“It’s a huge signal that Congress needs to step up and do something at the federal level.…The fact that advocates are targeting levels beyond what we’ve done before, and winning, reflects people’s frustration with the lack of any effort to deal with the problem of wage stagnation at the federal level.”—David Cooper, Economic Policy Institute
Wall Street Journal
March 29, 2016
Those proposals also would leave the federal minimum wage well below the level it would have reached if it tracked increases in U.S. productivity or real average wages for rank-and-file workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which is associated with labor organizations and other progressive groups.
Los Angeles Times
March 29, 2016
Partly driving the push for a higher wage floor is the argument that raising wages would help “undo all the wage inequality that has happened in the last 45 years,” says David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal research group based in Washington.
Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2016
According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank specializing in labor issues, a $15 minimum wage in New York City would boost the wages of 1.4 million workers—about 35 percent of the city’s workforce.
Vice News
March 29, 2016
Assuming 2 percent inflation, $15 in 2022 is approximately equal to $13.30 today. But California’s not doing it in one leap. The gradual increase keeps the wage floor in line with what liberal economists believe would benefit the broad mass of workers. For example, the Economic Policy Institute endorsed raising the national minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020, saying it would lift wages for 35 million workers. The California deal would get to $12 by 2019, meaning that the wage wouldn’t accelerate past the EPI benchmark for three years.
Salon
March 29, 2016
In the absence of action on a national scale, a number of states and localities have made their own moves. Last year 11 states and the District of Columbia lifted their minimum wages through legislation, and 11 states increased them via regular indexing to inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington DC think-tank.
Financial Times
March 29, 2016
The job market can be a tough place, particularly for new college graduates. While the unemployment rate for new grads (age 21 to 24) has dropped — falling to 7.2 percent in 2014 from 9.9 percent in 2011—according to the Economic Policy Institute, it remains significantly elevated, particularly as new graduates are forced to contend with those from the previous six years who are still searching for positions.
CNBC
March 29, 2016
Robert E. Scott of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank critical of free-trade deals, estimates these deficits with Mexico alone have cost 850,000 Americans their jobs. This, in turn, has a “chilling effect,” Scott said. “It actually causes wage losses for everybody who doesn’t have a college degree.” After accounting for inflation, hourly pay at U.S. factories has been stagnant since the early 1970s.
Bloomberg
March 29, 2016
“What we see in those states is that the poverty rate among tipped workers is dramatically lower than in the states where they’re getting $2.13 per hour as their base wage,” David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute said.
PBS News Hour
March 29, 2016
From other research, we know two important facts about black public sector workers: 1) Black workers make up a disproportionate share of the public sector workforce; and 2) Black public employees were more likely than other public employees to lose their jobs during the Great Recession. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that the reduction in state and local public employment disproportionately affected African-Americans.
U.S. News & World Report
March 29, 2016
A new analysis underlines that point, showing that state laws that increase the minimum wage help people at the bottom of the income ladder, even when they’re making slightly more than the minimum wage. Those people at the very bottom? Nearly 60 percent of them are women — and they are disproportionately women of color.
The analysis, published Wednesday by Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, looks at the income of the 10th percentile of American workers — that is, the people who earn less than 90 percent of workers in the U.S. — in every state. In 2015, wages for that bottom 10th percentile went up everywhere, but they went up more in the 22 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that increased minimum wages than they did in the other 28 states. And they went up the most for women who live in those states.
The Huffington Post
March 29, 2016
There is still a pay gap among male and female business owners, too. Women-owned businesses earn only about 25 cents for every dollar that male-owned businesses do, according to 2015 data from the Economic Policy Institute.
Christian Science Monitor
March 29, 2016
According to a 2009 survey of union elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, “workers were forced to attend anti-union one-on-one sessions with a supervisor at least weekly in two-thirds of elections, … employers used supervisor one-on-one meetings to interrogate workers about who they or other workers supported, and in 54% used such sessions to threaten workers.” That’s not all. “Employers threatened to close the plant in 57% of elections, discharged workers in 34%, and threatened to cut wages and benefits in 47% of elections.”
Los Angeles Times
March 24, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute reports that in 2012, state departments of labor recovered $172 million for workers, state attorneys general recovered $14 million and private attorneys recovered $467 million in wage and hour class action lawsuits.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
March 24, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute is an economic research group located in Washington, D.C., and it concluded in a 1999 study that nearly 40 percent of the minimum wage earners in the United States are working parents. To go even further, nearly 33 percent of the minimum wage earners are married couple raising children. Without a minimum wage, these workers may be forced to work for less money.
Houston Chronicle
March 24, 2016
Looking for a raise? Why not come to Massachusetts, home of the fattest paychecks in the country. The median wage in the Bay State is $21.19, a full dollar higher than second-place Maryland and four dollars above the US average, according to the latest data from the Economic Policy Institute.
Boston Globe
March 23, 2016
Though inequality still divides the local economy, the Massachusetts has the highest median wage in the country, according to the latest data from the Economic Policy Institute. The median wage in Massachusetts is $21.19 per hour, a dollar higher than Maryland, which took the No. 2 spot, and $4 above the U.S. average.
Boston.com
March 23, 2016
“This stagnation is hurting our overall growth as people are not able to spend sufficiently. It elevates poverty and hurts our upward mobility,” said Larry Mishel, president of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “Between the high unemployment we’ve had until recently and the falling or stagnant wages, it puts a tremendous squeeze on families’ ability to get by.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution
March 23, 2016
Yet Washington is only a mid-range factory state. Ohio’s 2014 total was 12.6 percent and Michigan’s 13.5 percent, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. The Midwest has lost millions of factory jobs to offshoring, including a recent notorious case with Carrier, and criticism of the trade status quo by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump resonated strongly.
Seattle Times
March 23, 2016
Fortunately for drivers, however, that appears to be bullshit.“[Workers’ time] is so far from immeasurable that they measure it down to the minute,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Ross Eisenbrey told ThinkProgress. In their own new paper, Eisenbrey and colleague Larry Mishel seek to deflate the notion that Uber is forcing a revolution in the laws governing sweat-for-money exchanges throughout the economy.
Think Progress
March 23, 2016
The CPC budget is a detailed and sophisticated document. Prepared in conjunction with the Economic Policy Institute, it is projected in parallel with the Congressional Budget Office baseline. Its assumptions, programs, costs and revenue are laid out for all to see. And it is a ringing indictment of our current course.
The Washington Post
March 22, 2016
Larry Mishel and Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute released a new report last week pushing back on a provocative policy prescription that, in response to an ascendant “gig economy,” calls for a third category of worker that blends the employer flexibility of an independent contractor with the legal protections of a traditional employee. The proposal they were commenting on came from economists Seth Harris and Alan Krueger, who argued that establishing a new class of “independent workers” is necessary to address the legal limbo into which such on-demand workers as Uber and Lyft drivers currently fall. The new EPI report fills a big void in the conversation by refuting the claim that many app-workers’ labor is unmeasurable by conventional metrics. Mishel and Eisenbrey argue that this assertion rests on a “mistaken assessment of an Uber driver’s situation,” going on to say that this type of labor still falls within the confines of traditional employment regulations.
The American Prospect
March 22, 2016
The hustle is real: Women are more likely to hold down a second job than men are, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (Pay gap, it keeps giving.) If you’re one of them, don’t just think of it as a check.
Women's Health
March 22, 2016
For starters, the United States runs an annual trade deficit of about $500 billion. The Commerce Department estimates that every $1 billion of exports creates 6,000 jobs. By extension, one might expect that every $1 billion of imports would eliminate 6,000 jobs. This is not entirely true, because imports of things like rare earth elements in which the United States is not self-sufficient actually create jobs rather than eliminating them. On the other hand, economists at MIT and the Economic Policy Institute in Washington conclude that imports from China eliminated about 2.4 million US jobs between 1999 and 2011.
Boston Globe
March 22, 2016
The manufacturing sector, in particular, is vulnerable to unfair trade and currency manipulation, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute says. It calculates that trade with the 11 other nations in the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership cost 2 million jobs in the U.S. last year.
Sacramento Bee
March 22, 2016
Tipped workers, like waitstaff, are about twice as likely as non-tipped workers to end up in poverty, according to reports from the Economic Policy Institute, which have been cited by the White House (pdf). (The EPI’s findings are not specific to Olive Garden. They are based on the Current Population Survey from the US Census Bureau.)
Quartz
March 22, 2016
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank partly funded by unions, estimated that more than 850,000 jobs have been lost due to NAFTA since the agreement was enacted in 1994. During that time, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $61.4 billion deficit in 2012, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
USA Today
March 21, 2016
Last year, economist Alan Krueger and former Labor Department official Seth Harris penned a much-discussed paper arguing that Uber drivers and other on-demand workers belong to a new category of employee—one that should come with certain workplace protections but not others. On Thursday, economist Larry Mishel and lawyer Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute issued a rebuttal, arguing Uber drivers are workers like anyone else.
The Huffington Post
March 21, 2016
The restaurant industry is among the largest in terms of employing minimum wage workers. In New York alone, restaurants rely on over 400,000 such workers, putting it on par with the retail and care sectors, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on American workers. This institute advocates for increasing federal minimum wage as a means of ensuring decent quality of life to these workers. “A parent who works full time and is paid the federal minimum wage does not currently earn enough through work to be above the poverty line,” Economic Policy Institute David Cooper wrote in a recent EPI report.
Christian Science Monitor
March 21, 2016
China is also responsible for many of the manufacturing job losses that have had such a crippling impact on states such as Ohio, according to a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. More than 310,000 manufacturing jobs in Ohio vanished between 2000 and 2014, according to the report, which pins the blame on unfair trade practices that made it easier for foreign nations to export goods to American consumers. “That was the era when China trade was decimating manufacturing,” said Robert E. Scott, senior economist at the institute and author of the report. Saying that productivity growth has slowed massively in the past seven years, Scott said, “Trade is responsible for essentially all of the manufacturing job losses.”
Columbus Dispatch
March 21, 2016