Media clips
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In a blog post, Economic Policy Institute analyst David Cooper explored that idea further. He ran the numbers on some other possible indices to which minimum wage could be tied. The chart below shows his work.
Bill Moyers Blog February 26, 2013 -
The statement doesn’t identify how such a bureau would be structured, and the decision ultimately lies with Congress. But a handful of groups have advocated for some version of the idea—notably, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Migration Policy Institute, and the Economic Policy Institute. The chamber wouldn’t comment beyond what was in Thursday’s statement, but the AFL-CIO pointed to an EPI plan as an influence on its 2009 immigration-reform platform. Here’s what that would look like:
Under the EPI plan, a commission would hold a great deal of power over immigration policy. The Foreign Worker Adjustment Commission—proposed in 2009 by EPI’s Ray Marshall—would have the authority to set employment-based immigration levels, subject only to congressional disapproval. FWAC would study labor shortages by looking at regional, demographic, and educational trends to develop its policy suggestions. The top priority, Marshall writes, “is the preservation of U.S. labor standards.” (Brookings advocates for a similar commission, but with a narrower scope. It would provide annual recommendations to Congress and the president, but the recommendations could be ignored.)
The EPI proposal envisions the president wielding a great deal of power over the commission’s structure.
National Journal February 26, 2013 -
And even for the lucky ones who are working, the picture remains bleak. According to the Economic Policy Institute, between 2000 and 2011 wages adjusted for inflation fell by over 11 percent for young high school grads and by 5.4 percent for young college grads.
The Huffington Post February 22, 2013 -
“It’s not as good as a good defined-benefit plan,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, “but better than what they have now.”
She says government guaranteed programs like California’s are a hot topic in the pension community right now. “Everyone’s trying to figure out something workable.”
Los Angeles Times February 22, 2013 -
“It’s a massive drag on the economy. We lost three-quarter million public-sector jobs in the recovery,” said economist Heidi Shierholz of the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute. “We’re still losing government jobs, although the pace has slowed. But we haven’t turned around yet.”
Associated Press February 22, 2013 -
Yet if tech workers are in such short supply, why are so many of them unemployed or underpaid? According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), tech employment rates still haven’t rebounded to pre-recession levels. And from 2001 to 2011, the mean hourly wage for computer programmers didn’t even increase enough to beat inflation.
The ease of hiring H-1B workers certainly hasn’t helped. More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages below those paid to American-born workers for comparable positions, according to EPI. Experts who track labor conditions in the technology sector say that older, more expensive workers are particularly vulnerable to being undercut by their foreign counterparts. “You can be an exact match and never even get a phone call because you are too expensive,” says Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California-Davis. “The minute that they see you’ve got 10 or 15 years of experience, they don’t want you.”
Mother Jones February 22, 2013 -
That would still be below 1968’s level, but it would represent a $5,000-plus raise for close to 30 million workers at or near the minimum today (it would also add $25 billion to gross domestic product, according to the Economic Policy Institute). That bill went nowhere without White House leadership; even a lunch-bucket Democrat like Tom Harkin refused to hold hearings on the idea.
The Washington Post February 8, 2013 -
Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, agrees that the lower educational attainment rate among African-Americans plays a significant role in their current and disproportionately higher unemployment rates.
“As educational attainment increases, unemployment rates decrease,” he said. “Another factor is age. Black workers are somewhat younger than whites, and younger people have higher unemployment rates.”
BET February 8, 2013 -
According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, inflation-adjusted wages for young high school graduates declined by 11.1 percent between 2000 and 2011, and the real wages of young college graduates declined by 5.4 percent. EPI also saw evidence among millennials of a hesitation to seek new employment opportunities, with 30 percent fewer voluntary quits each month.
The Huffington Post February 8, 2013 -
Researchers know a lot about how various factors associated with income level affect a child’s learning: parents’ educational attainment; how parents read to, play with and respond to their children; the quality of early care and early education; access to consistent physical and mental health services and healthy food. Poor children’s limited access to these fundamentals accounts for a good chunk of the achievement gap, which is why conceiving of it instead as an opportunity gap makes a lot more sense.
But we rarely discuss the impact of concentrated poverty—and of racial and socioeconomic segregation—on student achievement. James Coleman’s widely cited 1966 report Equality of Educational Opportunity has drawn substantial attention to the influence of family socioeconomic status on a child’s academic achievement. However, as Richard Kahlenberg, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, notes: “Until very recently, the second finding, about the importance of reducing concentrations of school poverty, has been consciously ignored by policymakers, despite publication of study after study that confirmed Coleman’s findings.”
It’s time that we stop ignoring it. The past few decades have seen increasing income polarization, with the top 1 percent reaping the vast majority of societal gains, the middle class shrinking, and those at the bottom losing ground. As a result, concentrated poverty is more potent and relevant an issue than ever. Add to that the fact that 2012 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of William Julius Wilson’s groundbreaking book, The Truly Disadvantaged, and we have every reason to reexamine the life realities, impacts and policy implications of segregation and entrenched, concentrated US poverty.
The Nation February 8, 2013