The recession was especially tough for low-wage earners, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Low-wage workers are “replaceable, essentially,” she said. They “need a tight labor market to negotiate for higher wages.”
Des Moines Register
October 15, 2012
As the Economic Policy Institute points out in the latest edition of The State of Working America, “Productivity grew 80.4 percent between 1973 and 2011, when, as noted, median worker pay grew just 10.7 percent.” However you feel about President Obama’s economic policies, they are unlikely to have done very much damage to the wages of workers in the 70s. Instead, wages have suffered in thanks in large part to policies which the Republican Party still vigorously supports: namely, keeping the minimum wage low and suppressing the power of unions.
MSNBC
October 12, 2012
By spurring Congress to immediately pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the president turned around that employment plunge and “kept our economy from swerving over the cliff,” according to Rebecca Thiess, a policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.
NPR
October 12, 2012
Claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics published phony numbers on employment last week are a bad joke, but some might want to know why the two pieces of the BLS picture didn’t appear to match. Lawrence Mishel goes through the numbers carefully, and shows why it happened.
The Washington Post
October 12, 2012
For most households, the home part of the equation matters most, as only about half of all households own any stocks and just over 30 percent have holdings of $10,000 or more, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Research by Heidi Shierholz, an economist at EPI, has shown that “since 1989, the top fifth of households consistently held about 90 percent of stock wealth, leaving approximately 10 percent for the bottom four-fifths of households.”
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
October 11, 2012
The “fiscal cliff” is, at its heart, a collision between these two priorities. We can let the Bush tax cuts and the payroll tax cut expire, and we can let the automatic spending cuts hit, and the deficit problem is pretty much solved. Unfortunately, we will likely have thrown the economy back into recession.
Conversely, if we just kick everything down the road, that’s better for the recovery, but it means we’ve made no progress on the debt, and if you believe in the confidence fairy, she’s not coming because we haven’t given anyone any reason to be confident in our political system or the future shape of their tax burden.
EPI’s take on this is optimistic: The good news, they argue, is that if you look at the various components of the fiscal cliff separately, you’ll see that the parts that do the most for deficit reduction do the least for the recovery, and vice versa. This suggests an “a la carte” approach to the fiscal cliff, in which we extend the most stimulative policies and wave goodbye to the most costly policies.
The Washington Post
October 11, 2012
There were 3.1 million “green jobs” in the US as of November 2011. Green jobs are growing faster than overall job growth in the US. They pay well, and there’s an increasingly wide range of them accessible to Americans of every level of education and experience, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s “
Counting up to green” analysis of the Labor Dept. Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) groundbreaking
Green Jobs report, which was released Sept. 28.
Clean Technica (
http://s.tt/1pKqJ)
Clean Technica
October 11, 2012
At the end of 2011, white median wealth was 44.5 times higher than black median wealth, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
ColorLines
October 11, 2012
“We’re in a goddamn recession and it’s hurting people,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Although technically our economy is no longer in a recession and is growing slowly, Mishel says the labor market is still dealing with its lasting and permanent impact.
“The weight of unemployment depresses wage and benefit growth for everybody. That has a much greater impact on low-income households and minorities,” said Mishel.
ABC News
October 10, 2012
“The data suggest that at least we’re not shedding a lot of teacher jobs any more. That’s a really nice first step, but there’s still so much to make up,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
Considering public schools were slashing jobs in the four years leading up to July, the recent gains are hardly enough to bridge the gap.
Over that time period, enrollment in public schools was projected to grow by about 377,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
To keep up, schools would have had to hire about 62,000 workers, Shierholz estimates. Instead, they laid off about 315,000.
CNNMoney
October 10, 2012