Media clips
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It’s a fantasy, of course. Not coincidentally, as union density in America has declined, so too have workers’ wages, benefits, workplace protections and negotiating power. Additionally, as the Economic Policy Institute documents, unions not only help their own members, they set industry-wide standards. So when unions lose ground, all workers lose out.
Salon August 27, 2012 -
A $295 billion trade deficit with China resulted in the loss of 2.7 million U.S. jobs in the past decade, with the biggest impact in California’s Silicon Valley, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg Businesweek August 27, 2012 -
“In an ideal world, you can’t cut government spending effectively until the economy is close to full employment,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst for the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The magnitude of government spending cuts for a balanced budget amendment is beyond the realm of the tenable. We don’t have a $1 trillion waste, fraud and abuse account to tap into.”
The Fiscal Times August 23, 2012 -
But not all college grads have it equally rosy. As the Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews has pointed out, the Georgetown report misleadingly sandwiches together plain-old bachelor’s holders with workers who have a master’s, doctorate, or professional degree. And according to data Matthews cites from the Economic Policy Institute, between 2007 and 2011, 98.3 percent of the job gains in that combined group went to the advanced degree holders. These days, it seems we’re really in a grad school economy.
That reality plays out pretty clearly in the unemployment figures, as shown in this chart posted by EPI’s Lawrence Mishel. Bachelor’s holders, like everyone else, have suffered from much worse joblessness than normal during the recovery. Today, they’re still facing 4.1 percent unemployment, well above pre-recession levels. If there was a great shortage of college talent in the labor market, it’s reasonable to assume their situation would have improved faster.
The Atlantic August 23, 2012 -
The unemployment rate for all college graduates over 25 years old is currently 4.1%, less than half of the national unemployment rate of 8.3%. But a recent Economic Policy Institute study reports that the unemployment rate is 9.4% for college grads ages 21 to 24 (not currently seeking a post graduate degree), and the underemployment rate for this group is 19.1% (this includes part-time workers who want full-time jobs). In 2011, those grads lucky enough to have a full-time job earned an average of $35,000 a year, a 5.4% inflation adjusted decrease from 2000 average income. Finally, it is estimated that nearly 4 of 10 grads are working in fields that don’t require a college degree (the college-grad barista syndrome).
Wall Street Journal August 23, 2012 -
Bogira ties this back into residential segregation, an ongoing interest of his (and mine). On that note, Richard Rothstein and Mark Santow have a long piece in The American Prospect about residential segregation, and in particular its history in Detroit and George Romney’s attempts to combat it.
Chicago Magazine August 23, 2012 -
When Larry Mishel and I looked at this in the context of wage inequality, we found no statistical evidence for acceleration, so we found it hard to blame technological change, something that’s literally been going on forever, as the cause of something new — increasing wage inequality.
The Huffington Post August 23, 2012 -
George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that the U.S. and the U.K. are two nations divided by a common language. While the two countries are indeed worlds apart in many ways, the issue of high unemployment among recent college graduates looms large on both sides of the Atlantic.
Both countries present increasingly tough labor markets for recent graduates: in the U.S., data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, show that the unemployment rate for young college graduates was 9.4% in 2012. In the U.K., that figure was 9% between 2010 and 2011, the latest data show, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Wall Street Journal August 23, 2012 -
So there’s systematic divergence. And it’s a big deal. According to Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, this gap alone accounts for one third of the divergence between productivity and median compensation in the 1973-2011 period.
What does that mean in the real world? I think it’s mostly a longwinded way of emphasizing that incomes and prices are two sides of the same coin. The political discussion normally talks about income and wages in one box, and then college affordability or health care or housing in some other boxes.
Slate August 22, 2012 -
The improvement is visible in a number of statistics. The July labor force participation rate for these workers—that is, the share either with a job or looking for a job—was 60.5 percent, up from last summer’s record-low 59.5 percent. And the summer youth unemployment rate is also on the decline, from 19.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted) in July 2010 to 18.1 percent last year to 17.1 percent this year.
“It’s all good news. It’s headed in the right direction,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Prosperity Institute, a left-leaning think tank based in Washington. However, she adds that figures on labor force participation and employment for young workers “are still really low.”
US News and World Report August 22, 2012