President Trump is threatening new tariffs on Chinese goods if Chinese President Xi Jinping does not meet with him at the upcoming G20 Summit. Robert Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at The Economic Policy Institute, discusses the state of U.S. trade tensions.
Cheddar
June 12, 2019
On the same panel, Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, strongly condemned Trump’s use of tariffs in negotiating a trade deal.
CNBC
June 12, 2019
“China appears to believe that it has an inalienable right to control its own domestic economy, and its international economic environment… irrespective of any commitments it has made under the WTO or other international agreements,” said Robert E. Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.
ThinkProgress
June 12, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute reports that 41% of baby boomers aged 55 to 64 have no retirement savings at all. If you’re part of that statistic, then you need to step up your retirement contributions now.
HoweStreet.com
June 12, 2019
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a preliminary calculation suggests that well over half of the workers who would have gotten new or strengthened overtime protections under the 2016 rule would be left behind by this proposed Trump administration rule. This means the administration’s rule would leave out millions of workers.
U.S. Senate Committee on Health
June 12, 2019
While that story is, again, extreme, the common thread here is, uh, exploitation. Even South by Southwest, the longest running and largest festival/conference hybrid in the country, would likely not be able to turn a profit if not for some questionable labor practices. Thousands of “volunteers” and “interns” work for free every year, at an event that sells tickets in the four figures and benefits a for-profit company. In 2014, a Salon report quoted Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute as saying, “I can’t see how what they’re doing is legal. They’ve opened themselves up to a class-action lawsuit, which involves attorney fees and could involve liquidated damages, meaning double back pay for everyone.”
VOX
June 12, 2019
The merger would reduce the U.S. wireless market to three major players (the others are AT&T and Verizon). The state AGs’ objections echo those of 37 House Democrats who sent a letter to federal regulators earlier this year arguing the deal will “destroy jobs and drive down wages.” The Communication Workers of America estimates the consolidation will eliminate 30,000 jobs, and researchers at the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt institute, two left-leaning think tanks, estimate it will lower wireless workers’ average weekly earnings by up to 7 percent in affected labor markets. Read a press release on the lawsuit here. More from POLITICO here.
Politico
June 12, 2019
In other words, inequality has local officials coming and going. The ranks of the homeless are growing because almost all the gains from America’s growing economy, as the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould testified to Congress this past March, are “going to households at the top.”
United Steelworkers
June 12, 2019
An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) brief entitled “ The Productivity-Pay Gap” vividly displays a disturbing trend that, for the last 45 years, essentially all of the economic gains from America’s increasing productivity has gone to the elite and upper-middle class, while workers’ real wages have remained roughly flat. In their report, 1973 serves as a demarcation line: Prior to that date, worker gains in terms of real wages increased with an almost lockstep 1:1 relationship with productivity. After 1973, however, despite the continued trend of increased productivity, the promised “trickle-down” to all workers from neoliberal supply-side economics hasn’t happened.
Democracy Journal
June 12, 2019
U.S. Census Bureau statistics show median earnings for workers of $26,059, according to the 2017 American Community Survey. Median earnings for workers in 2010 were $23,699, or a growth of about 1.42 percent a year. How many county residents have seen their bills increase by only 1.4 percent each year? The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, has stated wages would need to increase between 3.5 and 4 percent for average workers to feel an impact.
The Post-Journal
June 12, 2019
In the Economic Policy Institute’s new report: “Class of 2019: High School Edition,” they look at the job prospects of students as they graduate from high school and consider their future. What they found was that Importantly, nearly two-thirds of workers over age 21 do not have a four-year college degree.
88.5 WMNF
June 12, 2019
Raising the minimum wage “speaks so clearly and directly to trying to resolve that problem, it is going to resonate even to folks who are going to be conservative on other issues,” said David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that studies how policy affects low and middle-income people.
CNBC
June 11, 2019
OLYMPIA, Wash.—The Washington Department of Labor and Industries proposed a rule change June 5 that would extend eligibility for overtime pay to more than 250,000 workers. The rule would gradually raise the minimum salary where administrative workers can be denied time-and-a-half pay from the current federal standard of $23,660 a year to 2.5 times the state minimum wage in 2026, or more than $75,000. “This is a long overdue update that will help tens of thousands of Washingtonian workers,” Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement. The new standard would be phased in over six years, going up faster at businesses with more than 50 employees. The Obama administration tried to raise the federal standard to $47,476 in 2016, but a lawsuit by Republican-governed states blocked it. The Trump administration is proposing a smaller increase, to about $35,000. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of salaried employees guaranteed overtime fell from 63% in the 1970s to less than 7% in 2016. The Washington proposal would cover roughly 44% of the full-time salaried workforce in the state, the EPI estimates. The final rule will be made this fall, after a period of public comment. Read more
LaborPress.org
June 11, 2019
Horan includes data that illustrates how ride-sharing services like Uber have made it harder for drivers to earn a livable wage. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Uber reduced US driver pay to between $9 and $11 per hour in 2018. But before Uber entered the market, taxi drivers in big cities made between $12 and $17 an hour.
Markets Insider
June 11, 2019
In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute found that 17% of low-income workers were earning less than the minimum wage due to skimming by their employers. A 2009 survey carried out in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago found that three-quarters of low-wage workers weren’t compensated at a higher rate for overtime. Though the vast majority of wage theft goes unreported, the $933 million recovered by workers in court settlements in 2012 amounted to three times the cost of all robberies combined.
Huffington Post
June 11, 2019
To date, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City have all enacted city-level fair scheduling laws. Last July, Oregon became the first state to pass predictive scheduling legislation, with an additional 13 states and 4 municipalities across the U.S. considering legislation in 2019 or 2020. As of mid 2018, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 740,000 workers were already covered by predictive scheduling laws at that point. Assuming this trend continues, we could very well see predictive scheduling laws become the rule rather than the exception by about 2025.
Industry Today
June 11, 2019
The Economic Policy Institute found that overall, American productivity rose 21.6% between 2000 and 2014. But while productivity has increased, Gallup reports that the average workweek has risen to 47 hours. Isn’t there a way to work smarter, not harder?
Chief Packaging Officer
June 11, 2019
This morning’s jobs report showed the economy added 75,000 jobs in May. As the country marks its longest expansion in history, May’s number is significantly less than April’s growth of 224,000. Downward revisions to March and April, meanwhile, subtracted 75,000 jobs from the total gains.
People’s World
June 11, 2019
“This is a noticeable slowdown from the pace we’ve experienced this year so far, which has averaged 164,000 a month, and slower than the average monthly growth for the last 12 months (196,000),” writes Elise Gould, a senior economist at The Economic Policy Institute. “While we would expect job growth to level off as the economy approaches full employment—and 75,000 jobs is about what we need to keep up with today’s population growth—the pace of the slowdown in recent months is troubling.”
PayScale
June 11, 2019
A high-pressure economy is especially important for those at the back of the hiring queue. People sometimes say that full employment is fine, but that it doesn’t help people of color, younger people, or those without college degrees. This thinking, however, is backwards. It is educated white men with plenty of experience whose job prospects depend least on overall labor market conditions; their employment prospects are good whether overall unemployment rates are high or low. It is those at the back of the hiring queue—Black Americans, those who have received less education, people with criminal records, and others discriminated against by potential employers—who depend much more on a strong labor market. The Atlanta Fed’s useful wage tracker shows this clearly: Wage growth for lower-wage, non-white, and less-educated workers lagged behind that of college-educated white workers during the high-unemployment years following the recession. Since 2016, however, that pattern has reversed, with the biggest wage gains for nonwhite workers and those at the bottom of the wage distribution. This pattern has been documented in careful empirical work by Josh Bivens and Ben Zipperer of the Economic Policy Institute, who show that, historically, tight labor markets have disproportionately benefited Black workers and raised wages most at the bottom.
Roosevelt Institute
June 11, 2019
Monthly housing costs for a family of four average $3,121 in San Francisco, Hayward and Oakland — the highest in the country, according to a USA Today analysis in April. The newspaper used data from the Economic Policy Institute and Bureau of Economic Analysis measuring the 25 most expensive places to live in the nation.
Fox News
June 11, 2019
The top 1% of income earners is also often used to categorize the rich. Those people made at least $719,000 in 2017, according to the most recent wage data reported by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
U.S. News
June 11, 2019
High school graduates receiving their diplomas this month have better job prospects than those who graduated in 2007. But they’re still worse off than high school graduates in 2000. That’s according to a new report from the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
KASU
June 11, 2019
“Fifty years of social science research has confirmed, over and over again, that the best predictor of student achievement is not teacher quality or any other school influence, but the social and economic circumstances of the children,” says Richard Rothstein, a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute.
Statesman Journal
June 11, 2019
As Lawrence Mishel, an economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, notes, poverty creates obstacles that would trip up even the most naturally gifted student. He points to the plight of “children who frequently change schools due to poor housing; have little help with homework; have few role models of success; have more exposure to lead and asbestos; have untreated vision, ear, dental, or other health problems; … and live in a chaotic and frequently unsafe environment.”
The Atlantic
June 11, 2019
Okay, so both Warren and Rubio use the same phrase, Economic Patriotism. And for all their stated differences, they agree on a key symptom of the problem, outsourcing, which is deleterious to both employment and national security. The Economic Policy Institute, for instance, has estimated that in the dozen years after the U.S. normalized trade relations with China in 2000, some 3.2 million American jobs went to the People’s Republic.
Breitbart
June 11, 2019
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 1965 bosses of the largest companies in the U.S. earned around 20 times more than their average employee. By 1989 the number had more than trebled to 58 times. Today it’s over 300 times and rising. And some CEOs are making astronomically more than their workers.
Forbes
June 11, 2019
Policies should be passed that give shareholders greater control over “excessive CEO pay,” according to a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute.
Pensions & Investments
June 11, 2019
Average wages for high school graduates in the U.S. are finally higher than they were in the middle of the financial crash — but they remain lower than they were in 2000, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, Erica writes.
- The average pay for white high school graduates increased about 1% from 2000 to 2019, but fell 2.7% for black graduates.
Axios
June 11, 2019
Class of 2000 rules. Class of 2019 drools. “Compared with those who graduated [high school] into the strong 2000 labor market, the Class of 2019 still faces real economic challenges, as demonstrated by elevated levels of underemployment as well as low wages and worsened wage gaps for black workers,” Elise Gould, Julia Wolfe and Zane Mokhiber write at the Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
June 11, 2019