The effect could be similar to what globalization did to blue-collar positions in the manufacturing sector, which lost more than 3 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
January 4, 2016
But some labor experts say the ruling’s effects could go far beyond political speech ramifications: If agency fees are optional when union representation is guaranteed, then what incentive exists for employees to fork over hefty union dues? Jeffrey Keefe, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute and former professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said it’s not surprising to see a great deal of free riding in right-to-work states.
International Business Times
January 4, 2016
The Pew data went back to 1970 but the middle class likely held the crown even longer, going back to the late 1940s. To be fair, the conclusion is less stunning to those who have been following the work of the Economic Policy Institute, specifically its State of Working America, and other scholars.
Seattle Times
January 4, 2016
The new provision blows that compromise out of the water. It could lead to a doubling or tripling of the 66,000 seasonal workers who come under the existing program, will weaken the requirements that employers seek out American workers first, lower the wages paid to many foreign workers, and reduce federal oversight of employers. Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute says the new provision will “create a huge incentive to hire temporary foreign workers instead of the local U.S. workers who reside in communities where the jobs are located.”
Council on Foreign Relations
December 23, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute gets the nod for a figure that captures a) the growth of inequality, as a huge gap has evolved between the typical worker’s compensation and the productivity growth they themselves are helping to create, and b) what we believe will be a key issue in the 2016 campaign.
The Washington Post
December 22, 2015
The black unemployment rate is about twice the white unemployment rate regardless of education status, the Economic Policy Institute has found in a recent article. However, the black unemployment rate has always been twice the rate of whites.
The rate for blacks with only a high school diploma is 9.6 percent — without a diploma, the jobless rate shoots up to 16.6 percent. In comparison to white workers who only have a high school diploma or less, the numbers were at 4.6 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.
“The broader significance of this disparity suggests a race penalty whereby blacks at each level of education have unemployment rates that are the same as or higher than less educated whites,” Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, wrote. “Persistent disparities in unemployment are constant reminders of how race continues to have an undue influence on life in this country.”
The Huffington Post
December 22, 2015
A higher percentage of white Americans obtain college degrees: 41 percent, compared to the black population’s 22 percent. But data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) show that differences in education can’t explain fully the entirety of the unemployment gap. According to research from Valerie Wilson, an economist at EPI, for black Americans with the same level of education level as white Americans, the unemployment rate is consistently nearly twice as high. Wilson looks at census data and finds, unsurprisingly, unemployment is highest for those who didn’t attend college at all. Among those who hadn’t completed high school, whites had an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent. But for black Americans, the situation was much more extreme: Their unemployment rate was almost two-and-a-half times higher, at 16.6 percent.
The Atlantic
December 22, 2015
Louisiana is among the biggest users per capita of the H-2B program. It attracted 2,648 H-2B workers in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank that advocates for low- to middle-income families in the U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., was a co-sponsor of Mikulski’s language. But in contrast to Mikulski, the Economic Policy Institute said there is no evidence of an employee shortage in landscaping, seafood processing or hospitality jobs, the main occupations for which employers hire H-2B workers. The institute says the bill will drive down wages that H-2B employers must pay, providing a strong incentive for U.S. businesses to employ foreign seasonal workers at the expense of U.S. citizens.
New Orleans Times-Picayune
December 22, 2015
But not everyone agrees with that 5% threshold. “While most indicators have been trending in the right direction, nominal wage growth and the prime-age employment-to-population ratio remain far outside of target ranges, and provide ample evidence that the economy has a way to go before reaching full employment,” said Elise Gould, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal
December 21, 2015
While women of that demographic were earning about 88 cents for every dollar men of the same age made in 2004, those women were making just 81 cents for every dollar men earned in 2014. “You would think as women get more experienced in the labor force, as they get more skilled, they’d have a similar increase to men, but they simply don’t,” said Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
December 21, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, which showed that women are today paid 20% less than men – a tiny gain, which was accounted for not by an increase in women’s remuneration but by stagnant wages for men.
Forbes
December 21, 2015
The national unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities. According to the Economic Policy Institute, if this large pool of “missing workers” were registered as looking for work, the unemployment rate would be 7 percent and not the official rate of 5 percent.
U.S. News & World Report
December 21, 2015
Here, from the Economic Policy Institute, is something very easy to understand. Black Americans suffer from significantly higher levels of unemployment even when they have the same level of education as white people.
Gawker
December 21, 2015
An estimated 66,000 H-2B visas are distributed on an annual basis. But employers often us the H-2 visa programs to take advantage of legal guest workers. An Economic Policy Institute study found that temporary legal guest workers are as likely to be subjected to low wages as undocumented workers.
Think Progress
December 21, 2015
Josh Bivens, a Fed watcher at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, and a critic of Wednesday’s rate increase, is even more pessimistic. He estimates that if the Fed raises the federal funds rate at the pace that Fed officials believe will be necessary, it will slow economic growth in a meaningful way by the time of the November election. “An increase of 0 to 1.4 percent would have a noticeable effect on the economy,” Bivens said.
The Huffington Post
December 18, 2015
Should only wealthy people be able to have kids in America? According to a new report, childcare center fees for two children is higher than median rent payments in every single state in the United States. Another recent report shows that childcare costs more than in-state college tuition in most states.
The New Republic
December 18, 2015
There is an old adage that is typically passed down by elder black relatives to young children: You have to be twice as good as white people. But according to this graph from the Economic Policy Institute, the adage should be updated: You have to be twice as good as white people to get the same education, but you’ll still be twice as unemployed. The graph shows the racial unemployment gap grows exponentially smaller with more education, but the unemployment rate for black Americans who have graduated with at least one degree is still nearly double that of similarly educated white folks.
The New Republic
December 18, 2015
Indeed, some counterargue that Fed policies have stimulated the economy, resulting in job creation, falling unemployment, and recovering middle-class housing values. “To the extent that the Fed pushed the economy closer to full employment, it reduced inequality,” Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, argued in a June analysis.
Christian Science Monitor
December 17, 2015
Josh Bivens, who studies Federal Reserve policy for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, called an interest rate hike a “mistake” in remarks at a Dec. 1 congressional briefing for that very reason. Bivens and other, mostly liberal, economists who believe it is too soon for an interest rate hike argue that lackluster inflation is actually a sign that the Fed’s other area of concern, the job market, is not growing fast enough. “I am against the hike, because to me you hike interest rates when you are trying to cool down an economy that is overheating and threatening to generate wage and price inflation,” Bivens said in an interview this week. “There is just no evidence of that in the data. In fact, both wages and prices are growing much more slowly than they should be if the economy is healthy.”
The Huffington Post
December 17, 2015
The financial sector also benefits from hard-on-inflation policies, since high inflation erodes the value of their investments. “Unexpected increases in inflation are wealth transfers from creditors to debtors,” explains Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. “The finance sector really, really dislikes unexpected inflation.”
Mother Jones
December 17, 2015
But post-recession progress seen in the black and Hispanic unemployment rates, which have been as much as double the rate for whites in recent years, can be slowed by the Fed’s raising of the interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point, the economists said. “Today’s actions are a worrisome backwards step,” said Josh Bivens, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit think tank that follows the impact of economic trends on the working class. “Despite years of steady progress restoring the damage inflicted by the Great Recession, a full economic recovery remains incomplete.”
International Business Times
December 17, 2015
That slowing is good to prevent the economy from overheating when there’s very strong wage growth, but that’s something a number of progressive economists think that there are not yet any signs of. And they fear the Fed’s decision is premature. “You’re supposed to raise interest rates when unemployment is too low, workers are making too aggressive wage demands and getting them and they’re threatening to set off wage and price inflation,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, told Mic. “That is just not the economy we have today, so I’m not sure why we’re going in that direction.” Bivens says he believes the rate increase doesn’t in and of itself threaten economic growth or demand in the economy too much, but that further increases could “keep the economy from improving the point it has today.”
Mic
December 17, 2015
Economist Josh Bivens, research and policy director for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, suggested in a blog post that a big reason behind weak inflation has been that workers have lost leverage and can’t demand higher wages like they used to, and that raising rates now might sap what little strength they’re gaining: The pressure to raise rates now, even in the face of a complete absence of inflationary pressures in the data, reflects a couple of strands of conventional thinking that are deeply damaging to prospect of workers’ wages rising anytime in the near future.
Quartz
December 17, 2015
Still, opinion is not unanimous. Some Fed policymakers have said they worry the world economy is too weak for the Fed to successfully march off on its own. Labor groups on Tuesday said pockets of employment and wage growth overall are still too weak to warrant tighter financial conditions. “There’s no reason to think that the pace of economic growth today is excessive and needs to be slowed because of incipient inflation,” Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, said in calling on the Fed not to hike. “Right now, lower unemployment that boosted wage and price growth would be an affirmatively good thing. Wages and prices are clearly growing too slowly.”
Reuters
December 16, 2015
As the Economic Policy Institute notes, public sector anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies, which the Center for Individual Rights has fought for decades, have been particularly effective in creating economic opportunities for women and Black people, “especially in contrast to the private sector.” Discrimination still exists everywhere, but it continues to be much more prevalent in the private sector where fewer protections – often won by working people speaking up for one another – exist.
NBC News
December 16, 2015
A new survey released by Bankrate.com finds that only 22 percent of employed Americans expect a bonus this year, while only 12 percent are anticipating a raise. It’s all a part of the slow wage growth that has continued to plague the U.S. economy, Josh Bivens, of the Economic Policy Institute, tells Bankrate.“The headline unemployment rate is a notably rosier indicator than lots of other measures of labor market slack, including the really slow pace of wage growth the last 5 to 6 years,” he says.
WTOP
December 16, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute, it is more expensive to send a one-year-old to daycare for a year than it is to send a college student to a state school in 30 states. Furthermore, the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis also shows that childcare costs over 30 percent of a minimum-wage income in every single state. This partially explains why the number of women in the American workforce has fallen from 74 percent in 1999 to 69 percent in 2014.
Bustle
December 16, 2015
Some remain skeptical, worrying the plan adds an unnecessary layer of confusion to an already complex debate. “It’s an interesting intellectual exercise but it wouldn’t be wise to actually legislate on this right now,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-backed think tank. He argues that policymakers should let ongoing worker classification disputes play in out in the courts before rushing to make any new categories.
International Business Times
December 15, 2015
But with an economy slow to recover from the worst financial shock since 1929, demand simply hasn’t been strong enough to push prices up, said Josh Bivens, research director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. Laffer and other inflation hawks “wildly underestimated how far from full potential we were,” Bivens told International Business Times, noting that wage gains have only just recently shown increasing momentum.
International Business Times
December 15, 2015
Young college graduates may be more optimistic, but their inflation-adjusted wages are lower. The Economic Policy Institute, in a recent study, found that earnings for young college graduates have steadily declined since 2000.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
December 15, 2015