Media clips

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• Federal Affirmative Action Guidelines for Construction Haven’t Been Updated in 30 Years
  The Nation October 3, 2014
• Lies, fear and tragedy: Maria Fernandes and the crisis of part-time work
  The Guardian October 1, 2014
• Not enough taxation and too much representation
  Al Jazeera America October 1, 2014
• Activists and Scholars Respond to the New Poverty Data
  Bill Moyers Blog September 30, 2014
• How Long You’re Unemployed May Not Matter So Much
  US News and World Report September 30, 2014
• A big win in the minimum wage battle, but the war is far from over

   

  In fact, the minimum wage is higher in many states and cities now than the federally required minimum, with San Francisco city and county currently the highest at $10.74, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Seattle will have the highest citywide rate at $15 once it’s fully phased in, starting in 2017 with large employers and applying to everyone by 2021. And voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota will consider ballot initiatives in November that would raise the minimum wage above the national rate.

   

  CNBC September 29, 2014
• Jobless Receiving Unemployment Insurance at a Record Low

  It t has been nearly nine full months since Congress allowed a program extending state unemployment benefits to the long-term jobless to expire. In that time, millions of Americans, who less than a year ago would have been eligible for an additional six months of unemployment benefits, have seen them cut off.

  Now, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, the percentage of the unemployed who are receiving unemployment assistance has hit an historic low.

   

  fiscal September 29, 2014
• Wage Theft Costing Low-Income Workers Billions

  Americans toiling away in low-wage jobs already struggle to earn a living, and a new report says these meager paychecks are winnowed down by wage theft with alarming regularity.

  Nearly $1 billion was recovered in 2012 by lawyers or regulatory agencies acting on behalf of workers who were paid below minimum wage, not paid for overtime or other wage and hour violations, according to a first-time analysis conducted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. And the problem is growing, EPI analysts say.

  NBC News September 29, 2014
• Low wages, no overtime: The downside of being a retail ‘manager’

  “That was a project to relieve as many employers as possible of their obligation to pay overtime,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, which receives some funding from unions. “So they started out with something that was worse than where it ended up, but they did a lot of damage.”

  Halfway through his second term, President Obama decided to swing the pendulum back toward workers. In March, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez signaled that he planned to raise that salary threshold much higher, and over the summer held listening sessions with both workers and employers. He didn’t give an estimate of where it should end up, but labor advocates have some ideas.

  According to an analysis by EPI, 65 percent of all salaried workers fell under the threshold in 1975, and were thus entitled to overtime. By 2013, just 11 percent of salaried workers were automatically due overtime pay, leaving the rest subject to a host of exemptions. EPI proposes raising the cutoff to $984 a week, or about $50,000 a year, which is simply what it was back in 1975, adjusted for inflation.

  “If you raise the salary threshold high enough, then you catch everybody whose financial situation you really worry about,” Eisenbrey explains. That could include millions of white-collar workers in clerical and administrative roles, as well as low-level managers.

  The Washington Post September 29, 2014
• New U.S. tax rules chill ‘inversion’ deal-making; shares dive

  “This move is a good and necessary start toward discouraging corporate inversions, which cost U.S. taxpayers billions in lost revenue,” said Thomas Hungerford, a tax expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank.

  Reuters September 25, 2014
• Rich and poor alike are worried about income gap

  In 2013, CEOs at some of the U.S.’s major companies earned on average nearly 296 times their typical worker’s salary, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute published in June 2014.

  While this figure is lower than the 2000 peak of 383.4, it has recovered from the lows of 2002 – where it stood at 188.5 due to the fall in the stock market – and 2009 (193.2). In 1965, the ratio was at 20-to-1.

  CNBC September 25, 2014
• Boehner blasts America’s unemployed as lazy

  Currently, there are more than two job seekers for every job opening in the country and the severity of the recession has created a long-term unemployment problem that has made many job seekers almost unemployable.

  MSNBC.com September 25, 2014
• Those Lazy Jobless

  The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades.

  New York Times September 22, 2014
• Return of the Bums on Welfare

  Here’s unemployment benefits as a percentage of GDP:

  They’re back down to their level at the height of the “Bush boom”.

  And here, from Josh Bivens, is the recipiency rate — the percentage of the unemployed receiving any benefits at all:

  It’s at a record low, and as Bivens says, the pullback in benefits is one main reason economic expansion isn’t reducing poverty.

  New York Times September 22, 2014
• Workers deserve to benefit from their productivity, too

  Time was when American workers reaped what they sowed. Between 1947 and 1972, the nation’s productivity increased by 97 percent and median pay by 95 percent. Since then, however, as the decline of unions and a host of other factors weakened employees’ bargaining power, hardly any productivity gains have gone to workers. Between 1979 and 2011, productivity rose by 75 percent, but median pay rose by just 5 percent.

  Chief executives, however, managed to reward themselves quite handsomely for the gains in their workers’ productivity. From 1978 to 2013, CEO pay rose by a mind-boggling 937 percent.

  The Washington Post September 19, 2014
• Stuck on Inflation

  Unemployment remains historically high, growth rates are still tepid, and what expansion we have had is fragile. And some economists—notably Paul Krugman, Laurence Ball of Johns Hopkins, and the progressive economists at the Economic Policy Institute—have strongly criticized the hawks. But they retain influence, especially because the media quote them frequently.

  The New York Review of Books September 18, 2014
• Deciding Who Gets Overtime Pay

  The fix is easy. Simply updating the salary threshold for inflation would raise it to nearly $1,000 a week. This change would make an additional 6.1 million salaried workers eligible for overtime, including food service managers, customer service representatives, insurance claim processors and retail supervisors, according to recent estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.

  The New York Times September 18, 2014
• New data shows Americans’ incomes still stagnant after recession

  “We are using a coffee cup to dig ourselves out of a big hole,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.

  Reuters September 18, 2014
• Demonizing the Minimum Wage

  According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average age of workers who would benefit from a higher minimum wage today is thirty-five. Eighty-eight per cent are over the age of twenty. “The typical worker who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2015 looks nothing like the part-time, teen stereotype: She is in her early thirties, works full-time, and may have a family to support.”

  The New Yorker September 18, 2014
• The Biggest Economic—and Political—Puzzle: Persistently Flat Wages

  This isn’t just a matter of trauma among lower-skilled or lower-wage workers. Anemic wage growth has plagued virtually all professions for well over a decade. A crunching of data last year found average pay for managers and professionals had nudged up just 2.2% between 2001 and 2012, while it had gone up 2.4% for office administrators and down 1.2% for workers across the rest of the service sector.

  Wall Street Journal September 18, 2014
• Historic inequality levels continue in new Census report

  “We basically have 13 to 14 years of lost incomes for the most part, and that’s the bigger picture,” said Larry Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, during a conference call with reporters.

  The rise in median income which took place between 2012 and 2013 was not “statistically significant,” he went on.

  “We’re very slowly digging ourselves out of a very deep hole. We’re using a coffee cup to dig ourselves out of a deep hole,” he said. “Families are just getting a taste of what a recovery looks like.”

  MSNBC September 18, 2014
• U.S. poverty declines in 2013, median income stagnant, Census Bureau finds

  “The generation-long trend towards ever-greater income inequality seems to be firmly underway again, after only the briefest interruption caused by the Great Recession,” read a blog by economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal economic research center.

  McClatchy September 18, 2014
• Employers Are Stealing Billions of Dollars a Year From Their Workers

  As the economy slowly recovers, it’s become increasingly clear that it’s not just unemployed Americans who need help from the government. It’s those that are employed as well.

  That’s the main finding of a new report from the Economic Policy Institute on wage theft. What is wage theft? It’s when employers refuse to pay their workers their rightful wages and benefits, such as refusing to pay overtime. It’s a major problem across the United States. One study, which EPI cites, examined three cities (New York, Chicago and Los Angeles) and found that two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries had experienced a pay-related offense in any given week in 2008. Those violations cost workers more than $2,600 a year on average—nearly 15 percent of their total earnings. If wage theft is as prevalent in the rest of the United States as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, then it costs workers more than $50 billion a year.

  The New Republic September 12, 2014
• NC’s $467 million problem: Abuse of workers, failure to collect taxes

  “You don’t pay an independent contractor by the hour,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a former U.S. Department of Labor official and a lawyer with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

  He said he was surprised the forms passed muster with regulators.

  “The extent, the open, brazen way that people are filling out forms and saying ‘I’m breaking the law’… the flagrancy of it does surprise me,” Eisenbrey said.

   

   

  McClatchy September 9, 2014
• Stronger hiring shines on long-term jobless

  The long-term unemployed now make up 31.2% of all jobless Americans. That’s still historically high, but is down from 38% a year ago and 45.3% in April 2010.

  “Long-term unemployment is actually falling faster than you would have predicted,” says Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute.

  USA Today September 9, 2014
• Hiring dropped in August as economy added 142,000 jobs; unemployment rate at 6.1%

  “Wage growth is far below the 3.5 percent rate consistent with the Federal Reserve Board’s inflation target of 2 percent. It’s clear that Fed policymakers should abandon notions of slowing the economy,” Elise Gould, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog post.

  The Washington Post September 9, 2014
• The Recovery Gets a B-Minus

  As the unemployment rate continues to drop, then, economists have turned more and more to wages and earnings as an indicator of progress. “Employers just don’t have to offer big wage increases to get and keep the workers they need, when hiring rates and net job creation remain far slower than what’s needed to for a healthy labor market,” said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, reacting to the jobs report. But some other indicators have looked up recently, meaning maybe the economy will get a better report card next month.

  New York Magazine September 9, 2014
• Regulators blew chances to bring labor scofflaws in line

  The scheme was most prevalent in Southern states where unions are weak, federal payroll records show. But reporters found projects in 21 states and the District of Columbia in which businesses didn’t withhold the taxes they’re obliged to deduct from employees’ pay. At a time when state and federal governments struggle to find additional revenue, the McClatchy investigation reveals that the nation’s leaders are missing opportunities to recover billions of dollars each year by not enforcing rules already on the books.

  “It’s the Wild West. It’s anarchy,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a former labor official who’s the vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

  McClatchy September 5, 2014
• Should Fast Food Workers Get $15 Per Hour?

  Fanny Velazquez, a single mother of three, has worked at a Los Angeles McDonald’s for eight years and makes around $9 an hour, about average for American fast food workers. “It’s difficult, it’s not enough to pay my bills,” Velazquez told the Los Angeles Times at a protest in Exposition Park.

  L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is among the politicians responding to Velazquez and others like her with a sympathetic ear. On Monday, the mayor proposed raising the city’s minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, saying, “it’s deplorable and bad for our economy to have one million Angelenos stuck in poverty, even when working full time.” According to an Economic Policy Institute report, 16.7 percent of restaurant workers live below the poverty line, more than double the percentage for those who don’t work in the industry.

  US News and World Report September 5, 2014
• One Economist’s Argument For Raising The Minimum Wage

  Labor organizers have planned a major fast-food worker strike this Thursday that will take place in an estimated 150 cities around the country. The strike comes on the heels of a Labor Day speech in Milwaukee by President Barack Obama that called once again for a raise in the minimum wage. In an opinion piece for the National Journal, economist David Cooper writes, “Raising the federal minimum wage would significantly improve the lives of millions, help spur wage growth, and reduce the gender pay gap.” Cooper said that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would lift wages for 28 million working Americans — nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. workforce. “When you raise the minimum wage, you’re not just lifting wages for folks that are right at the bottom. You’re also going to lift wages for those making just above the minimum wage. This is what we call the spillover effect,” he said.

  Wisconsin Public Radio September 5, 2014