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
A report released earlier this summer from the Economic Policy Institute shows a similar picture of economic inequality. Consider that black Americans are still twice as likely as white Americans to be unemployed — exactly the same situation as 50 years ago.
The Week
August 29, 2013
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute says the isolation of socially and economically disadvantaged African-American students is increasing. Black students, according to the report, are more segregated than 40 years ago.
Although Black student achievement has steadily risen during this period, the achievement gap still persists as socio-economic disparities continue to be an obstacle African-Americans face, according to Richard Rothstein, author of “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since: Education and the Unfinished March.”
“The achievement gap persists because the same social and instructional forces that have caused black student achievement to rise have apparently also caused white student achievement to rise,” Rothstein writes.
BET.com
August 29, 2013
1) The black unemployment rate has consistently been twice as high as the white unemployment rate for 50 years:
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that this gap hasn’t closed at all since 1963. Back then, the unemployment rate was 5 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks. Today, it’s 6.6 percent for whites and 12.6 percent for blacks.
The Washington Post
August 29, 2013
The March on Washington had a more formal title at the time: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized labor played a notable role in the event, though it’s perhaps best recalled that the executive board of the AFL-CIO withheld formal support. At the time of the march, in 1963, the unemployment rate for black Americans was 10.9%, more than double the 5% jobless rate among white Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Today, 6.6% of whites and 12.6% of blacks are unemployed.
MarketWatch
August 29, 2013