The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank known for its liberal bent, said that full-time minimum wage workers in the industry earn $15,080 a year.
The 1 million people working as restaurant cooks last year made $11.20 an hour on average, earning $23,300 over the year, according to the Labor Department. California, Texas and New York are among the states with the highest concentrations of such workers.
Los Angeles Times
June 28, 2013
It’s not really surprising to learn that full-time restaurant employees making minimum wage aren’t doing too great. What is surprising—and reasonably jaw-dropping—is just how much more money CEOs at the largest restaurant companies made in 2012 than those employees.
A new study from the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey shows that a minimum-wage employee makes in a full year much less than an average top restaurant CEO makes in one day. The actual numbers: A full-time minimum-wage employee made $15,080 in 2012. The average top restaurant CEO earned $11,884,000. That’s 788 times as much as a minimum wage employee made.
National Journal
June 28, 2013
Plenty of pundits have responded to Mankiw’s thesis, but none more effectively than Josh Bivens and Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, who also contributed a paper to the special issue of the JEP.
It turns out that it’s not so much what you know, as Mankiw argues, but how much power you have, especially the power to extract economic rents. Bivens and Mishel show that the increase in the incomes of the top 1% over the past 30 years owes more to successful rent-seeking than it does to efficient and competitive markets rewarding education and skills.
MarketWatch
June 28, 2013
Studies have found that American students are disproportionately disadvantaged, compared with those of high-performing nations on international tests.
The New York Times
June 27, 2013
Between 1979 and 2009, the top 1% of Americans saw their income grow by 240.5%, while the bottom 20% only say a 10.8% increase in gains. Reducing the inequality could significantly alter the economy, said Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist, Sunday on Weekends with Alex Witt.
Bernstein said that yes, manufacturing is highly productive and causes overall economic growth but robotics take jobs away from people. The Economic Policy Institute reminds us that “you can have all the growth you want but if it’s not equitably distributed then a lot of families end up falling behind even as the economy improves,” he says.
MSNBC.com
June 27, 2013
While the Great Recession and recovery brought the importance of savings to the forefront — for everyone, not just the poor — persistent unemployment and stagnant wages have made it difficult for Americans to put any money away. Low- and middle-income Americans were hit harder by the recession and slow recovery than their wealthy counterparts. The annual wages of the bottom 90 percent of workers declined between 2009 and 2011, according to a January analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The wages of the top one percent rose 8.2 percent during the same period.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013
But one chart, produced on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, blows away this argument, too. It tracks the income advantage of the college-educated against the income advantage of the top 1 percent of earners.
If Mankiw’s claim is correct, then these two lines should track each other closely. But they don’t. (Story continues below chart.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013
The bottom line is that working families are paying the price for America’s neglect of basic wage standards. The decline in the minimum wage accounts for more than half of the inequality that has emerged between the lowest-paid workers and those in the middle over the past 30 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
June 27, 2013
“The question is, ‘Is this person an employee?’ If they’re doing work for the benefit of the employer, they are,” Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute think-tank in Washington, told ABCNews.com. “Instead, these [internship programs] are finding a way to get young people to work for nothing, and that’s not going to satisfy the law.”
Eisenbrey said the U.S. Department of Labor raised the profile of unpaid internship issues three years ago when it published a fact sheet that listed guidelines for employers to decide whether interns must be paid minimum wage and overtime in the for-profit, private sector.
ABC News
June 27, 2013
The average CEO makes hundreds of times what the average worker makes. And the average CEO probably didn’t earn it all.
The average chief executive of one of the 350 biggest U.S. companies made about $14.07 million in 2012, including exercised stock options, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. In contrast, the average national pay for a non-supervisory worker was $51,200 last year. That means that in a typical top-350 company, the CEO made 273 times more than worker drones, by the EPI’s estimate.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013