Media clips
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“The answer is very clear: We need substantial additional stimulus to support the economy,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-of-center think tank. “We are choosing, as a country and as a town [Washington], not to do it, with millions of jobless workers.”
The Huffington Post January 18, 2013 -
The key thing nobody seems to be focused on: wages – Economic Policy Institute
Wall Street Journal January 18, 2013 -
“There are very few occupations or industries where unions are strong enough where they can set standards,” says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute. “There are no standards being set, so companies can push down on wages for all workers, union and nonunion alike.” When the Detroit automakers secure two-tier contracts, that enables them to pay new hires $16 an hour, far less than the $28 an hour earned by longtime workers. This also pushes down labor’s share.
The New York Times January 18, 2013 -
Costa has a background in immigration law and tends to dig into the economics of immigration from a labor perspective.
ABC News-Univision January 11, 2013 -
“It’s absolutely status quo,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said about Friday’s jobs report. “If we were at full employment, that would be fine. But status quo at a time like this represents ongoing suffering for millions of Americans.”
Los Angeles Times January 11, 2013 -
Research by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that job losses in the public sector have done more to hinder the country’s economic recovery than just inflate unemployment numbers: they have also had a noticeable ripple effect through the economy at large. “If a teacher loses his or her job, they’re going to have less money in their pockets,” said EPI’s Heidi Shierholz. “So they’re going to buy fewer goods and services in the private sector.” Furthermore, she said, job losses in the public sector mean that state and local governments spend less to accommodate their staff. For example, if a local police force employs fewer police officers, then the municipal government buys and maintains fewer police vehicles. “When we start to hire teachers back, that also probably means that other kinds of spending will also come back,” said Shierholz.
MSNBC January 11, 2013 -
Economist Heidi Shierholz, lead author of a study last May on the labor market prospects for the college graduating class of 2012, speculates that rising levels of student debt and declining family wealth played a role.
“We could be having some adjustments (in which) those who are sheltering in school are being offset by those who can’t find a job so they have to quit school,” says Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute. Similarly, she says, “if your parents just saw the value of their house (drop), they might be much less able to help you finance college.”
Shierholz, who has not reviewed the Pew study, cautioned that job opportunities for young people “remain very much at crisis levels” and that the data support anecdotal stories of recent graduates struggling to find work.
“There’s a much bigger group (of young adults) who are neither working nor in school,” she said. “And it does beg the question, how are they getting by?”
USA Today January 11, 2013 -
Here are the top 10 items on an education wish list for the holiday season and the new year. It was written by Greg Kaufmann, who reports on poverty for the Nation, and Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education. This appeared on The Nation’s website.
The Washington Post December 20, 2012 -
Many see the wisdom of leveraging networks, but job hopefuls and employed workers alike often talk about social roadblocks. One is just numbers: Few blacks are in top positions empowered to make hiring decisions, notes Algernon Austin, director of the race, ethnicity, and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.
Studies have suggested that social and professional networks, much like residential neighborhoods, are largely segregated, further limiting a black person’s access to those who are in a position to hire. “We don’t have as many people who have the opportunities to be in a position where they can both offer jobs to others or recommend places where others can work,” Williams says.
Austin projects the jobless rate for blacks will exceed 10 percent well through 2015, continuing a 50-year trend he wrote about for BET.com. In his commentary, he draws a connection among weak school performance, joblessness, higher crime rates, and poverty.
National Journal December 20, 2012 -
Meanwhile, the numbers of working poor are on the rise, said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. Workers earning less than $11 an hour — the equivalent of about $23,000 a year for those working full time — rose to 28 percent of the nation’s workforce last year, up from 23 percent in 2006, he said.
“The impact on educational achievement is going to be one of the biggest scars left from the recession,” Mishel said. “From everything we know, high persistent unemployment will do more damage to the educational prospects of low-income students than all the positive outcomes from educational reforms that people talk about.”
The Boston Globe December 20, 2012