Media clips
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David Brancaccio: A new, worrying hint this morning about America’s job market. The number of people signing up for unemployment benefits rose by 13,000 over the last week. That puts the seasonally-adjusted number at 380,000. The consensus of economists was for the number to fall. So, a surprise and not a good one.
Heidi Shierholz is a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Ms. Shierholz, thanks for joining us live.
Heidi Shierholz: Thanks for having me.
Brancaccio: So these new unemployment claims for the past week. What do you make of this?
Shierholz: OK, you never want to see these things go up. That is — you want to see them going in the right direction: heading down. But I’m not too worried about what happened this time around — that increase of 13,000 — it’s not a huge spike, and there is a ton of week-to-week variation in these numbers. So we haven’t seen a lot of improvement in the last couple of months, but the overall trend, if you eyeball this thing, going back the last couple of years is a pretty steady improvement. So we want to keep our eyes on it; we don’t want this thing to go up — but I’m not too worried about what we saw in the numbers this morning.
Brancaccio: We also learned this week, Heidi, that more Americans are quitting their jobs on their own volition, because they want to. What does that tell you?
Shierholz: Yeah, it’s sort of counter-intuitive, right? But that’s actually very good news for the labor market. In a really dynamic labor market, where there’s lots of job opportunities, that means there’s not just job opportunities for unemployed people — there’s also job opportunities for people with jobs. One of the ways people in this labor market see advancement, see wage increases, is through quitting the job they have and moving to one that’s a better match for them — a better fit for their skills, their experience, with better wages. So the fact that we’re seeing people voluntarily leave their jobs, and presumably in many cases taking another job, that is actually is a very good sign of healing in the labor market.
Marketplace July 6, 2012 -
Black unemployment in May was at 13.6 percent, an increase of six-tenths of a percent from the month before. The national unemployment rate is only 8.2 percent.
But while we’ve known for a long time that Black unemployment significantly outpaces the national unemployment rates, new data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows just how bad things have gotten in some of America’s most diverse and important cities.
BET.com July 6, 2012 -
Young job-seekers may find themselves sweating it this summer.
Unemployment for Americans under 25 remains high at 16.4 percent — twice the national average — and underemployment is also a concern, especially for college grads, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.
WYNC News July 6, 2012 -
A new study shows Minneapolis-St. Paul leading the nation in a category no one is celebrating: of 19 major metropolitan areas, the Twin Cities metro area has the widest gap in unemployment rate between blacks and whites.
During 2011, the jobless rate for African Americans in the Twin Cities averaged nearly 18 percent, more than three-times that of white residents. That’s by far the biggest disparity of all the metropolitan areas covered in a study from the Economic Policy Institute.
Minnesota Public Radio July 5, 2012 -
According to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), African Americans and Hispanics are still at a disadvantage when it comes to employment in some metro areas.
The EPI scanned 19 metro areas with large African American populations and 25 metros with large Hispanic populations. Both studies found that unemployment in 2011 was higher than the national rate for African Americans and Hispanics in several metro areas.
Marketplace July 5, 2012 -
The Twin Cities have the highest level of racial disparity in unemployment in the country, according to a study released on Monday. The Economic Policy Institute found that African-Americans in the Twin Cities metropolitan area were 3.3 times as likely to be unemployed as whites in 2011 – the highest level of disparity among 19 major metropolitan areas in the nation.
Unfortunately, this high level of unemployment disparity between blacks and whites in our area is not new. Two years ago we blogged on an EPI study finding that back then the Twin Cities also had the highest level of unemployment disparity among 18 major metropolitan areas.
Twin Cities Daily Planet July 5, 2012 -
Unemployment among blacks stood at 17.7 percent in 2011, which was 3.1 times the jobless rate of whites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. That disparity rate is unchanged from a similar report issued two years ago by the same organization, the Economic Policy Institute. Then the metro area also ranked the worst in the country among selected cities.
Minneapolis Star Tribune July 3, 2012 -
Metro Orlando had the second-highest rate of Hispanic unemployment in the nation last year, according to a report issued Monday by the Economic Policy Institute.
The jobless rate was 16.6 percent among Hispanics, researchers found, more than twice the unemployment rate of white residents. The Orlando area was second only to Providence, R.I., where the Hispanic unemployment rate was 23.3 percent.
Orlando Sentinel July 3, 2012 -
Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that’s just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.
“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.
AlterNet July 2, 2012 -
If we got rid of standardized tests to rate public schools, what would we have instead? The most likely alternative is the inspectorate used in England. Scholars like Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute say school visits by well-trained inspectors would reveal more about what needs fixing than test score averages.
The Washington Post July 2, 2012