Many of the people who explain economics to the general public, such as the bloggers at Marginal Revolution or the creators of the EconTalk podcast, have libertarian leanings. A number of conservative think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute, employ university-trained economists to promote free-market policies to the public. In recent years, this libertarian influence has been balanced out by more left-leaning voices—the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, the University of California-Berkeley’s Brad DeLong, and think tanks like the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Center for Economic and Policy Research and Economic Policy Institute. But libertarians’ head start in marketing—which goes back all the way to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the mid-20th century—will take a while to overcome.
Bloomberg
March 31, 2016
He was the dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management from 1987 to 1993 and a founder of the Economic Policy Institute, an influential progressive research group. In his heyday, he charged speaking fees of $30,000 and was one of the most sought-after economists on the lecture circuit.
The New York Times
March 30, 2016
While that gap between male earners in the 95th and 50th percentiles saw its biggest rise, last year’s increase only extended a long-running trend. “It is the most, but to say that inequality hasn’t been growing for the last 35 years would be wrong,” said Elise Gould, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who conducted the analysis earlier this month, as part of a larger report on wage inequality.
The Washington Post
March 30, 2016
While the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, U.S. law allows employees who receive tips to be paid just $2.13. Tipped workers are more than twice as likely as normal workers to fall under the poverty line, according to a 2011 study from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the labor movement.
The Huffington Post
March 30, 2016
A somewhat open question is whether bridge jobs are truly bridges to retirement or just another job change, perhaps one of many, in a seemingly unending working career. “I don’t want to be too Pollyannaish about bridge jobs because part of this is likely a reaction to the erosion of retirement security in the U.S.,” says Monique Morrissey, an economist with Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank with ties to organized labor. Morrissey says older Americans are facing a gradual erosion of retirement benefits. Specifically, she points to the transition to 401(k)s over defined-benefit pensions, as well as the eventual increase in the retirement age up to 67, a move she says amounts to an “across-the-board cut in benefits.”
Associated Press
March 30, 2016
Mileage tracking isn’t the only piece of infrastructure that is needed to make drivers’ lives easier and more profitable. More suitable insurance plans need to be developed, for example. And a key piece of the puzzle is the evolution of our legal standards for employment: Do we need to invent a new legal status which is neither employee nor contractor but has some characteristics of both? (The case for a new legal status is strongly challenged in a recent analysis by Economic Policy Institute.)
U.S. News & World Report
March 30, 2016
Well, new research from the Economic Policy Institute says the Uber employment structure isn’t as novel as it seems. “Gig economy” companies like Uber argue that their workers aren’t employees because they make their own hours and work independently, while workers of those companies say they are employees because they’re required to follow strict sets of guidelines, such as accepting a minimum number of jobs per week. The researchers looked into both sides’ claims and found that Uber workers look a lot like employees. “Various on-demand employers argue that gig work, like Uber and Lyft, represent a huge shift in the relationship between workers and employers and the W-2 status just doesn’t apply,” EPI President Lawrence Mishel said. “In fact, when you look at the realities of being an Uber driver, it is difficult to see something that differentiates it from other types of employment.”
Fusion
March 30, 2016
Of course, those who advocate for immigrant workers would never argue that all is well with the status quo—in which unauthorized workers are forced to work for low wages in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. But it’s worth noting that by some estimates, it would cost consumers less to pay these essential farmworkers a living wage than to deport them. A 40% increase in farmworker wages, a report from the Economic Policy Institute found, would cost American households only about $16 more a year—just a 3.7% increase in fruit and vegetable spending compared with what they spend today.
Quartz
March 30, 2016
“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