Media clips
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EPI Research Associate Gordon Lafer describes the implications of his latest paper in The Nation, saying, “None of this comes from individual legislators. . . . This is coordinated and national.”
The Nation November 1, 2013 -
There are plenty of problems in public education, but here’s the biggest, from Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute that recognizes the impact of social and economic disadvantage on many schools and students, and works to better the conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn.
The Washington Post November 1, 2013 -
For women, the good news is that, according to the latest payrolls data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs held by women is now higher than when the Great Recession officially began nearly six years ago, in December of 2007.
But the bad news is that while some women have certainly scored good jobs, others are struggling with positions that are low-paid, part-time or temporary, and perhaps lacking benefits. Economists say that’s partly because the sectors that have seen some of the strongest jobs gains amid the tepid economic recovery, such as leisure and hospitality, tend not to pay that well.
“It’s the low-wage industries that are disproportionately growing right now,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News November 1, 2013 -
Last year, Tennessee school teachers lost their collective bargaining rights. So did municipal workers in Oklahoma. And farm workers and childcare providers in Maine. Research assistants in Michigan, too.
These attacks on labor were not isolated instances of ideological union-busting, according to areport released today by the Economic Policy Institute. The study traces the rise of a broad and coordinated campaign, fueled by corporate cash and conservative state legislators, to strip workers in both public and private sectors of their rights.The Nation November 1, 2013 -
“People in any given place, if they’re dealing with a minimum wage repeal in New Hampshire or something, mostly experience that as if it comes from a particular legislator in their state, and it’s explained as a response to the conditions in their state,” report author Gordon Lafer told Salon. “So when you put all the pieces together over the 50 states, one of the things you see is how concerted an effort it is, and how cookie-cutter the legislation is – and how much it’s not being driven by individual legislators, but by a national corporate lobby.” Lafer, a University of Oregon political economist who’s served as a policy adviser in the U.S. House, wrote the paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based progressive think tank whose funders have included foundations and unions.
Salon November 1, 2013 -
Rules have been enacted to prevent minimum wage hikes and mandated paid sick leave, while others have made it harder to recover unpaid wages or collect unemployment benefits.
“This is coordinated and national,” the report’s author, University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, said during a Thursday morning panel unveiling the report. It was produced for the Economic Policy Institute, which focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers, and where Lafer is a research associate. (Disclaimer: I moderated Thursday’s panel.)
The paper explores a series of free-market policies pursued or enacted in 2011 and 2012. Four states limited the minimum wage or at least to whom it applied, another four made it easier for children to work and 16 imposed new limits on unemployment benefits.
The Washington Post November 1, 2013 -
–Teacher Gap: Heidi Shierholz notes that despite more students, the U.S. has fewer teachers. “Of the decline in public-sector employment in the last five years, around 40 percent (258,000) is in local government education, which largely consists of jobs in public K–12 education (the majority of which are teachers, but also included are teacher aides, guidance counselors, and administrators, among others). Over the same period, public K–12 enrollment increased by 1.6 percent. Just to keep up with this growth in the student population, employment in local public education should have grown at roughly the same rate, which would have meant adding 132,000 jobs. Putting these numbers together (i.e., what was lost plus what should have been added to keep up with the expanding student population) means that the total jobs gap in local public education as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath is around 389,000 jobs, as shown in the figure below.”
Wall Street Journal October 25, 2013 -
For high-income countries, an inverse correlation exists between the willingness to admit foreign guestworkers and the level of rights such workers are granted, speakers said Oct. 21 at an event sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute.
As such, restricting at least some guestworker rights could lead wealthy countries to be more open to admitting guestworkers, they said.
The discussion centered on the findings of “The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration,” a book by Martin Ruhs, an Oxford University professor who also is a researcher for the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society and a member of the U.K. Migration Advisory Committee.
Ruhs said he focused on the “tension” between countries’ openness to admitting greater numbers of guestworkers and granting rights to those guestworkers—with greater admission tending to lead to fewer rights for the foreign workers.
The author said he examined the relationship among the “three fundamental questions” countries must answer in determining immigration policy: how many guestworkers to admit; what types to admit; and what rights to provide when they arrive.
Bloomberg BNA October 24, 2013 -
It’s a genuinely bare-bones budget. It takes a wage of nearly $12 an hour earned by 1 2/3 full-time workers to reach an income of $40,000 a year for a family with two adults and two children. More than 50 million workers receive less than that pay or are unemployed and trying to find work.
To be sure, there have been increases in wages over the years, but they have gone mostly to the very top. Even for the American worker right in the middle, pay has risen by barely 10% in real terms over the last 40 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Contrast that with the near tripling of pay for the top 1%.
Los Angeles Times October 24, 2013 -
The right has long had a set of institutions that serve a similar role. The best known of these is the Heritage Foundation, which after its establishment in 1973 helped craft the conservative policy revolution that started with the election Ronald Reagan and crested, finally, during the presidency of George W. Bush. Heritage served multiple roles during that span—as an incubator of ideas, a supplier of arguments, and a source of talent. The brains and money behind Heritage saw the think-tank as an antidote to the prevailing liberal consensus in Washington, as put forth by places like the Brookings Institution (and academia generally) and reinforced by the New York Times(and rest of the media establishment). But there was a certain irony in this mandate: Whatever the ideological sympathies of these supposedly liberal institutions, or the people within them, they were not avowedly political organizations. On the contrary, they strove to maintain—and, I would argue, succeeded in maintaining—a strict posture of non-partisanship and even non-ideology. Other think-tanks and organizations had more clearly progressive outlooks, but even they tended to be heavily analytical and/or narrowly focused. They did invaluable work. (The Economic Policy Institute‘s annual State of Working America may be the single most important non-government report on inequality.) But one niche remained unfilled.
The New Republic October 24, 2013