There is such a thing as a good trade agreement, though it’s barely conceivable that Obama and Congress could negotiate one. We could imagine, for example, something that did away with tax havens for corporate profits. (For a detailed analysis of this, see this paper from the Economic Policy Institute.)
The New York Times
April 22, 2015
Elise Gould, a labor economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization, said the phenomena of workers cobbling together jobs to get to a 40-hour work week is a sign of the weakness of the economy. “We’re in a place where the employers hold all the cards. A place where workers can’t get full-time jobs if they want them,” she said. Even the job numbers for March were weak, Gould said, with just 126,000 jobs added to the national economy. In an environment where there are still nearly twice as many job seekers as there are jobs, businesses have little incentive to accommodate workers with better hours or schedules. “That’s why people are trying to piece together work still.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
April 22, 2015
The inconvenience and harm to the employee in these situations has been well documented, for example, in a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. In all, 17 percent of the U.S. workforce faces the challenges of unstable schedules, irregular hours or rotating shifts that make it impossible to establish a consistent routine.
U.S. News & World Report
April 22, 2015
The Economic Policy Institute has calculated that raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour, as the White House has recommended, would benefit workers who are on average 35 years old. Over a third are 40 or older. Most work their low-paying jobs full time, and on average earn half of their family’s income.
PolicyMic
April 22, 2015
The overtime cutoff salary of $23,660 now only covers 11 percent of salaried workers compared with 65 percent in 1975, according to an analysis by Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a research group partly funded by labor unions.
Bloomberg
April 22, 2015
Labor advocates, however, complain that NAFTA was a handout to big corporations that came at the expense of workers. A report in 2011 from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute claimed the agreement had cost the U.S. nearly 700,000 jobs.
Fiscal Times
April 22, 2015
This chart from the Economic Policy Institute shows the issue to which Clinton was referring. It displays the change in real annual wages by wage group from 1979-2012.
Fusion
April 22, 2015
According to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute, an income of $385,000 puts you in the national 1 percent. You’d need to make $539,000 to qualify for New Jersey’s 1 percent club — Christie fits the bill in either case.
The Washington Post
April 21, 2015
Conservatives often claim that lazy and unskilled workers are to blame for wage stagnation. But that argument has been debunked by economists such as Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, who point to government minimum-wage and anti-union policies that have weakened the bargaining position of low- and middle-wage workers as the real culprit.
A report by the Economic Policy Institute finds that raising the minimum wage would help reduce inequality, particularly as it affects lower-wage women and, by extension, the families they support. Stiglitz and other experts have pointed out that boosting the minimum wage would lift living standards for up to 25 million people in America without leading to significant job losses or other costs.
Al Jazeera America
April 21, 2015
Josh Bivens of the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute argues, trade deals like these will drive down wages, since they rely on boosting America’s capital-intensive sectors at the expensive of labor intensive ones. Economists would expect an increase in higher-paying white-collar and creative work, but perhaps not enough to balance out negative pressure on manufacturing and other tradable sectors.
Quartz
April 21, 2015
The Washington Post
April 20, 2015
For one, women-owned businesses make only about 25 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. That’s a much larger gap than the one that exists in the overall labor market, where the median earnings of women were about 83 percent of men’s, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
April 17, 2015
The leaked drafts describe a tribunals system called Investor-state Dispute Settlement (ISDS) that would allow corporate interests to sue countries over an alarming range of actions intended to defend the public interest. ISDS represents a warped version of a basically reasonable idea, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens. Traditional trade tribunals are meant to protect foreign businesspeople from having their investments in a country snapped up by soldiers and nationalized. “If a US corporation opens a big production facility somewhere else you don’t want foreign governments to just come in and take it from them,” Bivens said.
But the ISDS system used in modern trade deals goes far beyond protecting investors from forceful expropriation of their factories. It allows corporations to punish countries for things like environmental regulations and work safety laws. “Corporations have been known to bring suit based on, ‘You have passed a regulation that I did not expect when I opened this factory, so my return is lower than I expected,’” Bivens said.
Think Progress
April 17, 2015
This week, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will reportedly introduce “fast track” (trade promotion authority) legislation in the Senate, to help President Obama complete the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment deal with 11 other countries in Asia and the Americas. “Fast Track” authority would allow the president to submit trade agreements to Congress without giving members of Congress the opportunity to amend the deal. Experience has shown that these trade and investment deals typically result in job losses and downward pressure on the wages of most American workers. The last thing America needs is renewal of fast track and more trade and investment deals rushed through Congress.
Moyers & Company
April 17, 2015
Unbalanced trade leads to more job loss. As the Economic Policy Institute recently surmised, increased trade deficits push jobs out of better-paying industries. And at a time when income inequality is running rampant in the U.S., workers don’t need even more “free” trade agreements that will further strip this nation’s economy of middle-income jobs. Enough is enough!
The Huffington Post
April 17, 2015
Simply raising the hourly minimum in line with wage and price inflation would put it at about $11 today; adjusting it for productivity growth would put it at about $18.
The New York Times
April 17, 2015
Big employers, cutting back on full-coverage health care as Obamacare’s ‘Cadillac Tax’ begins to bite.
NPR
April 16, 2015
According to a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, this is life for about 17 percent of the labor force. So called “just-in-time scheduling” is far more common for those who work for hourly wages or are part-time employees, or both. Part-time workers—more than six million Americans—are more than twice as likely to have unpredictable hours than full-time employees.
The Atlantic
April 16, 2015
That language struck a chord with members of the alliance. As part of a new five-year plan, the organization is urging donors to contribute to an expanded suite of advocacy groups and think tanks devoted to economic inequality including Americans for Financial Reform, the Economic Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project.
The Washington Post
April 16, 2015
The Clinton campaign said she was relying on a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, which found that at the top 350 U.S. firms, in terms of sales, average chief executive compensation in 2013 was $15.2 million. It concluded that this was 295.9 times higher than the average compensation of workers at those companies, which was a decline from a peak of 383.4-to-1 in 2000 but far higher than a 20-to-1 ratio in 1965.
So how does the organization come up with this ratio?
EPI has published a fairly detailed description of its methodology. For chief executives, it originally used an annual survey published by the Wall Street Journal, and then later switched to buying the information –at a cost of $10,000 a year, according EPI president Lawrence Mishel—from Compustat, a division of Standard & Poor’s. The database includes data on the compensation of the companies in the S&P 1500 Index dating back to 1992, but Mishel says they focus on the top 350 in order to remain consistent with the WSJ data going back to the 1960s.
The Washington Post
April 16, 2015
Traditionally, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has emphasized promoting “opportunity” over reducing inequality. As Lawrence Mishel, the president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, pointed out in a blog post last week, that approach has sometimes enabled centrist Democrats to “avoid confronting the top 1 percent’s capture of the lion’s share of income growth. After all, addressing runaway executive pay and a runaway financial sector—the main causes of the top 1 percent’s income gains—smacks of redistribution; and besides, those folks are their donor base.” With Hillary and her staff about to hit up hedge-fund managers, investment bankers, tech moguls, and other rich folks for hefty campaign contributions, the suspicion lingers that, when it comes down to it, her campaign will punt, rather than directly confront, the entrenched problems of income and wealth inequality.
The New Yorker
April 14, 2015
For example, recent research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that men still outearn women at every rung of the income ladder. The higher up the ladder, the bigger the gap. In 2014, women in the 95th percentile of female earners made 79 percent of wages for men at the 95th percentile, while women in the lowest 10th percentile made 91 cents for each $1 earned by their male counterparts.
The New York Times
April 14, 2015
Last week, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute released a report on irregular scheduling. It found that 17 percent of the U.S. workforce has “unstable work shift schedules” of some kind, whether due to on-call work schedules or rotating shifts. The report suggests the actual percentage may be higher.
“Just to get even one hour paid for if someone is sent home before their shift time ends or if they show and there’s no work at all, which I think is the most common complain, that would get employers to reconsider those kind of practices,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor-employment relations at Penn State University and the author of the EPI report.
The New Republic
April 14, 2015
In 1965, CEOs earned about 20 times what a typical worker brought home, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. In 2013, CEO compensation was nearly 300 times the pay of the average worker, the EPI study said.
Reuters
April 14, 2015
Clinton can call on a wide range of experts, and a number of detailed proposals that Democratic think tanks, such as the centrist Center for American Progress and the liberal Economic Policy Institute have laid out in recent reports. The ideas range from raising the minimum wage and encouraging the growth of trade unions, to changing the tax code and investing in infrastructure.
The New Yorker
April 13, 2015
It’s well known that the employment outlook for young workers is dismal: a report released in May, 2014, by the Economic Policy Institute, for example, pointed out that the unemployment rate for those under the age of twenty-five in 2013 was two-thirds as high as the general rate, and the underemployment rate (which measures skilled workers performing in low-paying or low-skill jobs, and part-time workers who would rather be full-time) nearly four-fifths as high as the rate for all workers.
The New Yorker
April 13, 2015
Academic research shows that the worker-to-C.E.O. gulf has been widening. According to a 2014 study by Alyssa Davis and Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington with a reputation for rigorous studies, chief executive pay as a multiple of the typical worker’s pay rocketed from an average of 20 times in 1965 to 295.9 in 2013.
The New York Times
April 13, 2015
Nationwide, the crisis has reduced the size of the financial sector but only slightly. After falling to 6.2% of GDP during the crisis, it is now back to 7.2%. “They crawled about a third of the way back since the crisis,” said Josh Bivens, director of research and policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Manufacturing continues to fall and is now at 12.1%.
Los Angeles Times
April 13, 2015
See excerpt: This week, Senator Hatch will reportedly introduce “fast track” (trade promotion authority) legislation in the Senate, to help President Obama complete the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade and investment deal with eleven other countries in Asia and the Americas. “Fast Track” authority would allow the President to submit trade agreements to Congress without giving members of Congress the opportunity to amend the deal. Experience has shown that these trade and investment deals typically result in job losses and downward pressure on the wages of most American workers. The last thing America needs is renewal of fast track and more trade and investment deals rushed through Congress.
The administration has claimed that the TPP will create jobs, but it will not. There are other policies that have attracted bipartisan support, including ending currency manipulation and rebuilding infrastructure that could each create millions of U.S. jobs. President Obama has limited political capital to expend with the Republican-controlled Congress and he must choose his policies wisely.
The Huffington Post
April 13, 2015
At least 17 percent of the U.S. workforce is coping with an unstable schedule, ranging from irregular or on-call hours to rotating shifts, that adds stress and leads to unpredictable earnings, according to a study published by the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute.
CBS News
April 13, 2015