Media clips
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The New York Times April 5, 2013
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The NOW panel discusses the late night voting in the Senate on their first budget plan in four years and the wee hour amendments that got added in.
Now with Alex Wagner March 29, 2013 -
In 1995, Princeton economist Paul Krugman developed a simple model to estimate how globalization was affecting the wages of low-skilled workers in the United States. He found there wasn’t much effect at all. Eighteen years later, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute has re-run the numbers with updated data and has come to a strikingly different conclusion.
The Washington Post March 26, 2013 -
Income inequality in the U.S. has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and this study suggests that this recent increase is not going away soon. The incomes of the top 1 percent of households by income spiked 241 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the incomes of the middle fifth grew just 19 percent, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The U.S. has more income inequality than most advanced countries.
The Huffington Post March 26, 2013 -
The fate of workers who earn tips in New York could have national implications as the conversation around the minimum wage continues at the federal level.
ROC United has campaigned for a higher minimum wage for tipped workers on the federal level. Such an increase would affect millions of American workers. As of 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that some 2.3 million Americans were employed as waiters and waitresses alone–and about 73% of tipped workers are women, according to a 2011 report [PDF] by the Economic Policy Institute.
As the Economic Policy Institute points out, “Many tipped workers are unaware that their tips and hourly wages must add up to at least the minimum wage. At the same time, employers are unlikely to ensure that their workers are paid appropriately—it is up to the employees to know and understand this law.”
MSNBC March 26, 2013 -
It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. A September study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline, the EPI calculated.
Time Magazine March 26, 2013 -
Larry Mishel, of the Economic Policy Institute, makes the case from the left against using the chain-weighted CPI to adjust Social Security benefits for inflation, as President Obama proposes in his latest deficit-reduction plan. It’s simply a way to cut benefits, he says. If the goal is a better inflation measure, then develop one tailored to the elderly’s spending patterns. [EPI]
Wall Street Journal March 26, 2013 -
Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said Obama shoulders part of the blame. Since 2010, he said, Obama has spent too much time focused on the debt, including agreeing to significantly shrink domestic spending as part of his own budget proposals.
“I think they brought it on themselves to the extent that they validated the deficit issue,” Mishel said. “It was always the case that the actual budget policy being pursued contradicted the rhetoric in the campaign. Now it’s even worse.”
The Washington Post March 26, 2013 -
The first paragraph of the commentary posted Wednesday on the website of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank founded by, among others, Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, lays out the thrust of the argument pretty succinctly:
“For more than a year, there has been a high-profile debate over what Apple should do with its enormous cash reserve, now amounting to $137 billion. The proposals have been curiously one-dimensional, with a nearly exclusive focus on how the reserves should be used to reward its shareholders. Almost entirely absent from the discussion has been whether those reserves should also be used to provide fairer compensation to the workers making its products abroad or selling its products here. This imbalance is part and parcel of a larger trend: the share of economic rewards going to workers is diminishing.”
Fortune March 22, 2013 -
A larger backlog of EEOC cases could increase the number of workplace discrimination cases which go directly to court. If a workplace discrimination charge goes unheard by the agency for more than 180 days, complainants can request that a “Notice of Right-to-Sue” be issued automatically. However, those cases could still go unheard thanks to a rash of vacancies in the federal courts.
Some of the cases unheard by the EEOC might not even be submitted to the courts in the first place, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former OSHA commissioner.
“They’re hard cases to bring, hard cases to prove,” he said. Plus, “most people can’t afford attorneys to do it.” Instead, they rely on government agencies to “help them assert their rights.”
For complaints about health and safety standards, employees don’t even have the option of going to the courts on their own. Instead, all those complaints must go through OSHA. While that agency hopes to avoid serious reductions in its workload capacity due to the sequester, Eisenbrey said that the status quo at the department is already “completely insufficient.”
“The chance of having an OSHA inspection, if you’re an employer, in any given year is close to zero,” he said. He estimated that there were only about 1,000 inspectors in the agency, compared to seven million employers nationwide.
MSNBC March 22, 2013