Media clips
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The year started off strong in January and February with rising job creation numbers, but slowed sharply in March with only 88,000 jobs added.
Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the Economic Policy Institute, said the report shows that the economy “is growing just above stall-speed.” He said the pace of expansion of the economy is only enough to reduce unemployment slowly.
The Hill April 30, 2013 -
A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.
The Washington Post April 30, 2013 -
A new report, released last week, suggests that DC Public Schools’ much lauded reform efforts are still failing to produce positive results for DC’s students. Despite changesfirst championed by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee and now by Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the report isn’t pretty: There was little progress in test scores, costly school closures made capacity problems worse and sent students to poorer-performing schools, restrictive evaluations led to higher turnover of teachers, and racial gaps in achievement grew.
Elaine Weiss, the National Coordinator who wrote the report for theBroader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, said that“instead of continuing Rhee’s reforms, the District should address health and other problems that lead to truancy, and it should make sure the quality of teachers in Anacostia are just as good as those in Chevy Chase”.
The Washington Post April 30, 2013 -
The Senate’s current immigration bill would grant their wish. As written, it vastly increases the annual limit on H1-B visas, which allow corporations to bring employees with a bachelor’s degree to the U.S. from overseas for up to six years. Roughly half the guest workers who currently arrive through the program come for computer-related jobs. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that he was forming a political action group to back the reform effort, it was in part seen as a move to ensure that the H1-B provision would make it to President Obama’s desk intact.
There’s just one problem. That whole skills shortage? It’s a myth, as was amply illustrated (yet again) by a report this week from the Economic Policy Institute. It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren’t any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.
The Atlantic April 30, 2013 -
A briefing paper issued last week by the progressive Economic Policy Institute noted that under the Gang of Eight H-1B cap increase half of all IT jobs requiring a college degree would go to guest workers.
“What are the consequences of having that much of an occupation taken up by these temporary workers?” said Ross Eisenbrey, EPI’s executive vice president. “The conclusion is it does lead to lower salaries. And when salaries are depressed, it leads to U.S. workers and students being turned off from those fields.”
The Fiscal Times April 30, 2013 -
U.S. colleges now graduate 50 percent more students with degrees in computer and information science and engineering than get hired into those fields each year, according to the findings of a report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute. The co-authors offer what amounts to a counterintuitive take on a legislative hot potato. Even as tech CEOs continue to press legislators to let high-skill — and generally lower-cost — guest workers in the country, the report argues that the U.S. labor market already has a surfeit of Americans with skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the so-called STEM labor market — even as U.S. companies continue to source temporary talent from abroad.
“We really already accept a generous number of these types of migrants,” said co-author and Georgetown professor B. Lindsay Lowell. “You can talk a long time about what temporary status means and the implications for the workers and for the workforce generally and for our economy. I don’t think the argument here is that foreign workers aren’t good or they’re not productive. I think the argument is yeah, I think we want foreign workers and want our employers access to them. But the question is in what amount and is more better? And unfortunately, I think a lot of people conflate the obvious difficulties in making the system work, the kind of bottlenecks that we have in the visa system with numbers…
“You have to really sit back and ask a little bit, especially after having been presented with the facts about domestic supply if you believe in the law of supply and demand, at what point is more, better. and how much more. I think those are the tough questions we need to ask.”
Noted fellow study co-author and Rutgers professor Hal Salzman:
“There’s just a large supply of STEM graduates,” he said. “You can’t just see in the numbers a failure of various colleges and universities to produce a sufficient supply.”
CNET April 30, 2013 -
“Too often, OIRA has been the place that regulations, even those whose measured benefits far outweighed the costs, went to die,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of Economic Policy Institute. “The next administrator should respect the agencies’ expertise and help them fulfill their statutory missions, not impede them. OIRA is not a super-agency or the handmaiden of industry, and it should never act that way.”
The Hill April 30, 2013 -
Similarly, independent observers have given low marks to Apple and Reebok’s purported attempts to democratize their affiliated factories in China.
Economics Policy Institute vice president Ross Eisenbrey, a dogged critic of labor conditions in the Chinese Foxconn factories where Apple and other major hardware companies have their products built, compared the Bangladeshi building collapse to the recent fertilizer plant explosionin West, Texas.
“If you think we can rely on businesses to self-regulate, think again,” he wrote. “West Fertilizer, the small business that blew up and killed fourteen people in Texas last week, declared itself safe and estimated the chance of a catastrophic explosion at zero. They needed someone with authority and the power to change behavior to look over their shoulder, to look out for the workers and first responders who were most at risk, and to look out for the school children whose schools were within the blast radius. But no agency had or exercised that authority.”
MSNBC April 30, 2013 -
One of my more heterodox political views is that advocacy groups do themselves a disservice by adopting BS rhetoric that simply sounds good, because they leave themselves excessively vulnerable to attack. A great illustration comes today from an Economic Policy Institute study from Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and Lindsay Lowell that shows pretty persuasively that there’s no real “shortage” of STEM workers in the American economy. They look at this through a variety of lenses, but the key one is simply that you’re not seeing big wage gains for STEM workers of the sort that a shortage would cause. And since a lot of the rhetoric around H1-B visas for highly skilled guestworkers has focused on an alleged shortage, this kind of research constitutes a big blow to that whole frame.
Slate April 26, 2013 -
President Obama has said that improving STEM education is one of his top priorities. Chief executives regularly come through Washington complaining that they can’t find qualified American workers for openings at their firms that require a science background. And armed with this argument in the debate over immigration policy, lobbyists are pushing hard formore temporary work visas, known as H-1Bs, which they say are needed to make up for the lack of Americans with STEM skills.
But not everyone agrees. A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth.
The Washington Post April 26, 2013