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
Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, says the new provision won’t affect most workers. But studies show about 2 million workers could potentially get fewer hours — and therefore remain without health insurance.
“Workforces that are based on part-time work, a lot of those workers already are not eligible,” Gould says. But, she adds, “to the extent that they have some workers that are working, say, 32 hours a week, are they going to move them down? Absolutely. Those are the workers that are most at risk.”
NPR
April 30, 2013
“Indian companies can advertise and recruit in the U.S. just the way foreign auto companies do. There is plenty of homegrown talent who would be happy to work at a good salary for a company with a future in the United States,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
AP
April 30, 2013
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