Media clips

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• Obama’s minimum wage increase would reduce record income inequality

  And the need is real. The federal government classified 10.5 million Americans as “working poor,” including 4.1 million full-time workers. Their ranks have been swollen by an economy that’s funneled 98 percent of all income gains to the top 10 percent of earners since 1980, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  San Jose Mercury News March 7, 2013
• ‘By the grace of God’: How workers survive on $7.25 per hour

  Liberal-leaning economists say the move would help millions of workers without better prospects pay their bills. It would also pump more money into the economy through higher consumer spending, they argue.

  “Unfortunately, for far too many people, the ladder that they’re on doesn’t have a whole lot of rungs,” said Doug Hall, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the progressive Economic Policy Institute.

  NBC News March 7, 2013
• The Business of the Minimum Wage

  But the available data suggest that roughly half the workers likely to be affected by the $9-an-hour level proposed by the president are in families earning less than $40,000 a year. So while raising the minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour may not be particularly well targeted as an anti-poverty proposal, it’s not badly targeted, either.

  The New York Times March 7, 2013
• More Than One In Five U.S. Workers Is Working Part-Time

  A majority of jobs added since the recession have been in low-wage sectors, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and one-in-four American workers will be in low-wage jobs for the next decade.

  Think Progress March 7, 2013
• Wage inequality warps U.S. income report

  Over the past 40 years, those in the top 1 percent of earners saw their real annual wages go up by nearly 131 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Wages for those in the 90-99th percentile rose 45 percent. For everyone else, wages increased 15.2 percent.

  CBS Moneywatch March 7, 2013
• Amnesty For Immigrants Spurs Greater Employment in U.S.

  Wages overall continued to rise, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, even as the nation entered a recession that lasted from July 1990 to March 1991.

   

  Bloomberg March 7, 2013
• Workers don’t share in companies’ productivity gains

  Productivity, which measures the goods and services generated per hour worked, rose by 80.4% between 1973 and 2011, compared to a 10.7% growth in median hourly compensation, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which crunched the numbers last year.

  That’s a marked shift from the trend between 1948 and 1973, when productivity and compensation grew in tandem.

  The main reason for the wider gap is a dampening of wage growth in recent decades, both among the college-educated and those without degrees, said Lawrence Mishel, the institute’s president. Global competition and national deregulation have kept compensation down, while the decline of union power weakened workers’ ability to bargain for higher pay.

  The split has been particularly acute since the beginning of the 2000s, when wage growth flattened. And now, with unemployment hovering around 8%, workers feel lucky to have a job and aren’t pressing as much for raises.

   

  CNNMoney March 7, 2013
• This viral video is right: We need to worry about wealth inequality

  When we talk about economic inequality, we tend to talk about income inequality. But wealth inequality is much more skewed, as these numbers from the Economic Policy Institute show:

  

  The top 1 percent has about twice as large a share of the national wealth as it does of national income.

  The Washington Post March 7, 2013
• H-1B Workers Not Best Or Brightest, Study Says

  Managers of high-tech companies insist they need more H-1B visas for foreign IT workers to ensure access to the best and brightest workforce. But a study released on Thursday finds that imported IT talent is often less talented than U.S. workers.

  The study, published by the Economic Policy Institute and conducted by Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California in Davis, compares U.S. and foreign IT workers’ salaries, rates of PhD awards, doctorates earned and employment in research and development to determine whether those admitted to the U.S. under the H-1B visa program have skills beyond those of U.S. IT workers.

  Based on Matloff’s analysis, there’s no evidence that those granted H-1B visas offer exceptional talents.

  Information Week March 5, 2013
• Employer credit checks keep jobless out of workforce

  Demos said this can be partly attributed to higher unemployment in these communities. Unemployment among African-Americans stood at 14% at the end of 2012, while the Hispanic unemployment rate stood at nearly 10% — much higher than the 6% rate for white Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  CNNMoney.com March 5, 2013