The group first started by laying a foundation of economic analysis to support the idea of raising the overtime salary threshold. They started with a built-in advantage: The chief economist at the Department of Labor came from the main think tank that has been leading that research, the Economic Policy Institute, and others in high positions also have backgrounds in worker advocacy. Nevertheless, outside pressure became necessary towards the end of last year, as the process of developing the rule dragged on, and advocates worried it wouldn’t end up as strong as they wanted. “We heard that they were coming in with a threshold that was much lower,” says Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at EPI who has played a key role in the overtime push. “And when we raised a ruckus, they rethought it, and came in with a higher number and had to redo their economic analysis.”
The Washington Post
September 4, 2015
But there is one anomalous data point in the overall job-market recovery: wages. Average hourly wages have been increasing very slowly since 2010 — in a narrow range between 1.8 percent and 2.2 percent on an annual basis. After adjusting for inflation, real wages for most workers have barely kept pace with prices. “Wage growth over the entire recovery has been unbelievably anemic,” says Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute, in a teleconference where EPI released a new analysis of wages and productivity in the recovery.
Marketplace
September 4, 2015
Lawrence Mishel, director of the Economic Policy Institute, adds that this echoes a longer term relationship between wages and productivity. “These two used to go together in the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s,” says Mishel. “They have diverged such that productivity grew 72 percent since 1973 but the pay of a typical worker grew only 9 percent.” He adds that the current real minimum wage is 25 percent lower than it was in 1968.
Marketplace
September 4, 2015
Groups from the left and right came to Jackson Hole during the Fed’s annual meeting to try to make their economic-policy perspectives heard.
Wall Street Journal
September 4, 2015
15% vs. 138% Average pay increase in real wages since 1979 for the bottom 90% vs. top 1% of earners in America, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Time Magazine
September 4, 2015
Republican appointees would also be likely to target the new franchise ruling, which could make it easier for workers at fast-food companies like McDonald’s to unionize. “There is no permanence to a decision like the one that was reached, which overcome 30 years of mostly Republican decisions,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice-president of the progressive Economic Policy Institute.
The New Republic
September 4, 2015
The current salary threshold for overtime is badly out of date, says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. The last time the overtime threshold was significantly raised, in 1975, $23,660 covered a full 61 percent of salaried employees.
The American Prospect
September 4, 2015
Another study released this week by the Economic Policy Institute documented that despite a solid increase in worker productivity since 2000, the actual wealth generated by those gains went to shareholders and top executives, not the workers.
CBS Moneywatch
September 4, 2015
Overall, immigration is good for the country in myriad ways, including its effects on the wages of most workers. But competition with lesser-skilled immigrants can be a problem for low-wage-earning native-born workers during a recession or a time of high unemployment[pdf], though the effect generally equalizes over time. The only workers whose wages are depressed in a sustained way by lesser-skilled immigration are other immigrant workers with less than a high school degree. That’s evidence we shouldn’t fear immigration, but it’s not an argument for increasing the flow of lesser-skilled, low-wage workers to the United States. The McKinsey Global Institute has projected that in 2020, relative to the number of available jobs, there may be a surplus of about six million workers with a high school degree and of almost one million workers without a high school degree. If these projections are even remotely in the ballpark, then it is highly unlikely that the United States will face labor shortages requiring less-educated, lesser-skilled immigrant workers.
The New York Times
September 3, 2015
One explanation may lie in the findings of another study released on Wednesday by the Economic Policy Institute, also a liberal research group. Its report showed that even as labor productivity has improved steadily since 2000, the benefits from improved efficiency have nearly all gone to companies, shareholders and top executives, rather than rank-and-file employees.
The New York Times
September 3, 2015
The study, conducted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), finds that from 2000 to 2014, American workers’ total productivity increased 21.6 percent, while the median worker’s compensation, including pay and benefits, rose just 1.8 percent.
The Huffington Post
September 3, 2015
However, growth in this gap eased the following decade and especially since 2000, according to Economic Policy Institute think tank. While there is little question that the long-run effects of technological change are in this upward direction and will thereby make it harder for uneducated workers to command high wages, there is also a growing awareness that increased education alone will not solve the wage stagnation problem.
The New Republic
September 3, 2015
On Point
September 3, 2015
Americans keep working harder and producing more economic growth. But they’re not getting rewarded with any extra pay for it, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
And it means that stagnating wages aren’t workers’ fault. “People have been told that the economy isn’t doing well and therefore that’s why people haven’t done well,” Lawrence Mishel, president of EPI and a co-author of the report, told ThinkProgress. But economic growth has kept increasing at a healthy rate. “Everybody’s wages could have grown substantially. But they didn’t.” This isn’t accidental, either. “We haven’t been in an economic tsunami where people aren’t able to move ahead,” Mishel said. “This is a man-made phenomenon.”
Think Progress
September 3, 2015
The widening chasm between workers’ pay and productivity since the 1970s is “the central component of the wage stagnation story” in the United States, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said in a report issued Wednesday ahead of the Labor Day weekend. Drawing on data from the Social Security Administration and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, EPI economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens found that median hourly compensation, adjusted for inflation, grew by 8.7 percent between 1973 and 2014. Productivity rose 72.2 percent over the same time period, the EPI report said. “Productivity and compensation — all wages and benefits for a typical worker — used to grow together from 1948 to 1973, but since 1973 they have diverged,” Mishel said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. “That’s very important.”
Al Jazeera America
September 3, 2015
The oft spoken refrain about New York best serving childless young people is as true as the summer air is muggy, as a new report via the Economic Policy Institute could compel young New York families to skip town in favor of the radiant pastures of Toledo, Ohio. While the general outlay of living in New York is reflected constantly in what you hear, read and experience daily, the EPI’s report highlights the relative affordability of basically everywhere else in the country.
Brooklyn Magazine
September 2, 2015
Teenagers, however, represent only a fraction of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage, argue proponents of increasing the federally mandated minimum. “That ad simply displays employers’ contempt for their low-wage workers, portraying them as young workers not needing to feed their families,” Lawrence Mishel told the Guardian. Mischel is president of the other EPI – the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “How can that be accurate when more than 40% of America’s workers earn less than $15 an hour? When the minimum wage is more than 25% below its 1968 value, almost 50 years ago and when the productivity was just half of what it is today?” According to the Economic Policy Institute, if a federally mandated minimum wage were raised to $12 an hour as proposed by some Democratic lawmakers, the average age of an affected worker would be 36 years old. About 15.3% of affected workers would be aged 55 or older, compared with just 10.7% teenagers. The majority of workers – at 55.9% – would be women, including 40% of working single mothers.
The Guardian
September 2, 2015
At $11 hourly and no more than 30 hours per week, a tollbooth worker on the Skyway would earn $17,160 in a year — and that’s before payroll taxes are taken out. Even for a single adult with no dependents in the Chicago metro area, the cost of living is over $31,000 annually, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator.
Think Progress
September 2, 2015
Over on real estate blog Candy’s Dirt, Jon Anderson spent some time with a Family Budget Calculator recently updated by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. It uses market-specific date to estimate the income necessary for living in various cities not just at the subsistence level of the federal poverty line ($24,250 for a family of four) but at a standard of living that most of us would consider a bare minimum to, as Anderson puts it, “live like a human” with (according to EPI’s guidelines) “structurally safe, and sanitary rental housing of a modest nature with suitable amenities,” “nutritionally adequate diets,” as well as adequate health care coverage and meeting transportation needs.
Dallas Magazine
September 2, 2015
“They were very weak on getting people into their positions in the first term,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research and advocacy group. “They lost many years of potential fruitful activity.” (The White House says that the president was prompt in naming appointees, whose nominations then became bogged down in the Senate.)
“We’re really digging out of a 40-year hole,” Mr. Mishel said. “The Clinton years were ones where they more triangulated between business and workers rather than weigh in on the side of workers.”
The New York Times
September 1, 2015
The bad news: The ranks of underemployed and unemployed grads have soared since 2008. Job prospects have certainly improved lately, but the number of college grads earning the minimum wage alone hovers at around 250,000. For college graduates ages 21 to 24, the unemployment rate is 7.2 percent (vs. 5.3 percent for the general population), according to the Economic Policy Institute.
New York Post
September 1, 2015
A smarter move might be a whole new labor regime – something that acknowledges employment has changed a lot since the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935. “The NLRA should be overhauled completely,” Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an email.
Politico
September 1, 2015
“I would much rather have the Fed engage in slowdown and recession prevention by getting us to reach levels at which a rate hike would not be premature,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said earlier this week.
The Huffington Post
September 1, 2015
In 2013, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, responded strongly to Duncan’s arguments, pointing out that “no education secretary has been as deft as Arne Duncan in creating incentives—both carrots and sticks—to get states to follow his favored policies that are technically voluntary.”
“Only in this area, apparently, does Secretary Duncan believe that progress must be entirely voluntary, unforced by carrots and sticks,” Rothstein wrote. There have been plenty of opportunities to incentivize racial integration, such as rewarding states that prohibit all-white suburbs from excluding poor people through zoning ordinances, or withholding No Child Left Behind waivers from states that allow landlords to discriminate against families using federal housing vouchers. “Adoption of such ‘voluntary’ policies could make a contribution to narrowing the academic achievement gap that is so much a focus of Secretary Duncan’s rhetoric,” Rothstein said.
The American Prospect
September 1, 2015
According to an updated family budget calculator created by the Economic Policy Institute, the District leads the nation in how much parents pay for child care. For a family of four — two parents and two children — child care costs in the city average $2,597 per month, or $31,158 per year.
WAMU
September 1, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank founded in 1986 to study the needs of low- and middle-income workers, this week provided a more accurate measure of what it truly costs to secure an “adequate but modest standard of living” in the United States, circa 2014.
Tampa Bay Times
September 1, 2015
A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that, no matter where they live in the United States, minimum wage workers earn far less than they need to make ends meet. (Tweet This) Compiling data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Highway Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and several other sources, the nonpartisan think tank found that the average cost of living in the U.S., excluding discretionary spending, is more than $65,000 a year for a family with two adults and two children. That’s roughly $50,000 more than what a minimum-wage worker earns. The EPI also looked at the cost of living for single adults and found similar disparities.
CNBC
September 1, 2015
The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has ignited a nationwide conversation about racial polarization and civil unrest when it comes to relationships with minorities and the police. During this River to River interview, host Ben Kieffer talks with Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles. Rothstein says the racial tension is due in part to housing policies and government programs that created an “invisible fence” to segregate metropolitan communities around the country.
Iowa Public Radio
September 1, 2015
Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2015
Now, the Economic Policy Institute has developed a nifty new tool that shows exactly how much money you have to shell out to live in the Philadelphia metropolitan area and other regions throughout the country. Here’s what the think tank found it takes for a family with two adults and two children to survive here…One interesting takeaway? At $14,630, a family’s estimated annual child care costs in the Philadelphia metro are higher than its housing costs, which are approximately $13,620. CityLab reported that Philly is not unique in this way: “In 500 out of the 618 areas analyzed, child care costs more than housing for such families, says Elise Gould, senior economist and director of health policy research at the institute.”
Philadelphia Magazine
August 28, 2015