The days of the unpaid internship may be coming to an end, at least at businesses.
Yesterday, a federal judge in New York ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal and state labor laws when it didn’t pay production interns. Today, the liberal Economic held a press call featuring the lead plaintiff in the case and his lawyer. Their message: If you’re a for-profit enterprise, and you’re not paying your interns, you’re probably violating the law.
“If you’re deriving profit from labor performed in your workplace, why shouldn’t you pay for it?” asked Eric Glatt, the lead plaintiff in the Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Philadelphia Business Journal
June 18, 2013
There are up to 1 million unpaid internships offered in the United States every year, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. He said the number of internships has grown as the economy tumbled and he blamed them for exploiting young workers and driving down wages.
“The return on a college investment has fallen, students are facing higher and higher debt burdens, and the reaction of employers is to make matters worse for them by hiring more and more people without paying them,” Eisenbrey said.
AP
June 18, 2013
Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, said would-be interns would be wise to think twice about agreeing to work without pay, even to get a foot in the door.
“You signal to employers that you aren’t worth that much if you’re willing to work for nothing,” Eisenbrey said.
Reuters
June 18, 2013
The 10 highest-paid chief executive officers running Wisconsin public companies scored an average pay increase of 31% last year, bringing their average compensation up to $10.5 million. Meanwhile, pay for the typical worker in the state increased 2.37%.
Bottom line: The top 10 Wisconsin CEOs made, on average, 251 times more than Joe Average did last year.
“We’ve built an economy where these guys are doing well when everybody else doesn’t do well,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank. “There’s something wrong with that.”
…
Nationally, estimates of the gap between CEOs and average workers vary greatly, and they are based on the compensation of CEOs only at large companies. The Economic Policy Institute estimates it at more than 200 times. The AFL-CIO says the typical CEO made 354 times more than the average worker last year.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
June 18, 2013
Several months after it officially kicked in, sequestration is far from the hottest story coming out of Washington. Naturally enough, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is getting lots of attention, even if final passage of an actual bill seems pretty remote. But sequestration hasn’t simply dissipated into thin air. In fact, a new paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released yesterday tries to show exactly how the impact of the “automatic” budget cuts has played out on a state-by-state basis.
Education Week
June 18, 2013
Here’s a remarkable chart from EPI. Actually, no: strike that. It’s true that in a normal world it would be remarkable, but in the world we live in it’s actually totally unsurprising. It illustrates the rise in income inequality over the past three decades (top dark blue line), and as you can see, it’s been rising steadily. Totally unsurprising.
Mother Jones
June 18, 2013
Raising taxes on the rich often gets proposed as a way of combating the rise of financial inequality. But how important is tax policy, really?
Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation, has a new paper out of EPI that does a great job of illustrating the limits of tax policy in this area.
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:
Daily Kos
June 18, 2013
The U.S. jobs picture is bleaker than the most recent jobs reports may make you think. The economy added 175,000 jobs last month, but at the rate things are going, it would take almost a decade to get back to prerecession employment levels. A Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics digs in on the bad news: The number of job openings in the U.S. actually fell by 118,000 in April to 3.8 million.
How bad can 3.8 million job openings be? The Economic Policy Institute looks at the number and sees that “the main problem in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings.” To bolster this point, they put forward this chart:
National Journal
June 18, 2013
There’s nothing new or surprising about this chart from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. It’s just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in very bad shape — despite recent improvements:
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013