At the current rate of job growth, “it will take more than five years to return to the prerecession unemployment rate,” according to a note from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. But the shape of the recovery matters just as much as the pace, and that’s where BLS indicators become even more alarming. As the United States plods its way out of recession, it appears to be completing its transformation into a McJobs economy.
MSNBC
May 7, 2013
Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says the hiring data suggests that some industries may have a skills gap, but the overall labor market has a different problem.
“It’s just that we don’t have demand for work to be done,” she says. “What you find is that unemployed workers vastly outnumber job openings in every single industry.”
Marketplace
May 7, 2013
Account for population growth, and the jobs ditch is even deeper: Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, says the economy needs to add 8.6 million jobs, not 2.6 million, to keep up with a rising population.
AP
May 7, 2013
This hits home in Minneapolis, where black unemployment was estimated at 27 percent in 2011 by the Economic Policy Institute. Also, home prices in three of the city’s poorest sections — Camden, Near North, and Phillips — remain more than 60 percent below their pre-recession highs, according to the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors. Homes in north Minneapolis routinely are worth a third or a fourth of what people paid for them in 2005.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
May 1, 2013
Algernon Austin, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, said that taken together, the difference between unemployment rates between different racial groups and their median incomes was just as big a contributing factor to the wealth gap as housing. The black unemployment rate has stayed north of 13 percent since the recession began, and many researchers say the number might be much higher.
NPR
May 1, 2013
Because most companies don’t disclose average worker pay, the CEO compensation was divided by an estimate of industry-specific rank-and-file employee compensation calculated from government data. The methodology is based on one developed by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute for a 2012 study that focused on aggregate trends, not company-specific findings.
Bloomberg
May 1, 2013
As The Guardian noted, American CEOs saw their pay jump 15% in 2011 after climbing 28% the year before. Not only did worker wages drop 2% in 2011, according to the Labor Department, but the Economic Policy Institute says CEO pay leaped 725% from 1978 to 2011 while worker pay rose just 5.7%. As The Huffington Post points out, CEOs continue to see their pay climb at three times the rate of those they employ.
MSN Money
May 1, 2013
That’s the argument made by Jordan Weissman, an associate editor for The Atlantic, in a post appearing on Quartz recently. In it, Weissman rounds up new and existing research to show that actually the US is producing plenty of grads in necessary technical fields. He writes:
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.
Women 2.0
May 1, 2013
That’s according to the graph below from Economic Policy Institute’s recent report on America’s supply of science and tech talent. Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan. On math, we have a bit less to be proud of — we just claimed 14 percent of the high-performers, compared to 15.2 percent for Japan and 16.2 percent of South Korea.
The Atlantic
May 1, 2013
In a companion post to this feud, economist Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that non-inevitable workforce dropouts represent three-quarters of the decline in participation since the end of the recession. That’s about 4.4 million workers, by her calculations. In a follow-up e-mail, Shierholz draws on historical Labor Department estimates of participation rates given the nation’s demographic trends and calculates that another 3.7 million workers went non-inevitably missing from the labor force in the decade before the recession. That’s 8 million people, if you’re scoring at home.
The Washington Post
May 1, 2013