These practices tallied up to nearly $1 billion in 2012, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The Walmart lawsuit is unusual because it frames generally well-compensated employees as victims of the trend. It also sheds light on the labor practices of the trucking industry.
International Business Times
June 12, 2015
Researchers at private consulting firm Industrial Economics and the University of Maryland, for instance, recently predicted that the plan would add more than a quarter of a million jobs to the U.S. economy by 2040. This week, the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute said the Clean Power Plan would create nearly 100,000 more jobs than are lost.
Think Progress
June 12, 2015
The paper, written by Leila Morsy and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, focuses on five factors that new research suggests hinder the achievement of poor children: parenting practices in low-income households, single parenthood, irregular work schedules of parents in low-wage jobs, poor access to health care and exposure to lead.
The Washington Post
June 11, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, the vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, says when the rule was adjusted in 1975 more than 60% of salaried employees were eligible for overtime. According to his most recent calculation, he says, less than 10% of workers are currently eligible. The institute previously found only about 11% of workers were eligible in 2013. “Today, about 50% of children are raised in a family where both parents are working,” Eisenbrey says. “Having them work overtime is a particular strain on children and families with children. We need this rule more than ever.”
Time Magazine
June 11, 2015
Many millennials were unlucky to come of age when the Great Recession hit in 2008, and they’re still dealing with a tough job market despite the economy’s recovery. Many also are saddled with college debt. “Young college graduates’ job prospects have deteriorated dramatically since the start of the Great Recession,” the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank, said last month.
Los Angeles Times
June 11, 2015
In recent decades, rising inequality has funneled more money into the pockets of those at the top of the income ladder. But the 2014 numbers don’t match that trend. Low-wage workers saw the biggest gains last year, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute. Wages at the low end grew roughly 3.5 percent, while higher-wage workers saw no gains at all.
The Boston Globe
June 11, 2015
Indeed, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, as of 2013, only 11 percent of full-time workers were guaranteed overtime. Bumping the threshold up to around $50,000, for example — roughly where it was in 1975, adjusted for inflation — would bring 47 percent of workers under the threshold, making around 6 million more workers eligible, by one estimate.
And as in the minimum-wage debate, advocates of higher overtime thresholds say lawmakers should simply index the level to inflation — not only would it save lawmakers from periodic fights over how much to change the law, but it would also help lower-paid hourly workers by making sure they’re all paid fairly by keeping wage policies consistent with where prices go. “The original notion was that the people who don’t control their own hours, who need the protection of the law, get paid overtime,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at EPI. “Where the law set the threshold in 1975, that’s really supposed to demarcate the people about whom there’s no question — they are not the most powerful people.”
NPR
June 10, 2015
In a paper published last year, Heidi Shierholz, an economist formerly with the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank based in Washington, said that although the threshold rule was meant to protect workers who lack control over their time and tasks and do not receive high pay, the salary threshold has been updated only eight times in 75 years and only once since 1975.
The Chicago Tribune
June 10, 2015
An Economic Policy Institute report released Tuesday said the jobs both lost and gained would have “a substantial ripple effect” in other industries. The plan would lead to a net increase of 360,000 new jobs by 2020, the report said.
The report, written by Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, also warned that consumers and employers could be caught off-guard by higher electricity rates under the plan, possibly threatening between 25,000 and 150,000 jobs.
The Hill
June 10, 2015
Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute, who has done lots of smart analysis of EPA rules in the past, has done a deep dive on the employment effects of the CPP. His methodology is fairly simple. He takes the effects of the CPP on electrical generation (as projected by EPA in its Regulatory Impact Analysis) and calculates their employment effects. More specifically, he calculates their direct effects, indirect effects, and price effects on employment.
The direct effects are changes in employment in industries directly involved in electricity, which EPA already calculates in its RIA. Bivens then takes those numbers and calculates their indirect effects on “supplier jobs, induced (or re-spending) jobs, and public-sector jobs.” The sum of these three is the “multiplier effect” of the direct employment changes. The price effects trace the impact of higher electricity prices.
VOX
June 10, 2015
So what might this new overtime rule mean? It is difficult to say exactly how many workers will be affected, but the labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute estimates that a revision of the FLSA along these lines would likely impact between 5 and 10 million workers. For an optimistic interpretation of a more stringent overtime rule, I recommend reading EPI’s report on overtime from last spring, by Jared Diamond and Ross Eisenbrey.
National Review
June 10, 2015
By 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed Clean Power Plan will create nearly 100,000 more jobs than are lost, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. The report’s initial estimates are higher than some similar studies; however, the institute found that the job impacts of the Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon emissions from power plants, would not last, and would become “almost completely insignificant by 2030.”
But job growth analysis is incredibly complicated. Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute and the report’s author, explained that measuring such things as doctor’s visits could end up on both sides of the ledger. “Induced losses include fewer visits to doctors offices from people who’ve lost jobs, incomes, and insurance, but also include increased visits to doctors offices from people who have gained jobs, incomes, and insurance coverage,” he told ThinkProgress in an email.
Think Progress
June 10, 2015
You took the same classes and aced the same midterms and smiled for the same picturesque photos at graduation. But according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, the boys who stood next to you at Commencement are slated to earn $3 more per hour at work than you do.
Elle
June 9, 2015
Many policy experts believe that both the purported harms and gains from the TPP are being overstated in a heated debate. “There are going to be very few jobs that will be affected,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Robert Scott, who opposes the deal, told my former colleague Danny Vinik. Even legislators from the most export-driven districts remain unconvinced on the deal. According to a new Wall Street Journal analysis, “in the 10 districts with the biggest export growth since 2006, only three of the representatives” are currently backing the TPP.
The New Republic
June 9, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who pitched the changes to the White House in 2013, said updating the rules was necessary to reflect changes in the workforce. “It would provide a better work-family balance for millions of workers, giving some higher pay for working overtime and others reduced hours without any reduction in pay,” he said.
Reuters
June 9, 2015
Sanders pointed to an Economic Policy Institute study he requested that showed the real unemployment rate for black high school graduates, ages 17 to 20, was more than 51 percent during the 12 months ending in March. The jobless rate for Hispanics in that age group was just under 34 percent.
The Hill
June 9, 2015
Employers can garner huge benefits by avoiding “employment-related obligations,” says an upcoming report by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, labor-affiliated think tank. They “save on labor and administration costs and gain advantage over competitors.” They avoid paying the employers’ half of Social Security and Medicare taxes (workers must pay instead), and unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation taxes. They even can circumvent immigration enforcement — employers can’t be charged with hiring undocumented workers if they don’t have any employees.
Los Angeles Times
June 8, 2015
In the lower-paid, less competitive civil-service positions—in the Post Office, for example, or in middle-management office jobs—blacks have climbed the color-blind rungs of the civil-service hiring ladder with great success, according to Valerie Wilson, who heads up the Race, Ethnicity, and Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute. So much so, in fact, that as The New York Times reported just last week, cuts to government jobs and reductions of public-sector positions hit African Americans the hardest among all groups.
The Atlantic
June 8, 2015
Discussing the use of skilled foreign workers in the U.S., with Daniel Costa, Economic policy institute, and Cyrus Mehta, immigration attorney.
CNBC
June 8, 2015
Why aren’t Americans getting bigger raises? You can see why thanks to graphs like this one from the Economic Policy Institute, which says wages are “stuck in the mud.”
Slate
June 8, 2015
More recently, a number of Fed rate setters have come out and warned over economic data. In the first quarter the U.S. economy shrank 0.7 percent and the second quarter recovery has been tepid so far as consumers have not responded to lower gasoline prices by spending their money on other items. “Even though job growth was solid, it needs to be sustained over a longer period of time in order to significantly tighten the labor market to the point where we finally see significant wage growth,” wrote Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.
Reuters
June 8, 2015
The problem, by the way, isn’t that the US is only creating low-wage jobs. An analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute found that over the past year, the economy has been adding high-, low-, and middle-wage jobs “in proportion to the rate that those jobs already exist in the economy.”
Christian Science Monitor
June 8, 2015
According to new research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, young adults between the ages of 21 and 24 who graduated college in 2000 and entered the workforce rather than grad school earned an average of $18.41 an hour. Today, that figure is $17.94, a 2.5 percent drop, even as the relative burden of student loan debt young adults carry upon graduation has mushroomed. “Much of it has to do with the Great Recession and the aftermath and the weak economy,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and one of the study’s authors. “We haven’t pulled ourselves out of that.”
NBC News
June 8, 2015
An analysis by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute found that the Fed’s actions did indeed help shore up employment and, with it, workers’ ability to command higher wages — while the gain in stock prices attributable to quantitative easing may be lower than previously thought.
The Washington Post
June 5, 2015
But Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute says there are still plenty of challenges. “There’s much less federal investment in youth employment programs and services,” she says. “So it is almost entirely on the private sector to provide summer employment opportunities.”
Marketplace
June 5, 2015
Data released this week by the Economic Policy Institute found that young female grads make an average of three dollars less than their male peers. The report found that “while young male college grads earn an average hourly wage of $19.64 early in their careers, their female counterparts earn an average hourly wage of just $16.56.” That’s a gap of 18.6 percent. The EPI report is a quick hit, and the numbers don’t make distinctions for different majors and different jobs. But the American Association of University Women has been documenting the wage gap for people in their first year out of college, and those numbers are incredibly specific and point to similar issues.
Salon
June 5, 2015
Josh Bivens, research and policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, argues in an August 2014 fact sheet that the Fed should look for 3.5 percent growth. In the first quarter of 2015, wages were up 2.6 percent from the year before — a growth rate that many economists say doesn’t have a real impact on regular people’s lives.
Huffington Post
June 5, 2015
According to a new report published by the Economic Policy Institute titled The Class of 2015, the labor market has improved for college graduates but still has a long way to go before it reaches pre-recession levels. And once the data are broken down into race and gender, it’s obvious that unemployment is more of a reality for some groups than others.
The American Prospect
June 5, 2015
Arguments about why the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal would be good for middle-class Americans boil down to claims that it will boost U.S. exports. From an economic perspective, this is not a good case: The textbook argument for why efforts to liberalize trade are good for national income is that such efforts make imports cheaper, and increased exports are mostly a side-show.
But proponents of TPP are not stressing that the deal would cheapen imports, for a couple of reasons. First, barriers to imports to the U.S. are already low, so the proposed Pacific trade deal would have little traction in boosting imports to the U.S. Second, cheaper imports have ripple effects that make the case for liberalized trade problematic because they result in a contraction of domestic producers competing with importers and an expansion of export sectors that leads to lower wages for most Americans and increased inequality.
Wall Street Journal
June 4, 2015
In one paper, economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research and advocacy group, made three points in defense of the Fed. First, the bond-buying strengthened the economic recovery by lowering interest rates and creating jobs in interest-sensitive sectors such as housing and manufacturing. “Stimulus that reduces unemployment disproportionately benefits low- and moderate-wage workers,” Bivens wrote. Overall, Fed policies cut the unemployment rate by 1 percentage point, he estimated. That’s about 1.5 million jobs today.
Second, back-of-the-envelope estimates exaggerate the Fed’s effects on stock prices. Bivens reviewed studies and found estimates ranging from 3 percent to 8.5 percent — far smaller than Wien’s recent estimate. Bivens settled on 5 percent as a plausible gain. Third, lower interest rates also boosted the wealth of the middle class, with the largest effects on home prices. Bivens estimated that interest rates on mortgage bonds fell 1.5 percentage points, raising average home prices about 7 percent. That’s significant, because for middle-income Americans, housing represents nearly two-thirds of their wealth.
The Washington Post
June 4, 2015