The tepid demand for workers and weak wage growth that continues to hamper the U.S. job market is forcing many newly minted college graduates into low-paying, low-skilled jobs, according to a new report from the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. And that’s for those who are lucky enough to find a full-time job, given that the ranks of recent college grads who are underemployed have continued to swell in recent years.
“The class of 2015 is entering an economy that’s still recovering from the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, on a conference call to discuss the study. They are joining “six other classes of students who have graduated into a weak economy in recent years.
CBS Moneywatch
May 28, 2015
The findings demonstrate that the hangover from the financial crisis and downturn of 2007 to 2009 still weighs heavily on family balance sheets. “We are failing as an economy if we have a huge swath of American households who can’t come up with $400,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The really dire financial situations” of many survey respondents can be largely attributed to “the fact that we’re still far from fully recovered from the Great Recession.”
Bloomberg
May 28, 2015
Since the 1970s, there’s been a disconnect between productivity and wages, so even as workers produce more, they don’t necessarily see the benefits. “We have created lots of income, lots of output, lots of wealth over the last three decades,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute. “The problem is it has not accrued to the vast majority.”
Virtually all of the gains have gone to those at the top of the income scale. In the past, politicians have sometimes tried to address that through the tax code: taking a slightly larger cut from the wealthy and using tax credits to pad the pockets of the poor. But there are political limits to that approach. Some people consider such government redistribution akin to adding or taking away points after the whistle has blown. Mishel and others argue that policymakers need to focus more on shaping the rules of the economic game, so average workers can command higher pretax wages. “The problems with people’s paychecks is not what the federal government is taking out in taxes. It’s what employers are not putting in,” Mishel said.
NPR
May 27, 2015
The resulting plans present a menu of options — some unexpectedly overlapping, some radically and predictably diverging — prepared by the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), and the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) and Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The nascent 2016 campaign would benefit if candidates were asked to identify which of these plans best expresses their governing priorities — or what their alternative would be.
The Washington Post
May 27, 2015
Minimum wage as starter salary? Nonsense. The average age of a minimum wage worker in the United States is about 35, and 88% are over 20 years old, according to a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI also found that 55% are full-time workers, and 28% have children.
Los Angeles Times
May 27, 2015
Still, according to research coming out on Wednesday from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for young college graduates is down to 7.2 percent, lower than it was during the worst of the Great Recession but still well above historical norms.
Politico
May 27, 2015
The Labor Department counts half a million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007. That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to fill.
The New York Times
May 26, 2015
This week, economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, analyzed federal data and found that despite widespread notions that the poor eat really well and work very little, the latter is indisputably false.
The Washington Post
May 26, 2015
According to the Economic Policy Institute: “Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would return the federal minimum wage to roughly the same inflation-adjusted value it had in the late 1960s.”
New York Daily News
May 26, 2015
It started, as these things often do, with a two-part exposé in the New York Times, one focusing on the lousy pay and the other on the health threats. This provoked howls of outrage, and was in turn followed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo invoking “emergency measures,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) citing federal legislation on product safety she’s introduced and of course New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio presiding over a “day of action.” The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute declares nail salon abuses a function of “national policy failures.”
Wall Street Journal
May 26, 2015
New research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute finds that the majority of working-age poor people without disabilities do work. “When you look at that group, you see that nearly two-thirds of them are working and more than 40 percent of them are working full-time,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with the group. “So there are full-time workers out there who can’t lift their families out of poverty.” Gould said more than 50 percent of people living in the Los Angeles metro area earn less than what the group estimates living on a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle would take. “Raising the minimum wage to $15 would put a substantial dent in that number,” she said.
NBC News
May 26, 2015
That question prompted Fortune to examine which U.S. city residents would benefit the most from a $15 per hour minimum wage. We asked David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, for help.
But when you examine how much it costs to live in that region—which Cooper measured using regional price parity, the price of goods and services in that area versus the national average—you get a different picture. The RPP there is 85, on a scale where the overall national RPP is equal to 100, which means goods and services in that area are cheaper than the national average. To take that factor into account, we looked at the most expensive places to live, as measured by RPP, and used the U.S.’s average share of sub-$15 per hour earners—42.4%—as a cutoff for the share of low-wage workers.
Fortune
May 26, 2015
Between 2009 and 2012, the pre-tax income of Florida’s richest 1 percent — those who made at least $378,342 in 2012 — grew by an average of nearly 40 percent, according to a report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Miami Herald
May 26, 2015
The figures come from Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning research and advocacy group. At my request, she examined whether the recession has shifted the economy’s job distribution. To do this, she divided businesses into three groups by their pay. Today’s average hourly pay is $25. Low-paying employment is dominated by restaurant and hotel jobs (2015 average hourly rate: $14.12) and retail jobs ($17.21). Midlevel jobs include manufacturing ($23.90), health care and education ($24.97) and construction ($26.91). Finally, high-paying jobs included professional and business services ($29.59), finance ($31.10) and utilities ($36.02). The table below highlights her results. It shows how jobs were distributed in 2000, 2007 — again, the economy’s pre-financial crisis peak — and in 2015.
It’s striking how little has changed. There’s been a small and gradual increase in low-paying jobs and a parallel loss of midlevel jobs. Both trends preceded the recession and have continued. Gould characterizes these shifts as “very slight.” Some economists contend that weak overall wage growth (about 2 percent annually) reflects a large influx of poorly paid workers whose low wages drag down the average. To Gould, the stable low-wage share contradicts that. “The weakness in wage growth is not driven by the mix of jobs being created but rather by labor market slack,” she notes. This justifies, she argues, continued expansionary policies to add jobs and intensify pressure for higher wages.
The Washington Post
May 21, 2015
It is true that after long being flat at around 17 million, the number of factory jobs in America started a steady decline around 2001, the same time China entered the World Trade Organization. This is the alleged “turning point” cited by commentators such as Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. But this is like saying the sun rose after the rooster crowed. U.S. factory jobs plunged even when the yuan soared vis-à-vis the dollar. There is simply no correlation between the long-term trend in factory jobs and movements in China’s currency.
Wall Street Journal
May 21, 2015
The Atlantic
May 21, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group influential with Democrats in Congress, said the United States-Japan trade deficit reached $78.3 billion in 2013, with currency manipulation being “the most important cause.” That gap, it estimates, displaced 896,600 jobs in the United States.
The New York Times
May 20, 2015
That said, just about every measure finds they are struggling mightily. The Economic Policy Institute has reported that inflation-adjusted wages for recent college graduates have fallen by 7.7 percent since 2000. Last year, the San Francisco Fed produced this graph showing wages for recent college grads essentially hitting a flight ceiling around 2008 while overall wages continued to climb, however slowly.
The Atlantic
May 20, 2015
Such narrow portrayals of Baltimore and its residents are only possible if we exclude decades of state and federal policy from our frame of analysis. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute wrote something I suggest reading in its entirety. But to quote: In Baltimore and elsewhere, the distressed condition of African American working- and lower-middle-class families 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.
American Prospect
May 20, 2015
Recently, the president claimed that critics who say that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “is bad for working families … don’t know what they are talking about.” Skeptics would respond, “Show me the money. Show me the jobs and wages you’re going to generate for working Americans. Explain how the TPP is going to be different from the lousy trade deals we’ve had since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law in 1993.” The White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report touting the benefits of the TPP in pulling down barriers to U.S. exports abroad, but the report fails to mention the most important barrier to U.S. export success: several major trade partners (including TPP partners) managing the value of their own currencies for competitive gain vis-à-vis the U.S. Yet the Obama administration has refused to even discuss the currency issue in the TPP negotiations.
Newsweek
May 19, 2015
Yet, while the left and center-left now agree that inequality is both rising and something to worry about, they still disagree about its causes and what to do about it. “I think remarkably over the past year and half, there’s been a convergence that skill-biased technological change doesn’t do much to help explain the [increase in inequality during the] 2000s,” said Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive economic think tank. “This really burst into the public sphere by Larry Summers calling educational upgrading essentially an evasion of the key issues.” But when I asked Jason Furman, the current CEA chair, about Mishel’s argument, he wasn’t convinced. “I personally think the rise in inequality has been large enough that there’s room for a lot of explanations without them having to compete with each other.”
The New Republic
May 19, 2015
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Here is another change that might be a broader sign of a pending reset: A heavy burden of adjustment in the overall labor market is being borne by the young. Wages for the typical graduate of a four-year college have dropped more than 7 percent since 2000, and the labor force participation rate of the young has been falling.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
Josh Bivens, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, estimates that increased globalization, aided by a strong dollar that led to a persistent trade deficit, reduced the annual earnings of the roughly 70 percent of American workers without college degrees by about $1,800.
The New York Times
May 18, 2015
In a recent study done by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, these sorts of statistics just jump off the page:
- Incredibly, 89 percent of minimum-wage recipients are over the age of 20 — not teens flipping hamburgers.
- Interestingly, 56 percent of those working for the minimum wage, which in New York is $8.75 an hour, are women.
- Many have children — 28 percent of those working for minimum wage have kids.
New York Post
May 18, 2015
In particular, U.S. automakers have long complained that they have been undercut and forced to shed jobs in recent years by Japan’s undervaluing of the yen — and they are pushing aggressively for the Portman-Stabenow amendment to give Americans more power to push back with its trading partners. Roughly 150,000 jobs would be created in Ohio alone if the currency issue is addressed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
May 18, 2015
In 2003, after a decade of NAFTA, a report from the Economic Policy Institute by Robert E. Scott summarized the situation: Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.
Salon
May 18, 2015
The move will cut costs and let Fossil invest in other projects, he said. But what’s the message to the 1,200 who work at Fossil headquarters in Richardson? “It’s a reminder of just how little bargaining power they have,” said Ron Hira, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and an associate professor at Howard University. “Workers have to feel like they’re very disposable.”
Dallas Morning News
May 18, 2015
But that isn’t the full story. In an important recent paper, Josh Bivens, of the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that estimates like the one produced by the Peterson Institute don’t take into account the distributional aspects of trade agreements. The traditional argument for free trade is that it reallocates resources, workers included, to their most productive uses, and that this causes over-all income and output to rise. But this churning process doesn’t only create winners, such as consumers who can buy lower-cost imported goods. It also creates losers, such as the Maytag-plant workers in Illinois and many others who make things that poorer countries can produce more cheaply because they have lower wages.
The New Yorker
May 15, 2015
Fifty years after the repeal of Jim Crow, many African-Americans still live in segregated ghettos in the country’s metropolitan areas. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.
Fresh Air
May 15, 2015