Media clips
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The 77-cent figure “only answers one very specific question—annual earnings for women versus men,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. What most people want to know is how much women and men earn when they are working side by side for the same work, she said. “That’s not answered by the 77 cents.”
Wall Street Journal April 14, 2014 -
Concentrated poverty and racial segregation in American cities are tremendously knotty problems, problems inherited across generations that are hard to solve for unspoken reasons of politics and history and race.
But here is one fairly simple truth that we need to acknowledge — but seldom do — to create any kind of sustainable policy solutions, whether they take the form of housing vouchers or pre-K education or “promise neighborhoods”: “When it comes to housing and race,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “there really is no such thing as chance or accident.”
She was speaking this week at a discussion on concentrated neighborhood poverty hosted by the Economic Policy Institute. And what she means by this is that suburbs didn’t become predominantly white and upper income thanks solely to market forces and consumer preferences. Inner city neighborhoods didn’t become home to poor minority communities purely through the random choices of minorities to live there. Economic and racial segregation didn’t just arise out of the decisions of millions of families to settle, by chance, here instead of there.
The Washington Post April 14, 2014 -
Strong countries need a thriving middle class, but in America today, the people who have to work for a living are getting squeezed. Republicans in Congress are poised to vote this week on a plan to make it even worse, selling out the middle class to enrich the already rich.
With their latest budget, Republicans are stacking the deck for special interests — and whether you’re a student, parent, commuter or senior citizen, Republicans will force you to pick up the costs so that special interests get their tax breaks.
In Washington, too many people speak in vague hyperbole. So let’s look at the numbers in the GOP budget and see exactly how its priorities would affect real Americans. Many economists predict that this budget will lead to a loss of more than 3 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN April 10, 2014 -
I didn’t hire anyone for the recession Heidi Shierholz is an economist with the economic policy Institute she says businesses still aren’t seeing it on demand so they don’t need to hire someone to write right now and and not really people out there and hope I’m an ardent players to get a really great worker for really cheap which suspect why people aren’t too hot to quit their job even if they find another one they’re not going to get much of a raise by switching to New York possibly been a short summer place if you’re looking for a job or thinking about quitting the one you have let us know or collecting your stories Cirencester website marketplace . or try continuing with the general threat of jobs and who has and there is a big brouhaha going on in tech Google Apple Intel a bunch of others or wrapped up in a class-action lawsuit employee’s are claiming the companies agreed not to poach talent from one another and as a result they workers bettors are missing nine billion dollars in lost wages this quick cam fixed from the Jindal Stout is that the Markkula Center for applied ethics at Santa Clara University anything you exactly how much money in wages was lost with the lawyers came to presenting e-mails discovered bring a lawsuit help us connect the dots in an e-mail and I will edit out all weird sort . removal of all try harder for French software engineers who had
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Marketplace April 10, 2014 -
The Pew Research Center last year found that women earned 84 percent of what men earned in its study of the hourly wages of all workers, including those who work part time. Similarly, a 2013 review by the Economic Policy Institute of annual hourly wages for men and women with college degrees, including salaried and hourly workers, found that the men earned on average $33.71 per hour and the women just $25.35 an hour.
The New York Times April 10, 2014 -
(Also in The Herald Business, Inside Bay Area)
Just a few days ago, representatives from Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and other Bay Area companies met with about 65 members of Congress to discuss H-1B and related issues, Lam said. Most of the lawmakers they talked to were in the House, she said, since the Senate already has passed a bill, which besides reforming various aspects of immigration law would increase the number of visas to between 115,000 and 180,000 a year, depending on economic factors.But immigration reform has faced a more difficult road in the Republican-controlled House and critics of the proposed H-1B expansion contend it would be detrimental to U.S.-born workers.
“It undercuts the American labor market,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor and immigration expert at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, citing studies that have found many firms pay their H-1B workers extremely low pay. “It reduces wages and job opportunities for Americans. It reduces our standard of living. So it’s a bad idea.”
Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, agreed, and said he sees “a very, very small chance” of Congress expanding the program this year.
Bloomberg Businesweek April 8, 2014 -
This current reality clashes with our own recent past. For three decades following World War II, wages rose in tandem with increases in productivity — that was the essence of the old “Social Contract.” But in the 30 years since 1980, earnings have essentially flatlined: While the productivity of American workers grew by a healthy 80%, family income grew by only about 10%, and average hourly wages inched up by about 6%.
The first decade of this century — sometimes called “the lost decade” — has been even worse. Real wages (wages adjusted for increases in the cost of living) either declined or did not increase for high school or college graduates. Only those at the top of the occupational ladder with advanced degrees experienced modest wage growth. The “Occupy” movement had its facts right: Most of the income growth went to the top 1% or less of the population. America is now suffering from the highest level of income inequality of any time since the 1920s.
CNNMoney April 8, 2014 -
The figure below, using numbers developed by the economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, shows where we are compared with where we should be (the figure uses total payrolls, including government). The gap between the two lines last month amounts to over seven million jobs; that’s how many jobs short we are in the labor market once you adjust for the fact that just by dint of population growth, there are a lot more people who need work.
So sure, March posted decent job gains, and as the figure shows, we’re slowly catching up to the trend line. But the operative word there, especially for policy makers, is “slowly.”The New York Times April 8, 2014 -
“Where we have not had as much job growth is in the public sector because of cuts in education, public safety and the rest. So that is a place where there still is a gap, and that is a reflection of the policy that is there,” Pelosi said.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the numbers may have political or psychological value, but not much else. There are still nearly 3 million more unemployed people than when the recession started.
“I cannot think of anything economically meaningful about passing the December 2007 employment level,” Shierholz said.
The Huffington Post April 8, 2014 -
It’s the million-worker mystery.
A large chunk of American adults are no longer in the labor force. That has left economists divided over how many of them are voluntarily not working — or even looking for work — because they wanted to retire, go to school or take care of family members, versus how many have been forced out because they couldn’t find a job.
“Almost everyone who’s looked rigorously at the numbers thinks both of those things are going on,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
What they can’t agree on is what is more prevalent — leaving the workplace on purpose, or getting left out even as the economy improves.
The distinction is important because it would help economists understand whether the job market is on its way to a healthy recovery, or whether the current unemployment rate of 6.7 percent vastly underestimates how many Americans actually need a job.
NBC News April 8, 2014