Media clips
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The liberal Economic Policy Institute called the sustained high rates of unemployment an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
Associated Press July 9, 2012 -
“The labor market is treading water,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She called it an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American work force.”
Associated Press July 9, 2012 -
If you assume Romney intends to implement the Ryan budget—which he has said on multiple occasions—his plan would cost the economy 1.3 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The American Prospect July 9, 2012 -
“We’ve been consistently adding jobs,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “But we’ve been adding what we need to roughly tread water. It’s not what we need to dig out. It’s just what we need to hang on.”
Philadelphia Tribune July 9, 2012 -
From the Economic Policy Institute comes a report today on public-sector job loss, which as you know is a favored topic of mine. The number of public-sector workers has decreased in this recession from 7.3 workers per 100 adults, an average the United States has maintained since the late 1980s, to something well under that. If we had stayed at the 7.3 figure, and given that population has grown by nearly 7 million since June 2009, that would have meant 1.1 million more public-sector workers on payrolls.
Newsweek/The Daily Beast July 9, 2012 -
But Algernon Austin, director of the the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, attributes the rise in the rate to more black Americans entering the workforce, not to job losses or more people out of work.
CNNMoney July 9, 2012 -
Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.
Think Progress July 9, 2012 -
The pace of churn is tied to the unemployment rate–which, in turn, is tied to business and employer confidence–and generally moves in the same direction as the headline rate. But while both have shown slow, steady improvement over the past three years, churn has risen much more slowly, as the above graph indicates. That glacial pace of improvement provides a more accurate snapshot of the recovery.
“The unemployment rate is overstating improvements right now because so many people are dropping out” of the labor force, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
The difference is in the denominators. Unemployment is measured by dividing the number of people out of work by the number working and seeking work, also known as the labor force. When people give up looking for work, they drop out of the labor force, shrinking the denominator and bringing down the unemployment rate more rapidly than it would decline through job creation alone.
National Journal July 6, 2012 -
David Brancaccio: A new, worrying hint this morning about America’s job market. The number of people signing up for unemployment benefits rose by 13,000 over the last week. That puts the seasonally-adjusted number at 380,000. The consensus of economists was for the number to fall. So, a surprise and not a good one.
Heidi Shierholz is a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Ms. Shierholz, thanks for joining us live.
Heidi Shierholz: Thanks for having me.
Brancaccio: So these new unemployment claims for the past week. What do you make of this?
Shierholz: OK, you never want to see these things go up. That is — you want to see them going in the right direction: heading down. But I’m not too worried about what happened this time around — that increase of 13,000 — it’s not a huge spike, and there is a ton of week-to-week variation in these numbers. So we haven’t seen a lot of improvement in the last couple of months, but the overall trend, if you eyeball this thing, going back the last couple of years is a pretty steady improvement. So we want to keep our eyes on it; we don’t want this thing to go up — but I’m not too worried about what we saw in the numbers this morning.
Brancaccio: We also learned this week, Heidi, that more Americans are quitting their jobs on their own volition, because they want to. What does that tell you?
Shierholz: Yeah, it’s sort of counter-intuitive, right? But that’s actually very good news for the labor market. In a really dynamic labor market, where there’s lots of job opportunities, that means there’s not just job opportunities for unemployed people — there’s also job opportunities for people with jobs. One of the ways people in this labor market see advancement, see wage increases, is through quitting the job they have and moving to one that’s a better match for them — a better fit for their skills, their experience, with better wages. So the fact that we’re seeing people voluntarily leave their jobs, and presumably in many cases taking another job, that is actually is a very good sign of healing in the labor market.
Marketplace July 6, 2012 -
Black unemployment in May was at 13.6 percent, an increase of six-tenths of a percent from the month before. The national unemployment rate is only 8.2 percent.
But while we’ve known for a long time that Black unemployment significantly outpaces the national unemployment rates, new data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows just how bad things have gotten in some of America’s most diverse and important cities.
BET.com July 6, 2012