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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 -
But the remaining 4.7 million jobs and another 5 million that would have been created in an otherwise sound economy mean that the country is operating at a deficit of 9.7 million jobs, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research center.
McClatchy September 4, 2012 -
A worker on minimum wage earns $15,080 a year, far below the federal poverty threshold of $19,090 for a family of three. It’s true that the low-wage workforce includes teenagers and people who live in households with other income earners. But a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that fewer than one-third of low-wage earners live in households with incomes over $50,000.
Kansas City Star September 4, 2012 -
The winners instead have been the nation’s top 1 percent, who between 1979 and 2007 saw their annual earnings grow 156 percent, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. In 1980, compensation for chief executives at some of the nation’s largest companies was 42 times the pay of the average worker; now it’s more than 300 times.
Tampa Bay Times September 4, 2012 -
A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute found that more than a quarter of Americans — 28 percent — would work in low-wage jobs for the next decade. Those jobs pay less than $11.06 an hour, the necessary wage to reach the federal poverty level. Low-wage sectors, EPI found, are growing faster than the overall economy.
Think Progress September 4, 2012 -
From the point of view of an economist at a think tank that examines the trends and policies of working people in the U.S., the reasons are simple: “Wealth is in their housing and what they get paid,” explained Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
“They don’t have a lot of dividends,” he continued. “Their wealth is … not in financial assets.”
National Journal September 4, 2012 -
The decline of union membership has been a key driver of income inequality in recent decades, a new report found.
The drop in unionization accounts for roughly a third of the growth in wage inequality among men and a fifth among women between 1973 and 2007, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The share of the workforce represented by unions declined from 26.7% in 1973 to 13.1% in 2011. This contributed to the increase in inequality by lowering wages for middle class workers, according to EPI.
CNNMoney August 31, 2012 -
Declining unionization is responsible for about one-third of the growth of wage inequality among men from 1973 to 2007, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The wage gap between white- and blue-collar workers grew some 10 percentage points from 1978 to 2011, while the gap between college and high school graduates increased 24 percentage points.
Nationally, the share of the work force represented by unions declined from 26.7 percent in 1973 to 13.1 percent in 2011.
“Unions reduce wage inequalities because they raise wages more at the bottom and in the middle of the wage scale than at the top,” Lawrence Mishel, president of the institute, said in a statement. “It is unsurprising that efforts to weaken unions have exacerbated both wage inequality and the divergence between overall productivity and the compensation of the typical worker.”
Maryland Gazette August 31, 2012 -
Real wages have stagnated over the last decade partly because of dwindling collective bargaining power, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute.
In his research for the institute’s “State of Working America” report, which will be published Sept. 11, Lawrence Mishel said “deunionization” also can explain some of the growing wage gap between the nation’s highest paid workers and everyone else.
About 13.1 percent of the U.S. workforce was represented by unions last year. The share has decreased steadily since the late 1970s.
“The decline of unions has affected middle-wage men more than any other group and explains about three-fourths of the expanded wage gap between white- and blue-collar men and over a fifth of the expanded wage gap between high school and college-educated men from 1978 to 2011,” Mishel wrote.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/29/3785314/decline-in-unions-weakened-overall.html#storylink=cpyKansas City Star August 31, 2012