Workers across the country experience a “union premium” — an increase in wages for workers who belong to a labor union compared to workers who are not organized. That premium amounted to $1.24 per hour last year, a 17.3 percent premium. And according to a new study from the Economic Policy Institute, union membership is even more important for African American and Latino workers, whose union premiums exceed that of white workers.
Think Progress
September 5, 2012
Race, apparently, is a factor in the unemployment rate of college graduates as well. Figures from the Economic Policy Institute state that, while improving over the last year, the unemployment rate for Black college graduates is still nearly 11 percent, compared to 8.7 percent for white graduates.
BET News
September 5, 2012
From 1948 to 1973, the productivity of all nonfarm workers nearly doubled, as did average hourly compensation. But things changed dramatically starting in the late 1970s. Although productivity increased by 80.1 percent from 1973 to 2011, average wages rose only 4.2 percent and hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose only 10 percent over that time, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
September 4, 2012
The average household income for working families headed by someone under 65 has been on a downhill slide for more than a decade. The data, which can include multiple wage-earners but excludes people living alone, comes from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank whose annual “State of Working America” will be released next week.
“The labor market never really recovered during the 2000s,” said Josh Bivens, the chief labor market economist at EPI. “Unemployment may have reached 4 ½ percent by 2007, but if you look at the employment to population ratio, it never reached its late 1990s peak.”
And that was before households got hammered by the downturn. Average income fell by more than seven percent or nearly $5,000 between 2007 and 2010. Though data for households isn’t available for last year, there’s no way families made up much of that ground with unemployment stuck above 8 percent, Bivens said.
Fiscal Times
September 4, 2012
Josh Bivens looks at stagnant income growth for working-age families. “Median income for working-age families… measures the income of the household that is in the exact center of the income distribution; they have higher income than half of all working-age families and lower income than the other half. The chart focuses on working-age households because they are the ones most affected by the wage stagnation and eroded employment opportunities that have been evident over this decade. The poor labor market performance of the last decade has clearly damaged the incomes of these working-age families. These incomes never recovered their 2000 peak during the recovery and expansion that followed the 2001 recession. They then fell precipitously following the onset of the Great Recession, declining more than 7 percent ($4,926) between 2007 and 2010.”
Wall Street Journal
September 4, 2012
But the remaining 4.7 million jobs and another 5 million that would have been created in an otherwise sound economy mean that the country is operating at a deficit of 9.7 million jobs, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research center.
McClatchy
September 4, 2012
A worker on minimum wage earns $15,080 a year, far below the federal poverty threshold of $19,090 for a family of three. It’s true that the low-wage workforce includes teenagers and people who live in households with other income earners. But a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that fewer than one-third of low-wage earners live in households with incomes over $50,000.
Kansas City Star
September 4, 2012
The winners instead have been the nation’s top 1 percent, who between 1979 and 2007 saw their annual earnings grow 156 percent, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. In 1980, compensation for chief executives at some of the nation’s largest companies was 42 times the pay of the average worker; now it’s more than 300 times.
Tampa Bay Times
September 4, 2012
A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute found that more than a quarter of Americans — 28 percent — would work in low-wage jobs for the next decade. Those jobs pay less than $11.06 an hour, the necessary wage to reach the federal poverty level. Low-wage sectors, EPI found, are growing faster than the overall economy.
Think Progress
September 4, 2012
From the point of view of an economist at a think tank that examines the trends and policies of working people in the U.S., the reasons are simple: “Wealth is in their housing and what they get paid,” explained Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
“They don’t have a lot of dividends,” he continued. “Their wealth is … not in financial assets.”
National Journal
September 4, 2012