the labor force who want and are available for work, and who have looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months, but were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”
BET June 17, 2014 -
The average pay for a Starbucks barista is about $8.80 an hour, according to employment site Glassdoor. Store managers earn about $45,000 a year, on average.
Many U.S. workers are struggling to stay ahead, with six out of 10 respondents in a recent CNNMoney poll saying they no longer believe the American dream is achievable. For most Americans, wages either fell or flatlined from 2000 to 2013, according to a recent study from the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
About half of college students fail to finish their degrees because of debt, lack of support or challenges with balancing life and work, Starbucks said in a statement.
Schultz said he had encountered cynicism since announcing the plan, including about the lack of a requirement that employees remain with the company after they graduate.
CBS Moneywatch June 17, 2014 -
That means the pay gap between employees and their bosses continues to widen, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s latest report released Thursday.
Average CEO compensation came in at $15.2 million in 2013, according to the left-leaning think tank. That includes salary, bonus, restricted stock grants, options exercised and long-term incentive payouts for chiefs at the top 350 U.S. firms by sales.
Private-sector, non-supervisory workers, meanwhile, earned an average of $52,100.
CNNMoney June 13, 2014 -
Last month, the unemployment rate for white Americans was 5.4 percent. For black Americans, it was more than twice that, at 11.5. Why?
Writing in The Guardian, Jana Kasperkevic points to a compelling theory advanced by Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute. Black unemployment is high, Wilson suggests, not only because black joblessness is high (for reasons well documented in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent Atlantic cover story), but because black people are more resilient when it comes to sticking to their job search.
The key to understanding Wilson’s point is knowing that unemployment doesn’t measure the number of people who are, well, “unemployed” in a conventional sense of the word—without a job. What the unemployment rate measures is how many people are actively looking for work. If someone gives up on his or her search, he or she is no longer counted as unemployed. In May, Kasperkevic writes, “there were over seven million Americans who want a job but were not counted as part of the labor force.”
The Atlantic June 13, 2014 -
College-educated workers still earn much more than less-educated ones, but landing a good job at rising pay is made even more difficult as each new group of graduates joins a backlog of unemployed and underemployed college and high school graduates, dating back to the class of 2008.
Over the last six years, one of the economy’s biggest problems has been faulty fiscal policy, with the federal government underestimating the need for economic aid or withholding and reducing help prematurely. Another drag has been lack of business investment, even as financial markets have prospered with the help of loose monetary policy.
The New York Times June 13, 2014 -
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Steven G. Cochrane, Moody’s Analytics; Doug Hall, Economic Policy Institute
The New York Times June 12, 2014 -
There has also been a massive exodus from the labor force. Since late 2007, the number of people 16 and over “not in the labor force” has increased by almost 13 million. Studies suggest that at least half of the loss reflects natural causes: older workers retiring; spouses — men and women — staying at home with children. Adding the remaining labor-force dropouts to the officially unemployed would boost the jobless rate to 9.7 percent, estimates the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research and advocacy group.
So the job market straddles good news and bad. The open question is whether the economy is approaching “full employment” — often estimated between 5 percent and 6 percent unemployed — or whether stronger job creation will pull many recent dropouts back into the labor market. If full employment approaches, that could put upward pressure on wages and inflation. But if dropouts re-enter the labor market, the numbers of both the employed and the unemployed might rise.
The Washington Post June 12, 2014