Media clips
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In a companion post to this feud, economist Heidi Shierholz of the liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that non-inevitable workforce dropouts represent three-quarters of the decline in participation since the end of the recession. That’s about 4.4 million workers, by her calculations. In a follow-up e-mail, Shierholz draws on historical Labor Department estimates of participation rates given the nation’s demographic trends and calculates that another 3.7 million workers went non-inevitably missing from the labor force in the decade before the recession. That’s 8 million people, if you’re scoring at home.
The Washington Post May 1, 2013 -
Elise Gould, director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, says the new provision won’t affect most workers. But studies show about 2 million workers could potentially get fewer hours — and therefore remain without health insurance.
“Workforces that are based on part-time work, a lot of those workers already are not eligible,” Gould says. But, she adds, “to the extent that they have some workers that are working, say, 32 hours a week, are they going to move them down? Absolutely. Those are the workers that are most at risk.”
NPR April 30, 2013 -
“Indian companies can advertise and recruit in the U.S. just the way foreign auto companies do. There is plenty of homegrown talent who would be happy to work at a good salary for a company with a future in the United States,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
AP April 30, 2013 -
The year started off strong in January and February with rising job creation numbers, but slowed sharply in March with only 88,000 jobs added.
Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the Economic Policy Institute, said the report shows that the economy “is growing just above stall-speed.” He said the pace of expansion of the economy is only enough to reduce unemployment slowly.
The Hill April 30, 2013 -
A new report looks at the results of school reform in three major cities and finds that reformers’ claims about success don’t exactly match reality. Here’s a piece on it by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.
The Washington Post April 30, 2013 -
A new report, released last week, suggests that DC Public Schools’ much lauded reform efforts are still failing to produce positive results for DC’s students. Despite changesfirst championed by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee and now by Chancellor Kaya Henderson, the report isn’t pretty: There was little progress in test scores, costly school closures made capacity problems worse and sent students to poorer-performing schools, restrictive evaluations led to higher turnover of teachers, and racial gaps in achievement grew.
Elaine Weiss, the National Coordinator who wrote the report for theBroader, Bolder Approach to Education campaign, said that“instead of continuing Rhee’s reforms, the District should address health and other problems that lead to truancy, and it should make sure the quality of teachers in Anacostia are just as good as those in Chevy Chase”.
The Washington Post April 30, 2013 -
The Senate’s current immigration bill would grant their wish. As written, it vastly increases the annual limit on H1-B visas, which allow corporations to bring employees with a bachelor’s degree to the U.S. from overseas for up to six years. Roughly half the guest workers who currently arrive through the program come for computer-related jobs. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that he was forming a political action group to back the reform effort, it was in part seen as a move to ensure that the H1-B provision would make it to President Obama’s desk intact.
There’s just one problem. That whole skills shortage? It’s a myth, as was amply illustrated (yet again) by a report this week from the Economic Policy Institute. It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren’t any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.
The Atlantic April 30, 2013 -
A briefing paper issued last week by the progressive Economic Policy Institute noted that under the Gang of Eight H-1B cap increase half of all IT jobs requiring a college degree would go to guest workers.
“What are the consequences of having that much of an occupation taken up by these temporary workers?” said Ross Eisenbrey, EPI’s executive vice president. “The conclusion is it does lead to lower salaries. And when salaries are depressed, it leads to U.S. workers and students being turned off from those fields.”
The Fiscal Times April 30, 2013 -
U.S. colleges now graduate 50 percent more students with degrees in computer and information science and engineering than get hired into those fields each year, according to the findings of a report by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute. The co-authors offer what amounts to a counterintuitive take on a legislative hot potato. Even as tech CEOs continue to press legislators to let high-skill — and generally lower-cost — guest workers in the country, the report argues that the U.S. labor market already has a surfeit of Americans with skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the so-called STEM labor market — even as U.S. companies continue to source temporary talent from abroad.
“We really already accept a generous number of these types of migrants,” said co-author and Georgetown professor B. Lindsay Lowell. “You can talk a long time about what temporary status means and the implications for the workers and for the workforce generally and for our economy. I don’t think the argument here is that foreign workers aren’t good or they’re not productive. I think the argument is yeah, I think we want foreign workers and want our employers access to them. But the question is in what amount and is more better? And unfortunately, I think a lot of people conflate the obvious difficulties in making the system work, the kind of bottlenecks that we have in the visa system with numbers…
“You have to really sit back and ask a little bit, especially after having been presented with the facts about domestic supply if you believe in the law of supply and demand, at what point is more, better. and how much more. I think those are the tough questions we need to ask.”
Noted fellow study co-author and Rutgers professor Hal Salzman:
“There’s just a large supply of STEM graduates,” he said. “You can’t just see in the numbers a failure of various colleges and universities to produce a sufficient supply.”
CNET April 30, 2013 -
“Too often, OIRA has been the place that regulations, even those whose measured benefits far outweighed the costs, went to die,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of Economic Policy Institute. “The next administrator should respect the agencies’ expertise and help them fulfill their statutory missions, not impede them. OIRA is not a super-agency or the handmaiden of industry, and it should never act that way.”
The Hill April 30, 2013