Media clips
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(Also in Port Clinton News Heralds, htrnews, The Des Moines Register, Courier-Post, Cincinnati.com
The latest jobs report for April gave grads a puzzling picture. Employers added the most jobs in more than two years, 288,000. Unemployment dropped from 6.7% to 6.3%, the first time it was that low since September 2008. Young adults still face higher unemployment, but the rate for 25-29 year-olds fell from 7.5% in March to 6.9%. The unemployment rate for those 20-24 dropped from 12.2% to 10.6%.Still, the portion of Americans 25-34 who were working in April fell to a five-month low of 75.5%, down from 75.9% in March.
“The entire drop (in unemployment) was due to people dropping out of the labor force, in particular young people,” says Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist who writes an annual report on the state of employment for young adults for Economic Policy Institute.
And despite the number of jobs added last month, Shierholz calls the gradual improvement “agonizingly slow.”
USA Today May 23, 2014 -
(Also in Star Tribune, NBC News, News Times, Reading Eagle)
Labor leaders and many economists worry. Contract workers have less job security and don’t contribute to the economy through spending as much as permanent, full-time workers. Nor do they have the same job protections. Few are union members.“It is not hugely clear that we’re coming into a temp-worker, contract-worker, contingent-worker nation. But it’s something to keep an eye on,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute. “There’s definitely been an increase in the share of those working part time.”
Associated Press May 23, 2014 -
“After all these years, it’s no wonder people are still feeling the weight of the Great Recession,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which tracks the well-being of the poor and the working class, “because the weight is still there.”
The New York Times May 23, 2014 -
Retirement saving aside, many young potential first-time homebuyers largely just can’t afford to purchase a home. They point to insufficient credit history or score and a lack of funds to cover a down payment and closing costs as the biggest obstacles to purchasing a home, according to a May report from Fannie Mae.
Further compromising their financial stability, the unemployment of Americans under 25 is likely higher given the scarcity of job opportunities, a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute showed. There are about 1 million “missing” young workers, which means they’re not employed, in school or actively seeking work. They’re not counted in the jobless rate, which was 10.6 percent in April for Americans 20-24. Almost five years after the recession ended, there should be 7.1 million more jobs to match the growth of the labor force.
US News and World Report May 23, 2014 -
“Whenever it comes to the issue of the day, whether it’s labor or energy, you can’t ignore what they are doing because they have a measurable effect on the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal May 16, 2014 -
I asked the Economic Policy Institute to annotate the graph to show how much of the premium is from real wage gains for college grads, and how much is from wage declines for high school grads. In the 1980s and 1990s, college grads strongly outpaced high school grads. But since then, the better pay performance of college grads is due to high school students losing ground, not to college grads pulling ahead.
The New York Times May 16, 2014 -
• The six Walmart heirs are worth as much as the bottom 41 percent of American households put together.
The New York Times May 16, 2014 -
Cheap imports have resulted in net losses for the steel industry in four of the last five years, said Robert Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research for the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the report. The other authors are attorneys for Stewart and Stewart, a Washington, D.C., law firm whose specialties include trade issues.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette May 16, 2014 -
But the U.S. companies — as well as the unions whose membership depends on domestic production — haven’t given up. They’ve asked the Department of Commerce to reevaluate its decision, and on Tuesday they put out a report by the Economic Policy Institute making the case for why America ought to fight back. In a rare moment of accord, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — both from heavy steel-producing states — got on a call with reporters to drive that message home.
The Washington Post May 16, 2014 -
The latest jobs report released last week showed the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent in April. Private-sector employment in March surpassed the prerecession peak. Though the unemployment rate for 20- to 29-year-olds who graduated from college in 2013 was still 10.9 percent, that figure was down from 15.5 percent in 2009 when the recession was ending, the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
“All of these trends bode well for those entering the job market this spring,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Not everyone is so optimistic. Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., doubts that the economy has really turned around for young college grads. “Since the unemployment rate of young college graduates remains significantly elevated, the class of 2014 will join a sizable backlog of unemployed college graduates from the last five graduating classes in an extremely difficult job market,” Shierholz said in a new report.
Stateline May 13, 2014 -
The class of 2014 is graduating into a job market that might charitably be described as a disaster.
NEARLY 17 PERCENT OF 2014 GRADS WILL BE UNDEREMPLOYED
There’s plenty of evidence on this point, as several commentators have pointed out. The class of 2014 will emerge into an economy with a jobless rate of 6.5 percent, and new grads’ prospects will be even worse than that. Young college graduates face a jobless rate of 8.5 percent, according to recent data from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington, DC-based think tank.
Not only that, but EPI finds that 16.8 percent will be underemployed, meaning they will either be working part-time despite wanting full-time work, or they will have stopped looking for work despite wanting a job (this is what is called the U-6 unemployment rate in the monthly jobs report).
VOX May 13, 2014 -
Bloomberg May 12, 2014
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Milwaukee Journal Sentinel May 12, 2014
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The visit to the Mountain View, Calif., Wal-Mart underscores Mr. Obama’s complex relationship with the nation’s biggest retailer, accused alternately by Mr. Obama and his political allies of offering substandard wages and inadequate health-care, but also praised for hiring veterans, selling healthy food and embracing solar power.
“I want to thank the folks at Wal-Mart,” Mr. Obama said Friday at an event to highlight the administration’s climate change agenda. “Because more and more companies like Walmart are realizing that wasting less energy isn’t just good for the planet, it’s good for business. It’s good for the bottom line.”
The contrasting views may simply reflect Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s size. With about 1.3 million employees at more than 4,800 U.S. stores and clubs, and more than $473 billion in world-wide net sales last year, the company is simply too big to ignore. Wal-Mart’s corporate decisions can also ripple through the country.
“Whenever it comes to the issue of the day, whether it’s labor or energy, you can’t ignore what they are doing because they have a measurable effect on the economy,” said Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Wall Street Journal May 12, 2014 -
The top graph is embedded from an article by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz for Economic Policy Institute. I found it in an article by Lydia Depillis on Wonkblog, which is a column of The Washington Post. The visual with the cartoon people was made by yours truly using numbers from the same Economic Policy Institute article and images from Thinkstock. Thumbnail photo of dear ol’ Donald via Gage Skidmore, used under a Creative Commons license.
Upworthy May 12, 2014 -
1. My pay is rising much faster than yours.
While American workers grapple with stagnant wages and an uncertain job market, there’s one group that doesn’t need to worry about pay raises: CEOs.
At the country’s largest 350 companies by revenue, average CEO compensation — including salary and the value of stock options exercised — was $14.1 million in 2012, up nearly 13% since 2011 and 37% since 2009, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute , a think tank in Washington, D.C.
MarketWatch May 12, 2014 -
As Republicans stonewall President Obama’s initiative to raise the federal minimum wage from$7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour by 2016, some state lawmakers have taken the matter into their own hands, passing legislation that increases the salaries for America’s most vulnerable workers. But there’s one group that is still largely left out of the minimum wage battle: people who work for tips.
As it stands, only seven states require employers to pay tipped workers the same minimum wage as nontipped workers. The federal minimum wage for the latter is $7.25, but the federal minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnate at $2.13 since 1991, with no adjustment for inflation. Employers are supposed to make up the difference if tipped workers aren’t earning the regular minimum wage through their tips, but it doesn’t always happen. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found in 2011 that tipped workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to fall under the federal poverty line.
The Minimum Wage Fairness Act, which Obama endorsed, would have gradually raised tipped workers’ minimum wage to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage. But the bill has faced steep opposition from Republicans and the restaurant lobby. According to Open Secrets, the National Restaurant Association, which opposed the minimum-wage hike, spent more than $2.2 million on lobbying last year.
Mother Jones May 12, 2014 -
The short story is that wealth inequality is growing right along with income inequality, especially at the very top. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in the early 1960s, the wealthiest 1 percent in the U.S. had 125 times the wealth of a median household. In 2010, that ratio had doubled, reaching 288 to 1.
It’s worth noting that data on wealth and wealth inequality is harder to come by than data on incomes. The census measures income, not wealth. Tax returns don’t paint a full picture of a person’s net holdings. Surveys like the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances have trouble capturing the super-rich.
Part of what makes the work of Thomas Piketty and his colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman so ground-breaking is that they have developed new ways to measure private wealth and wealth inequality over time. Their method involves taking tax returns, which record the income generated from assets (in dividends, interest payments or rental income), and teasing out the underlying value of those assets.
Marketplace May 12, 2014 -
Here is the situation in two graphs.
The first graph shows the “college premium,” which is basically the percentage difference between the pay of college grads and high school grads. The graph is widely misinterpreted — by students and parents — to mean that wages for college-educated workers go nowhere but up.
I asked the Economic Policy Institute to annotate the graph to show how much of the premium is from real wage gains for college grads, and how much is from wage declines for high school grads. In the 1980s and 1990s, college grads strongly outpaced high school grads. But since then, the better pay performance of college grads is due to high school students losing ground, not to college grads pulling ahead.
The New York Times May 12, 2014 -
You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recentchartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.
Slate May 9, 2014 -
This weekend, college seniors and their families will hear a lot of stirring words from commencement speakers as graduation season gets into full swing.
What comes next for many will be a little less stirring: the job hunt.
“The Class of 2014 is a little bit better off than the few classes who came before,” says researcher Alyssa Davis, co-author of a report, ‘The Class of 2014: The Weak Economy is Idling Too Many Young Graduates,’ for the Economic Policy Institute. “Since the recession, this has become the new normal, with a weak job market, stagnant wages, high unemployment and underemployment.”
Unemployment for young college graduates is 8.5 percent, compared to 5.5 percent in 2007. For young high school graduates, the comparison is 22.9 percent to 15.9 percent.
Marketplace May 9, 2014 -
April’s strong numbers brought us just about back to the total number of jobs we had before the recession struck. The problem, as this chart from the liberal Economic Policy Institute shows, is that in the intervening six and a half years of economic weakness the population has grown considerably:
VOX May 7, 2014 -
HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: This was one of the stranger reports I’ve seen in a long time.
NOGUCHI: Shierholz is an economist with the Economic Policy Institute.
SHIERHOLZ: At first blush, it looked great. The unemployment rate dropped substantially to 6.3 percent. But you look one level deeper and you find that that drop in the unemployment rate was not for good reasons.
NPR May 7, 2014 -
“We do not yet have a jobs recovery that is strong enough to really pull people in,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute. The number of people who began seeking work for the first time fell 126,000 from March to roughly 1 million. The figure for new grads and parents who began looking was even bleaker: Down 417,000 to 2.6 million.
Associated Press May 7, 2014 -
Moreover, even if job growth continued at last month’s solid, steady pace, the country would not have a labor market as healthy as the one it had before the recession started in December 2007 until the end of 2016, according to calculations by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Put differently, it would take the economy nine years to recoup the jobs lost during the recession plus those needed to employ new workers during the slow recovery.
The economic recovery that began in June 2009 has been the weakest the country has experienced since World War II, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. But it did not have to be. Lawmakers in Washington have repeatedly undermined the recovery by emphasizing deficit reduction rather than economic growth. They have also stood in the way of proposals that would have helped the unemployed and workers at the lowest rungs of the economy.
The New York Times May 7, 2014 -
The issue of 401(k) loans highlights the poor state of retirement savings of many Americans. The TransAmerica Center estimates that 62 percent of Generation Xers and 44 percent of baby boomers were at risk of seeing a “significant” drop in their living standards after retirement.
“In 2010, 40 percent of families in their peak saving years (age 55-64) had nothing saved in retirement accounts and 10 percent had $12,000 or less, according to data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances,” the Economic Policy Institute noted in a recent report.
CBS News May 7, 2014 -
A worker that’s more productive, Peri adds, is a worker who can demand more money.
But it’s important to remember here that immigrants aren’t what matter in this story; STEM workers are, wherever they come from. By this study’s logic, if suddenly US universities started cranking out more STEM graduates tomorrow, those workers could theoretically boost productivity in the same way as foreign STEM graduates.
In addition, not everyone agrees that the US economy needs more foreign STEM workers. The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found in 2013 that high-skilled foreign workers would be detrimental to other US workers: “Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce.”
If H-1B visa-holders are indeed boosting native-born Americans’ wages, that information could inspire lawmakers to pass immigration reform.
VOX May 7, 2014 -
“I think the Administration can continue to investigate ways to make improvements, but ultimately Congress must pass top–to–bottom immigration reform if we are going to fix our country’s broken immigration system,” Lofgren said.
Some critics of immigration reform have said that tech firms use the visa program to offshore jobs out of the country.
A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute last year found that the top 10 recipients of the visas in 2012 “were all in the business of outsources and offshoring high-tech American jobs.”“Far from keeping top talent in the U.S., the administration is working to put more talented Americans out of work,” said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Session (R-Ala.), who opposed the new DHS action. “Meanwhile, the administration continues to look the other way as companies use the guest worker visas to facilitate offshoring, laying off U.S. workers and tasking guest workers with coordinating offshoring centers.”
The Hill May 7, 2014 -
Over time, the creep of off-hours messages from our bosses and colleagues has led us to tolerate these intrusions as an inevitable part of the job, which is why it’s so startling when an employer is actually straightforward with his lunatic demands, as with the notorious email a Quinn Emanuel law partner sent to his underlings back in 2009: “Unless you have very good reason not to (for example when you are asleep, in court or in a tunnel), you should be checking your emails every hour.”
Constant access may work out great for employers, since it continues to ratchet up the pressure for turning off-the-clock, away-from-the-desk hours into just another part of the workday. But any corresponding economic gains likely aren’t being passed on to workers: During the great internet-age boom in productivity, which is up 23 percent since 2000, the inflation-adjusted wages and benefits for college graduates climbed just 4 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Mother Jones May 7, 2014 -
Bernard Brock thought his work life in Logansport, Ind., would begin soon after he graduated from high school earlier this year. The 21-year-old has since applied for factory work and at multiple fast-food restaurants, all with no luck.
A generation ago, Mr. Brock’s diploma might have secured him a decent blue-collar job. But for a rising number of high-school students, that piece of sheepskin has led to nothing.
More than one million students under 21 who completed high school are not working, looking for work, or pursuing further education, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, a left-leaning think tank.
The study examines the rising number of young adults who have emerged from high school into the sluggish, postrecession economy and are now caught between diminished job prospects and soaring costs for higher education.
Wall Street Journal May 2, 2014