But more often than not, we’re being faced with a new issue of employment. Despite the fact the country is coming out of a recession, the Economic Policy Institute simply states people just aren’t getting jobs as easily, whether they have a college degree or not.
USA Today
April 7, 2015
According to research at the Economic Policy Institute, compensation for chief executives at publicly traded companies climbed 937 percent between 1978 and 2013, while the average worker’s compensation climbed just 10 percent.
Huffington Post
April 7, 2015
Across industries, CEO pay has risen over the past half-century in comparison with what the average worker earns. In 1965, the leaders of the top 350 publicly traded companies made an average of 20 times what the average worker did, but by 2013 that had ballooned to about 296 times, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank affiliated with labor unions.
Wall Street Journal
April 6, 2015
During these years, inflation-adjusted median wages grew an average of 1.5 percent annually compared with no gain from 1979 to 1995, says the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “The late 1990s,” it argues, “was the only period between 1979 and 2013 when wage growth was robust and broadly shared.”
The Washington Post
April 6, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said that while there are legitimate uses for the H-1B, the visas are mainly used to drive down labor costs and boost profits. “It’s about replacing US workers who are already doing the job with someone who’ll do it more cheaply,” said Eisenbrey. “Their only purpose is cutting wages. it’s not about bringing new skills.” Eisenbrey called for legislation that would make it illegal to lay off US citizens and replace them with H-1B workers. He also proposed requiring H-1B workers be paid more than the local prevailing wage for the work they do. Eisenbrey said that if the foreign workers possess skills that are impossible to find in the US labor market, companies should be happy to pay the extra money.
The Boston Globe
April 6, 2015
But Elise Gould, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement that the new report “should give us pause. … While it’s important not to put too much stock in a couple months of data — especially given the unusual amount of snow that blanketed the country in the past two months — policymakers should be wary of any signs of any slowdown from the solid job growth over the previous year.”
“There is still ample slack in the labor market,” Gould wrote. “Private sector hourly wages are up only 2.1 percent over the year. Wages need to grow faster, and for a longer time, before we can say the economy is truly working for working people.”
Politico
April 6, 2015
The weak March report is a reminder that although the economy is improving, it’s still struggling to climb back from the Great Recession. “While it’s important not to put too much stock in a couple months of data . . . policymakers should be wary of any signs of any slowdown from the solid job growth over the previous year,” Elise Gould, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis. “Other indicators make it clear that there is still ample slack in the labor market.”
McClatchy
April 6, 2015
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute pointed out that the public sector workforce has not recovered since the recession. “The economy is short 1.3 million public sector jobs,” EPI senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a blog post Friday.
NBC News
April 6, 2015
When people cheat to escape a corrupt accountability system, who is to blame? This was written by scholar Richard Rothstein, 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. This appeared on the EPI website and I am republishing it with permission.
The Washington Post
April 6, 2015
Over the last year, employers added an average of 266,000 workers to their payrolls each month, pushing the unemployment rate to a level not seen since 2008. The falling overall rate, however, obscures persistent difficulties facing particular groups of workers. “The unemployment rate for black communities is at a crisis level, even as the economy gets closer and closer to a full recovery,” said Valerie Wilson, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The New York Times
April 3, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based liberal think tank, nominal wage rises of 3.5-4 percent per year will be needed before workers begin to recover losses from the last severe recession.
Elise Gould, an economist at the EPI, said state-government mandated minimum wage hikes, rather than a scarcity of workers in retail, leisure and hospitality probably contributed to the improved fortunes of the bottom 10 percent. “I would be surprised if those were the sectors where we saw the tightness first,” she said.
Reuters
April 3, 2015
Perhaps because of the effect on prices, the mortgage-interest deduction doesn’t even seem to encourage homeownership. Thomas L. Hungerford, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, notes that Canada and the United Kingdom have homeownership rates similar to that of the U.S., even though they don’t let borrowers write off the interest on their mortgages. “Having the mortgage-interest deduction does almost nothing for increasing homeownership rates,” Hungerford said.
FiveThirtyEight
April 3, 2015
This report was produced by the Economic Policy Institute as part of the Full Employment Project of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The American Prospect
April 3, 2015
International Franchise Association CEO Steve Caldera and Economic Policy Institute Senior Economist Elise Gould weigh in on the income inequality and minimum wage debate. They speak on “In The Loop.”
Bloomberg TV
April 2, 2015
The raise, however, only applies to employees of the actual restaurant. The 750,000 workers employed by franchises, which make up 90 percent of McDonald’s restaurants, are not included in this wage hike. “The fact that a $1.00 raise for 90,000 workers is headline news is evidence of how low the bar has been set,” the Economic Policy Institute noted in a statement. “All workers should receive regular wage increases as productivity rises, and yet despite rising productivity, Americans’ wages have been stagnant for three-and-a-half decades.”
Mother Jones
April 2, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, said the fact a $1 raise for 90,000 workers is headline news is evidence of how low the bar has been set. “All workers should receive regular wage increases as productivity rises, and yet despite rising productivity, Americans’ wages have been stagnant for three-and-a-half decades.”
The Hill
April 2, 2015
The Washington Post
April 1, 2015
Webb graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968. Research from the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that the chief executive-to-worker compensation ratio in 1965 was 20-to-1.
The Washington Post
April 1, 2015
The skill and education of immigrants with H-1Bs do not insulate them from criticism. Ross Eisenbrey, a lawyer at the left-wing Economic Policy Institute, complained that such skilled immigrants supposedly hurt Americans. He claimed that skilled migrants cause a “genius glut” that pushes down the job opportunities for Americans. Eisenbrey does get one thing right in his polemic against skilled immigrants: There is no shortage of skilled workers. But that doesn’t mean America can’t use them.
The Hill
April 1, 2015
Ross Eisenbrey warns that communities would get what they pay for. He’s vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank. “The union labor that often is the higher cost labor is much better quality. The people who do the work are journeymen who’ve been through apprenticeship programs, and they’re just more skilled and more productive and more efficient. So at the end of the day, what is saved in an hourly rate calculation is lost. It takes more hours for the less skilled person to do the work,” Eisenbrey says.
Eisenbrey adds that lower wages don’t mean taxpayers would see savings. He says it’s not unfathomable to think that a company might just collect a bigger profit.
Milwaukee Public Radio
April 1, 2015
Wage stagnation is an old story, of course, having been around for about 35 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. It reported last year that hourly wages of the vast majority of Americans have either stagnated or declined since 1979 — the late 1990s being a brief exception — even as the economy surged.
Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2015
The repositioning of candidate Clinton has already begun. One of the fascinating indicators is a report of a commission on inclusive prosperity organized and released in January by the Center for American Progress. The report, co-authored by Larry Summers (!), sounds more like something Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute or Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz might have written.
Huffington Post
March 30, 2015
“A do-it-yourself retirement system isn’t any more feasible than a do-it-yourself health-care system,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute specializing in retirement security. “People need to be guided.”
CNBC
March 30, 2015
Tom Hungerford interview.
The Real News Network
March 30, 2015
Missouri and Illinois had among the highest rates of black unemployment in 2014, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. Missouri’s rise of 3.2 percentage points in black unemployment from 2013 to 2014 year was the second highest among the states, according to the study by EPI economist Valerie Wilson, which was released Thursday. Black unemployment fell in most states in 2014, according to the study, but spiked up in Wisconsin and Missouri.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
March 27, 2015
A new report on unemployment trends by the Economic Policy Institute has some sobering findings on the varying unemployment trajectories that different racial groups experienced between 2013 and 2014, and what we can expect to see this year. According to the report, in 2014 the white unemployment rate across the United States was 4.9%. But the black unemployment rate was more than double that, at 11.4%. The GIF below breaks down the disparities between white and black unemployment by state in 2014. (The sample size for unemployment broken down by race wasn’t big enough for every state; this chart includes 32 states and the District of Columbia.) You can see that black unemployment dwarfs white unemployment across the country:
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Mic
March 27, 2015
The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was 10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
Think Progress
March 27, 2015
In Wisconsin, the state with the highest annual African-American unemployment rate, nearly 1 in 5 black people are unemployed. The states with the next highest rates of black unemployment were Nevada (16.1 percent) and Michigan (15.8 percent), according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The issue brief is a sobering reminder that black Americans continue to face troublingly high unemployment rates.
Huffington Post
March 26, 2015
Unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin last year was the highest of any of the 50 states, according to a study released Thursday by the center-left Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At 19.9% — or 1 in 5 working-age people — the black unemployment rate in Wisconsin is nearly three times higher than the highest state white unemployment rate (7% in Nevada) and significantly higher than the national black unemployment rate of 11%, the think tank found.
Milwaukee is merely the extreme of a national trend, according to Valerie Wilson, the author of the report. “Five years into recovery from the Great Recession, unemployment rates are finally nearing their 2007 levels, but the pace of recovery varies by state for different racial and ethnic groups,” wrote Wilson, who directs the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
March 26, 2015