The New York Times
May 2, 2012
The 99 percent are extremely productive workers, but aren’t compensated for their productivity. While productivity has been on the rise among workers, average wage and compensation has remained nearly flat. That means while workers are producing more, they’re being compensated the same. This chart from the Economic Policy Institute details the change:
Think Progress
May 2, 2012
Josh Bivens says that the United Kingdom’s double-dip recession is proof austerity doesn’t work.
The New York Times
May 1, 2012
Larry Mishel has a systematic breakdown of the reasons for worker income stagnation since 1973. He starts with the familiar divergence: productivity up 80 percent, the compensation (including benefits) of the median worker up only 11 percent. Where did the productivity go?
The answer is, it’s two-thirds the inequality, stupid. One third of the difference is due to a technical issue involving price indexes. The rest, however, reflects a shift of income from labor to capital and, within that, a shift of labor income to the top and away from the middle.
The New York Times
April 30, 2012
“The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay between CEOs of the S&P 500 Index companies and U.S. workers widened to 380 times in 2011 from 343 times in 2010,” the site notes. “Back in 1980, the average large company CEO only received 42 times the average worker’s pay.” In 2005, the average U.S. CEO made 262 times as much as the average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Protesters with the “99 Percent” movement this week disrupted the shareholder meeting of another U.S corporate giant, General Electric, with chants of “pay your fair share.” That meeting was held at the Renaissance Center in Detroit – the same building that’s home to GM’s headquarters. Akerson should understand that it might not take much for him and his company to get similar treatment.
The Fiscal Times
April 30, 2012
The drop from January to March was largely thanks to a slump in government spending. That alone shaved 0.6 points of GDP.
“The U.S. economy is clearly expanding, but just as clearly it’s expanding at a rate that is too slow to put reliable, significant downward pressure on joblessness,” said Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute.
Industry Week
April 30, 2012
Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said things are “expanding at a rate that is too slow to put reliable, significant downward pressure on joblessness.”
And Bivens predicted that growth will likely continue to decelerate as the government spending is trimmed.
“The surest way to boost near-term growth to pull down the unemployment rate remains further fiscal support,” Bivens said. “The fact that most of the policy debate is instead focused on just how fast this support will be ramped down in coming quarters is a sign of how detached this debate has become from economic reality.”
Politico
April 30, 2012
In 1994, economists Lawrence Mishel and Jared Bernstein were first to point out the gap that was already opening up between pay (low) and productivity (high). Bernstein later served as Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economist and is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Mishel is president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Now, Mishel has done the most careful study to date of what accounts for the productivity/pay gap. He wrote a blog post called “Understanding the wedge between productivity and median compensation growth” on April 26. He also has a longer article on the EPI website. And if that’s not enough, there’s a technical article by Mishel and Kar-Fai Gee of Canada’s Center for the Study of Living Standards published in that center’s International Productivity Monitor (PDF).
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
April 27, 2012
Heidi Shierholz, labor market expert with the Economic Policy Institute, said the increase might also be influenced by “artificially low” jobless claims in January and February, as the unseasonably warm weather gave the job market a temporary boost.
As a result, Shierholz said it would be most accurate to characterize the job market as being in a “rocky recovery.”
“This sheds even more doubt on whether we’ve entered a robust, self-sustaining job recovery,” she said.
CNNMoney
April 27, 2012