“Temp workers are, of course, the first ones to get let go when demand starts to flag,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
However, for now, their growing share indicates an economy that is slowly and painfully healing—one of the few positives amid the headlines about the fiscal cliff and Europe’s sovereign debt woes leaving the continent in a perpetual crisis.
The Fiscal Times
August 8, 2012
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that this minimum-wage increase would generate about $25 billion in economic activity and around 100,000 jobs nationally.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
August 8, 2012
“At July’s rate of job growth it would take more than eight years to get back to full employment,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
Wall Street Journal
August 7, 2012
The massive loss of jobs during the recession relative to the monthly job gains is a key concern for economists on both sides.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, has calculated that the “jobs deficit” from before the recession is 9.7 million. At the current average pace of job growth, she said, it would take 10 years for the United States to return to full employment. Even if the rate of job growth were 350,000 a month, the job recovery would take three years, she said.
“Either way, it’s going to be a slog,” she said. “It’s just the hellacious recession that preceded this recovery that makes it look so bad.”
The Washington Post
August 7, 2012
For the first seven months of the year, the economy has averaged a gain of 150,000 jobs. This is just enough to find jobs for new people entering the labor market but not enough to give a boost to the millions of people who have been out of work for an extended period of time.
“This kind of job growth would be totally fine if we were at full employment,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington. “But it is not what we need given the jobs deficit we have.”
The Christian Science Monitor
August 7, 2012
Meanwhile, the already anemic 80,000 jobs created in June was actually lower, with the government revising the number to 64,000. In normal times the labor market needs to create more than 100,000 jobs per month to keep up with the number of people who want to work and that number is much higher now given the trough we’re trying to climb out of. The Economic Policy Institute puts out this sobering statistic: At July’s rate of growth it would take more than eight years to get back to full employment.
Bloomberg
August 7, 2012
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-oriented research organization, estimates that raising the minimum wage to $9.80 per hour would generate more than $25 billion in consumer spending, create more than 100,000 full-time jobs and lift wages for close to 30 million workers, since raising the floor affects not only those who earn the minimum but also those who earn slightly more.
The Root
August 3, 2012
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions showed that the schools are essentially using taxpayer subsidies to finance their aggressive recruiting and regulatory manipulation. Based on the Senate’s findings, the Economic Policy Institute put together this chart showing that for-profit schools put more money into recruitment — and pocket more in profits — than they spend on instruction:
Think Progress
August 3, 2012
From NPR:
“This pace of job growth means two things,” writes Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who says the U.S. economy has a deficit of 10 million jobs: “We are not in — nor are we slipping into — another recession, but neither are we getting the kind of job growth that will bring down the unemployment rate. In other words, the labor market is treading water. This would be perfectly fine if we were at full employment, but with the unemployment rate now above 8 percent for 41 months straight, this is an ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
Minnesota Public Radio
August 3, 2012
The number of Americans working in low-wage jobs — those that pay wages equal to or below the poverty line — will remain steady over the next decade, according to the Economic Policy Institute, as CNNMoney reports:
Some 28% of workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs in 2020, roughly the same percentage as in 2010, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.
The study defines low-paying jobs as those with wages at or below what full-time workers must earn to live above the poverty level for a family of four. In 2011, this was $23,005, or $11.06 an hour.
Think Progress
August 3, 2012