Between 1921 and 2008, the top 10% and the bottom 90% shared income gains equally. The split was 50-50 exactly, according to a new fun interactive graphic built by the Economic Policy Institute with data from economist Emmanuel Saez.
But between 1971 and 2008, real income declined for the bottom 90%. All the growth went to the top 10%, and more than half went to the top percentile.
The Atlantic
September 12, 2012
Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, said that’s been an especially big problem in the past few years, because jobs have been so scarce.
“If you lost your job in 1999, you were pretty much able to find a job that was similar to the one you lost,” she said. “But right now, if you lost your job in the Great Recession or its aftermath, you just got slammed in your wages.”
NBC News
September 11, 2012
The unemployment rate for young adults rose to 16.8% from 16.4% in July.
“I don’t think they’re more lazy. It’s that there are less opportunities for them,” said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist, at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “They have it rough.”
CNNMoney
September 11, 2012
The job market is “still so weak that it kicks people out or discourages people from coming into the labor force,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Los Angeles Times
September 11, 2012
All in all, a higher minimum wage would probably lead to a rise in pay for lower-income workers in general and a decline in inequality.
The 1980s help make that case in reverse. The federal minimum did not change from 1981 to 1990, causing its inflation-adjusted value to fall 30 percent during that time. Wages in the bottom of the income distribution fell sharply, even more sharply than they have in the last decade. The inflation-adjusted wage of a worker at the 20th percentile of the distribution dropped 9.5 percent from 1981 to 1990, according an analysis of government data in the forthcoming book “The State of Working America, 12th Edition,” by the Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
September 6, 2012
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
