Media clips
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A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan Washington-based think tank that focuses on labor research, found that, even after controlling for a wide range of varying labor market conditions, average overall (union and non-union) wages in “right-to-work” states are about 3 percent lower than in “fair share” states like ours. That means the typical full-time worker in a “right-to-work” state makes $1,558 less each year than the average worker in a state like Illinois.
The Chicago Sun Times May 14, 2015 -
On the other hand, pay has long been flat, even for college grads, so entry level wages, on average, will likely be no better than they were for grads from 15 years ago. The graph in this report by the Economic Policy Institute charts the average hourly wages of young workers, by education (in 2013 dollars). The average for college grads, $17.94, works out to about $36,000 a year.
The New York Times May 13, 2015 -
The liberal wing of the Democratic party has come out swinging against the agreement, with Warren, Senator Harry Reid, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi all voicing opposition. Robert Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, told VICE News that the public portions of the TPP point to a deal that could erode US jobs and put downward pressure on US wages.
“Certainly, experience tells us that when we negotiate trade and investment deals — like the Korea deal, like NAFTA, like the agreement to bring China into the WTO — what we’ve experienced is not just growing exports but imports, and as a result the losses of millions of jobs,” Scott said. The TPP could affect the wages of 100 million American workers, costing each an average of about $1,800 per year, Scott said, citing EPI research. “Everybody with a similar skill set, essentially all workers in the domestic economy who don’t have a college degree… could lose $1,800 a year,” he said. “Those are the most salient statistics for most working Americans. That’s why there’s such broad public concern about the effects of these trade deals.”
Vice News May 13, 2015 -
Job prospects for college graduates have been pretty terrible for a long time, said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The average young college graduate, between the ages of 21 and 24, makes just under $18/hour, or $36,000 a year, according to new data that EPI is set to release later this month. As an average, that figure is probably skewed a little high, said Bivens. Since 2000, grads have actually seen their pay fall from $18.41 an hour to $17.94, according to the new EPI data. A lot of college graduates wind up “underemployed” in jobs that don’t require a degree, said Bivens. The unemployment rate for young college graduates was 8.5 percent, according to a 2014 report from EPI, but the underemployment rate was nearly double that. “There’s a reason there’s a stereotype of college grads working as baristas in coffee shops,” he said.
The Huffington Post May 13, 2015 -
We’ll look at the white-hot politics of trade as President Obama and Congress go to the mat on the TPP.
On Point May 13, 2015 -
Although the exact extent of wage theft and underpayment nationwide isn’t recorded in any one place, “survey evidence suggests that wage theft is widespread and costs workers billions of dollars a year,” says a September report by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, citing a study of conditions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The phenomenon extends well beyond big cities. The Economic Policy Institute surveyed federal and local agencies that regulate wage conditions and found that “state departments of labor in 44 states recovered $172 million; state attorneys general in 45 states recovered $14 million; and private attorneys recovered $467 million in wage and hour class action lawsuits.”
CNN May 13, 2015 -
The true costs of goods and services is a secondary issue to stagnant and exploitative wages: The cost of certain goods might go up, but more people would be able to afford them with better compensation. The current price of low-cost goods and services in the United States is low-income, exploited workers living in poverty. But the country as a whole isn’t broke, only its workers are — while corporations and C.E.O.s are richer than ever. The value of the federal minimum wage has declined 24 percent since 1968. If we re-established the relationship between the minimum wage and the overall median wage to its 1968 level, we would raise wages for 35 million people, a full quarter of the workforce.
The situation is even worse for those earning tips, such as nail salon workers. Their pay is set at $2.13 an hour by the federal government. If tips don’t supplement these workers’ paycheck to the regular minimum, they have to ask their employers for the difference. (And good luck with that.)
The New York Times May 12, 2015 -
The impact of the bolder proposal for America’s workforce would be widely felt. According to recent estimates by the Economic Policy Institute, the new wage rate of $12 per hour will boost earnings for some 10 million parents, 21 million women and nearly 18 million workers of color.
CNN May 12, 2015 -
But the Economic Policy Institute points out that this ignores imports, and therefore the ballooning trade deficit, which weighs down economic growth and wages.
Salon May 12, 2015 -
The system accelerated urban decline and ghettoization. It also prevented a generation of black citizens from gaining the wealth that typically flows from homeownership. Writing of Baltimore just last month, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, argued that “the distressed condition of African-American working- and lower-middle-class families” in Maryland’s largest city and elsewhere “is almost entirely attributable to federal policy that prohibited black families from accumulating housing equity during the suburban boom that moved white families into single-family homes from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s — and thus from bequeathing that wealth to their children and grandchildren, as white suburbanites have done.”
The New York Times May 11, 2015 -
According to a brief by the Economic Policy Institute, the Walton Family’s total wealth equals that of 79 percent of the combined wealth of all African American families (or almost 78 percent of the combined wealth of all Latino families).
The Washington Post May 11, 2015 -
The average U.S. worker hasn’t done as well. For the 12 months ended in April, wages rose 2.2%. That’s well above inflation but below the 3.5% to 4% that marks a healthy economy, said Josh Bivens, the research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers.
The economy needs stronger jobs growth to increase demand for workers and push up pay, he said. “It’s too slow to have spurred any increase in wage growth yet, and I still think it’s going to be a while,” he said of April’s employment gains. Given that the economy appears to be stuck in another year of modest 2% to 2.5% economic growth, Bivens said, the Fed should not raise its benchmark interest rate yet.
Los Angeles Times May 11, 2015 -
Barack Obama’s petulant criticism last Friday of Democrats who do not support his proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership reminds me of the old tongue-in-cheek advice to young lawyers: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the law is on your side, pound the law. If neither is on your side, pound the other lawyer.” The facts are definitely not on the President’s side. For two decades the trade deals negotiated by the last three presidents have lowered U.S. wages, lost jobs and generated a chronic trade deficit that requires our country to borrow more money every year in order to pay for imports. The president’s main argument that exports have risen, without mentioning that imports have risen much faster, is now transparently deceitful to anyone who can add and subtract.
The Huffington Post May 11, 2015 -
Overall, the national unemployment rate fell to 5.4% Friday, its lowest point since 2008. But unemployment is still higher for blacks than any other race — 9.6% in April. “That definitely is a positive step in the right direction,” says Valerie Wilson, an economist who covers race and ethnicity issues at the Economic Policy Institute. “But it’s also an indicator of how much more progress needs to be made for African Americans.” Despite being almost six years into a recovery, the employment picture for blacks looks particularly grim in some states. Blacks in Illinois have an unemployment rate of 12.5% — more than double the national average. Michigan, Pennsylvania and California are above 12% too, according to an EPI report. The good news is that those rates have been steadily going down in the past year.
CNN May 11, 2015 -
In general, wages for new college graduates, as for US workers, have stagnated since the recession. On average, entry-level wages for graduates are expected to be no better than 15 years ago, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.
The Boston Globe May 11, 2015 -
Previous trade agreements have failed miserably in living up to the promise of new jobs. In fact, the North American Free Trade Agreement cost the United States 650,000 jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
San Francisco Chronicle May 11, 2015 -
But advocates fighting for better wages and working conditions at McDonald’s argue that most fast-food workers are not in fact teenagers and struggling actors. “If he thinks McDonald’s provides opportunities for people who need to find a job quickly, I can’t argue with that,” said David Cooper, economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “But you have a lot more people taking jobs at McDonald’s who aren’t struggling actors or students. It’s people trying to support a family.” A study by Cooper shows that workers earning less than $12 an hour today are 36 years old on average and more than one in four are supporting children. Only 11% are teenagers.
CNN Money May 8, 2015 -
Black America’s problems, like America’s, are unevenly spread. Many African-Americans live white-picket-fence lives, but some cluster in districts of utter dysfunction, especially in cities where old industries have vanished. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank, 45% of poor African-American children live in areas where 30% or more of their neighbours are poor. Only 12% of poor white children live amid such concentrated poverty.
The Economist May 8, 2015 -
First, the good: black unemployment has recovered in several states. The bad news? Those states had some of the highest black unemployment rates in the first place, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. The black unemployment rate during the first quarter of this year was at or below its pre-recession level in six states: Connecticut, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee, according to the analysis. But the rates in those states were also among the highest in the country before the recession. EPI notes.
The Washington Post May 7, 2015 -
Robert Scott, the director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on low- and middle-income workers, also pointed to Nike’s role as a leader in outsourcing as the reason for his dismay at Mr. Obama’s speech locale. “What the president is going to do is visiting and promoting and talking to the winners,” he said. Scott objects to Nike because it has hundreds of thousands of overseas workers employed by its suppliers, and a comparably tiny workforce based in America. “Is that what a Democratic president should be doing? I don’t think so,” he said.
CBS News May 7, 2015 -
Steve Inskeep talks to Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute about what he calls “government-sponsored segregation,” and how it has led to police-community tensions.
NPR May 7, 2015 -
afrBut the separation between white society and the black ghetto, the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein explains, was deliberate. Even after the end of Jim Crow, decades of discriminatory housing and criminal justice policies have conspired to confine many black Americans in the ghetto — or prison — with little hope for the future. “Baltimore, not at all uniquely, has experienced a century of public policy designed, consciously so, to segregate and impoverish its black population,”Rothstein writes.
The Washington Post May 7, 2015 -
Ross Eisenbrey and Michael Tanner talked about the role of government in combating inner-city poverty in communities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Topics included the minimum wage, tax policy, and jobs. The discussion began with a history of racial segregation in U.S. cities and “white flight” to the suburbs.
C-SPAN May 7, 2015 -
… a common argument against including a currency-management provision in the trade pact is that it would somehow interfere with future Federal Reserve responses to U.S. recessions. Because the Fed’s purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities during the recovery from the Great Recession put downward pressure on the dollar’s value, some say that this could be defined as currency management and bar the Fed from such actions under the auspices of a currency provision in the proposed trade agreement–hamstringing U.S. policy in future recessions.
This is nonsense. Every macroeconomic policy will have some impact on exchange rates. Tax cuts that raise federal budget deficits lead, all else being equal, to lower dollar values. Yet no one has ever said this constitutes “currency management.” Infrastructure investments that boost productivity growth would have implications for the dollar’s value (depending on which sector’s productivity growth improved), yet nobody has ever considered such investments “currency management.”
The reason no one has ever confused these practices with currency management is because currency management is pretty simple to define: It is the practice of buying assets denominated in foreign currency for the purpose of weakening one’s own currency in an effort to run trade surpluses. So it’s easy to see why the Fed’s asset purchases in recent years would never somehow get scooped up in a well-crafted currency provision: The Fed bought domestic assets with an aim to lower domestic interest rates, not foreign assets with an aim to lower the value of the dollar.
It is obvious why opponents of including a strong currency provision in the Pacific trade pact would want to say that it would hamstring the Fed’s ability to fight recessions–an outcome that would indeed be a bad thing. But the argument is flat wrong – there’s no reason to think that a currency provision based on widely held definitions of what constitutes currency management would be construed as barring a central bank’s purchase of assets denominated in its own country’s currency. This feels like an opportunistic argument to stop a sensible call for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to address the biggest barrier to trade in the global economy.
Wall Street Journal May 7, 2015 -
What Gornick and Milanovic realized (helped by suggestions from a number of colleagues, notably Larry Mishel at EPI) was that true US market inequality might be being masked by another exceptional piece of the US system – delayed retirement, causing many older households to have positive market income where comparable households in other countries have no or very little market income. Thus, putting all households together and looking at their pre-tax-pre-transfer income inequality makes other countries’ distributions appear comparatively more unequal because people in other countries are more likely to retire earlier than in the US (and hence have zero or low market income).
The New York Times May 5, 2015 -
There are some clues as to why black immigrants might have lower incomes in spite of their advantages in a couple of research reports by the Economic Policy Institute. The economist Patrick Mason and I examined whether cultural differences between U.S.-born and foreign-born blacks might have an impact on their wages in “The Low Wages of Black Immigrants.” Many people believe that black immigrants possess cultural values that would lead them to greater economic success than U.S.-born blacks. Mason and I did not find evidence to support this view. U.S.-born and foreign-born blacks both had significantly lower wages than U.S.-born whites. In fact, after controlling for worker and labor-market characteristics, some black immigrants were even worse off than U.S.-born blacks. Thus, since both U.S.-born blacks and foreign-born blacks performed poorly in comparison with U.S.-born whites, the real issue may be that there is a penalty for being black in the American labor market.
The Huffington Post May 5, 2015 -
The American Prospect May 5, 2015
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This is an important post about the consequences of government-sponsored segregation in places such as Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, where violent protest has erupted over the deaths of black men at the hands of police. It was written scholar Richard Rothstein, who explains that whenever young blacks riot in response to police brutality or murder, “we’re tempted to think we can address the problem by improving police quality” — but that only won’t address the primary problems. Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers.
The Washington Post May 4, 2015 -
Hillary Clinton could face a litmus test very soon. She is under pressure to take a position on a massive Pacific free-trade agreement sought by President Obama. Legislation supporting the pact is moving through Congress, and the left is mobilizing to fight it. “This is a chance to separate herself from what people fear about her, which is a continuation of some of the Clintonian economic policies that did not work out so well,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy institute, a progressive think tank.
For now, Mishel is reserving judgment. He said the candidate could yet delight liberal activists, noting that Clinton had the more progressive agenda when she ran unsuccessfully against Obama eight years ago. But he also pointed out that she would be spending a lot of time with Wall Street in the coming months, soliciting donations for her campaign. “We just don’t know where she is yet,” he said. “The unstated concern of some people, I think, is that she is too close to the financial center and needs to raise a lot of money. That can make someone shy about addressing the 1%. And it can push them into emphasizing ‘opportunity’ over inequality.”
The Chicago Tribune May 4, 2015 -
“You have people working full-time who are still living in poverty,” said Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the chief sponsor of the $12 proposal in the House. “Raising the minimum wage will address that.” About 37.7 million workers would benefit from the higher wage floor, and just 11 percent would be teenagers, said David Cooper, who co-authored a study of the legislation for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic May 4, 2015