Media clips
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The class of 2014 is graduating into a job market that might charitably be described as a disaster.
NEARLY 17 PERCENT OF 2014 GRADS WILL BE UNDEREMPLOYED
There’s plenty of evidence on this point, as several commentators have pointed out. The class of 2014 will emerge into an economy with a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, and new grads’ prospects will be even worse than that. Young college graduates face a jobless rate of 8.5 percent, according to recent data from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington, DC-based think tank.
Not only that, but EPI finds that 16.8 percent will be underemployed, meaning they will either be working part-time despite wanting full-time work, or they will have stopped looking for work despite wanting a job (this is what is called the U-6 unemployment rate in the monthly jobs report).
VOX May 13, 2014 -
Bloomberg May 12, 2014
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 12, 2014
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The visit to the Mountain View, Calif., Wal-Mart underscores Mr. Obama’s complex relationship with the nation’s biggest retailer, accused alternately by Mr. Obama and his political allies of offering substandard wages and inadequate health-care, but also praised for hiring veterans, selling healthy food and embracing solar power.
“I want to thank the folks at Wal-Mart,” Mr. Obama said Friday at an event to highlight the administration’s climate change agenda. “Because more and more companies like Walmart are realizing that wasting less energy isn’t just good for the planet, it’s good for business. It’s good for the bottom line.”
The contrasting views may simply reflect Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s size. With about 1.3 million employees at more than 4,800 U.S. stores and clubs, and more than $473 billion in world-wide net sales last year, the company is simply too big to ignore. Wal-Mart’s corporate decisions can also ripple through the country.
“Whenever it comes to the issue of the day, whether it’s labor or energy, you can’t ignore what they are doing because they have a measurable effect on the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal May 12, 2014 -
The top graph is embedded from an article by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz for Economic Policy Institute. I found it in an article by Lydia Depillis on Wonkblog, which is a column of The Washington Post. The visual with the cartoon people was made by yours truly using numbers from the same Economic Policy Institute article and images from Thinkstock. Thumbnail photo of dear ol’ Donald via Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license.
Upworthy May 12, 2014 -
1. My pay is rising much faster than yours.
While American workers grapple with stagnant wages and an uncertain job market, there’s one group that doesn’t need to worry about pay raises: CEOs.
At the country’s largest 350 companies by revenue, average CEO compensation — including salary and the value of stock options exercised — was $14.1 million in 2012, up nearly 13% since 2011 and 37% since 2009, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute , a think tank in Washington, D.C.
MarketWatch May 12, 2014 -
As Republicans stonewall President Obama’s initiative to raise the federal minimum wage from$7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour by 2016, some state lawmakers have taken the matter into their own hands, passing legislation that increases the salaries for America’s most vulnerable workers. But there’s one group that is still largely left out of the minimum wage battle: people who work for tips.
As it stands, only seven states require employers to pay tipped workers the same minimum wage as nontipped workers. The federal minimum wage for the latter is $7.25, but the federal minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnate at $2.13 since 1991, with no adjustment for inflation. Employers are supposed to make up the difference if tipped workers aren’t earning the regular minimum wage through their tips, but it doesn’t always happen. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found in 2011 that tipped workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to fall under the federal poverty line.
The Minimum Wage Fairness Act, which Obama endorsed, would have gradually raised tipped workers’ minimum wage to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage. But the bill has faced steep opposition from Republicans and the restaurant lobby. According to Open Secrets, the National Restaurant Association, which opposed the minimum-wage hike, spent more than $2.2 million on lobbying last year.
Mother Jones May 12, 2014 -
The short story is that wealth inequality is growing right along with income inequality, especially at the very top. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in the early 1960s, the wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S. had 125 times the wealth of a median household. In 2010, that ratio had doubled, reaching 288 to 1.
It’s worth noting that data on wealth and wealth inequality is harder to come by than data on incomes. The census measures income, not wealth. Tax returns don’t paint a full picture of a person’s net holdings. Surveys like the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances have trouble capturing the super-rich.
Part of what makes the work of Thomas Piketty and his colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman so ground-breaking is that they have developed new ways to measure private wealth and wealth inequality over time. Their method involves taking tax returns, which record the income generated from assets (in dividends, interest payments or rental income), and teasing out the underlying value of those assets.
Marketplace May 12, 2014 -
Here is the situation in two graphs.
The first graph shows the “college premium,” which is basically the percentage difference between the pay of college grads and high school grads. The graph is widely misinterpreted — by students and parents — to mean that wages for college-educated workers go nowhere but up.
I asked the Economic Policy Institute to annotate the graph to show how much of the premium is from real wage gains for college grads, and how much is from wage declines for high school grads. In the 1980s and 1990s, college grads strongly outpaced high school grads. But since then, the better pay performance of college grads is due to high school students losing ground, not to college grads pulling ahead.
The New York Times May 12, 2014 -
You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recentchartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.
Slate May 9, 2014