Media clips
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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 -
AMERICAN IDLE: College wasn’t necessarily a refuge for young people unable to find work during the Great Recession, the Economic Policy Institute concludes in a new paper out today, and enrollment at colleges and universities didn’t grow at a rate faster than before the recession. “This means there has been a large increase in the share of young high school and college graduates who are idled — neither employed nor enrolled in school — by the weak economy,” EPI economist Heidi Shierholz writes along with research assistants Alyssa Davis and Will Kimball.
— The paper says there are nearly a million “missing” young workers who are neither employed nor actively looking for jobs because job opportunities remain scarce. If they were in the labor market, the unemployment rate of workers under 25 would be 18.1 percent, not 14.5 percent.
— The recession will have a lasting effect on these young people, the report says. For the next 10 to 15 years, those in the “Class of 2014” will likely earn less than if they had graduated when job opportunities were plentiful. A solution? More public sector employment and safety net programs, the authors said. Find the full report later today: http://bit.ly/1u6C7FV.
Politico May 2, 2014 -
According to an analysis of Harkin’s bill by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the bill would “directly or indirectly raise the wages of 27.8 million workers,” resulting in about $35 billion in additional wages in the next 30 months. EPI also says the bill would create “roughly 85,000 net new jobs” over that same period of time.
The EPI analysis argues that higher wages for lower-income workers will equal more spending, which will subsequently result in higher demand that would boost the economy and could result in the need to hire more workers.
“Senate Republicans assert that increasing the minimum wage will not help working families, that assertion is not only wrong, Mr. President, it makes no sense, it’s illogical,” Reid said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “Twenty-eight million Americans stand to benefit from an increase in the minimum wage.”
NBC News May 2, 2014 -
The Economic Policy Institute calculates that in 1979 the share of wealth-derived income that went to the top 1% (33.5%) was actually lower than the share of wealth-derived income that went to the bottom 90% (36.2%). Three decades later, after government deregulation and financial innovation had “democratized” the market, the top 1%’s share had risen to 54% and the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 22.9%. Some revolution!
What explains this strange outcome? Mainly that, while a lot of people entered the stock market, not many acquired significant holdings. Half the nation’s households may be in the market, but only one third of that half (i.e., one-sixth of the nation’s households) own stock holdings worth $7,000 or more. Nearly 70% of all stocks are held by the top 5%.
Examining Piketty’s figures, one is struck by the fact that, since 1810, the only period during which wealth distribution grew more egalitarian was between 1910 and 1950, during the reign of the old elitist white-shoe investment firms. Credit belongs not to the old WASP hierarchy but to a series of cataclysmic world events (World War I, the Great Depression, World War II) and the more egalitarian government policies they brought about (a rise in the newly-established income tax, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, wage and price controls, etc.).
MSNBC April 28, 2014 -
(Note: Shout out to Dan Essrow and Eric Shansby for interviewing Bob Solow – their interview was quoted here)
In a recent interview at the Economic Policy Institute, Nobel Prize-Winning economist and MIT professor Robert Solow riffed on the political effects of increasing inequality and concentration of wealth at the very top. “If that kind of concentration of wealth continues, then we get to be more and more an oligarchical country, a country that’s run from the top,” he said.
The Atlantic April 28, 2014 -
This current reality clashes with our own recent past. For three decades following World War II, wages rose in tandem with increases in productivity — that was the essence of the old “Social Contract.” But in the 30 years since 1980, earnings have essentially flatlined: While the productivity of American workers grew by a healthy 80%, family income grew by only about 10%, and average hourly wages inched up by about 6%.
The first decade of this century — sometimes called “the lost decade” — has been even worse. Real wages (wages adjusted for increases in the cost of living) either declined or did not increase for high school or college graduates. Only those at the top of the occupational ladder with advanced degrees experienced modest wage growth. The “Occupy” movement had its facts right: Most of the income growth went to the top 1% or less of the population. America is now suffering from the highest level of income inequality of any time since the 1920s.
CNNMoney April 28, 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 April 28, 2014 -
Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week. That was down from 66.2 percent the previous year and was the lowest figure in a decade. The high point came in 2009, when 70.1 percent of new graduates had gone on to college.
“Falling college enrollment indicates that upward mobility may become more difficult for working-class and disadvantaged high school graduates,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “It’s another part of the long-term scarring process of the Great Recession that has been partly hidden.” She said that might reflect poorer employment prospects for parents and students who would have worked their way through college a few years ago, and added that many parents in the past paid for college by refinancing mortgages, an alternative no longer available to many families.
The New York Times April 28, 2014 -
The Labor Department reports that 260,000 college graduates were stuck last year working at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. That’s down from a peak of 327,000 in 2010. But it’s more than double the 127,000 in 2007, the year the recession began.
“Every way you cut it, young college grads are really having trouble — much more trouble than they used to have,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “The labor market is not producing decent jobs.”
Associated Press April 25, 2014 -
“It’s remarkable how poorly the middle class has done since the end of the 1990s boom,” Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, told CBS MoneyWatch. “We have an economic regime that’s not working to raise wages for most workers.”
CBS Moneywatch April 24, 2014 -
The Court’s decision in Brown sparked a disruption of white supremacy and Jim Crow in the South and forced the federal government to pass civil and voting rights legislation.
However, a new report by the Economic Policy Institute makes the argument that while the 1954 Supreme Court decision did achieve the goal of raising awareness about the inherent segregation and unfairness in the separate but equal concept, it has failed miserably at its central mission: to desegregate schools in the United States.
The report states, “[B]y focusing the nation’s attention on subjugation of blacks, it helped fuel a wave of freedom rides, sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading ultimately to civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s. But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission—to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today.”
The Grio April 22, 2014 -
“No politician at this point wants to be defending the performance of the economy today, and you shouldn’t be. It’s still really bad,” said Josh Bivens, director of policy and research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill April 22, 2014 -
Mainstream economists have been disgracefully slow in responding to this historic shift in who gets what. When Larry Mishel and his colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute began reporting on the growing gap between workers’ productivity and their pay in the mid-1980s, the first reaction of the economist establishment was denial. When they could no longer ignore the data, economists blamed the workers themselves for not being educated enough for the new information age.
The Nation April 22, 2014 -
The case essentially alleges white-collar wage theft. The engineers were not victimized by the usual violations of labor law, but by improper hiring practices against their interests. The result, however, was the same: Money that would have flowed to workers in the form of wages went instead into corporate coffers and from there to executives and shareholders.
When wage theft against low-wage workers is combined with that against highly paid workers, a bad problem becomes much worse. Data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute show that in 2012, the Department of Labor helped 308,000 workers recover $280 million in back pay for wage-theft violations — nearly double the amount stolen that year in robberies on the street, at banks, gas stations and convenience stores.
The New York Times April 22, 2014 -
“Because sales taxes are already highly regressive, the deduction makes them more so because federal income tax filers on the lower end of the income distribution do not itemize and hence cannot claim the benefit,” Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute explained in February. “Further, the provision (like all tax deductions) is worth more the higher a filer’s marginal tax rate, and this skews the benefits to high-income taxpayers.” In other words, high-income earners benefit more from the credit as they are more likely to itemize their taxes and the provision is worth more at higher marginal rates.
MSNBC April 18, 2014 -
Piketty presented his ideas during his April 15 talk (a fitting day to talk about taxes, as it’s the day when some 154 million Americans file their tax returns and pay around $1.4 trillion in federal income taxes) at an event held at Washington’s Economic Policy Institute and co-sponsored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Piketty has just published a book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” in which he measures income inequality in some three dozen countries. Because he was in Washington, his talk largely focused on the gap in the United States and what to do about it.
The Washington Post April 18, 2014 -
Sixty years ago next month, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation in the South, but the impact of that ruling isn’t readily apparent in schools today. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute argues that the Brown decision helped launch the civil rights movement and brought attention to the unfairness of separate but equal, in the long run it failed to achieve its main goal — desegregating schools. “The typical black student now attends a school where only 29 percent of his or her fellow students are white, down from 36 percent in 1980,” according to the Institute’s Richard Rothstein. A large part of the reason that America’s schools are segregated is because America’s neighborhoods are segregated.
While the circumstances of black students have improved dramatically since 1954, they have improved for white students as well. And even if low-income schools gain access to the resources they need — “high-quality early childhood programs… high-quality after-school and summer programs; full-service school health clinics; more skilled teachers; and smaller classes” — more integrated schools are key. Rothstein argues that fixing lapses in neighborhood integration policies is key to improving Brown v. Board‘s results. “Education policy is housing policy.”
The Wire April 18, 2014 -
“Every time you hear someone say ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ add the phrase ‘at the wage I want to pay’,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., economic research organization.
When Ms. Shierholz compared the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the number of job openings by industry with data from the U.S. Census on the number of people who are unemployed by industry, she found there are more unemployed people than jobs in every industry.
Pittsburgh Post Gazette April 18, 2014 -
The Journal, being the literal journal of Wall Street, takes great pains to articulate the anguish of the wealthy while downplaying that contributing factor. “Higher earners’ share of the overall federal tax burden has been climbing fairly steadily,” theJournal‘s John McKinnon writes, “even before lawmakers negotiated the fiscal-cliff deal at the end of 2012.” He tells the story of a business owner that saw her taxes “rise from around $600,000 in 2012 to more than $700,000.” That’s a steep increase. And, McKinnon continues, it was “driven mainly by changes in investment-tax rates on the $2 million in dividends she received from her firm.” Oh. Well. Sorry? “She was really shocked by the increase,” her attorney said. “That one hit home.” Which home? Not the Aspen one, I hope.
It’s in the fifth paragraph that McKinnon mentions the role of increased incomes. “The share of overall income for the top 1%, now at around 17%, according to the Tax Policy Center,” he writes, “has roughly doubled since the early 1980s,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. Contrast the Journal‘s graph of how taxes on the top 1 percent have increased (at left, below) with the change in income by group as plotted by the Economic Policy Institute (at right, purloined from The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson).
The Wire April 15, 2014 -
“This year the U.S. economy is sending clear signs that not only are STEM jobs growing but the highly skilled shortages masked by the economic crisis are still there as well,” Compete America said in a statement after the 2015 cap was reached. “The U.S. needs to move on to the business of fixing its highly skilled immigration system before it loses more of the top foreign professional and job creators that make America’s fastest growing industries competitive.”
Facebook and Google might not be getting the lion’s share of the available H-1B visas, but that’s because under the current system those visas are going to large, and in some cases off-shore, consulting and IT firms, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News April 14, 2014 -
Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, says the labor market needs to generate about 300,000 additional jobs each month to make a difference in the jobless rate. The economic landscape varies in communities around the country. To see the jobless situation by state, go to AARP’s interactive “pain index.”
AARP April 14, 2014 -
Uses our charts in slides.
The New York Times April 14, 2014 -
“You would probably get a small price decline … but it wouldn’t be profound,” says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. She points to studies that show minor increases in inflation when there are wage hikes. “The evidence of price increases [due to incremental minimum wage hikes] is that it’s really minimal, so I don’t think it would be a big factor.”
VOX April 14, 2014 -
The 77-cent figure “only answers one very specific question—annual earnings for women versus men,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington. What most people want to know is how much women and men earn when they are working side by side for the same work, she said. “That’s not answered by the 77 cents.”
Wall Street Journal April 14, 2014 -
Concentrated poverty and racial segregation in American cities are tremendously knotty problems, problems inherited across generations that are hard to solve for unspoken reasons of politics and history and race.
But here is one fairly simple truth that we need to acknowledge — but seldom do — to create any kind of sustainable policy solutions, whether they take the form of housing vouchers or pre-K education or “promise neighborhoods”: “When it comes to housing and race,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “there really is no such thing as chance or accident.”
She was speaking this week at a discussion on concentrated neighborhood poverty hosted by the Economic Policy Institute. And what she means by this is that suburbs didn’t become predominantly white and upper income thanks solely to market forces and consumer preferences. Inner city neighborhoods didn’t become home to poor minority communities purely through the random choices of minorities to live there. Economic and racial segregation didn’t just arise out of the decisions of millions of families to settle, by chance, here instead of there.
The Washington Post April 14, 2014 -
Strong countries need a thriving middle class, but in America today, the people who have to work for a living are getting squeezed. Republicans in Congress are poised to vote this week on a plan to make it even worse, selling out the middle class to enrich the already rich.
With their latest budget, Republicans are stacking the deck for special interests — and whether you’re a student, parent, commuter or senior citizen, Republicans will force you to pick up the costs so that special interests get their tax breaks.
In Washington, too many people speak in vague hyperbole. So let’s look at the numbers in the GOP budget and see exactly how its priorities would affect real Americans. Many economists predict that this budget will lead to a loss of more than 3 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CNN April 10, 2014 -
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Marketplace April 10, 2014 -
The Pew Research Center last year found that women earned 84 percent of what men earned in its study of the hourly wages of all workers, including those who work part time. Similarly, a 2013 review by the Economic Policy Institute of annual hourly wages for men and women with college degrees, including salaried and hourly workers, found that the men earned on average $33.71 per hour and the women just $25.35 an hour.
The New York Times April 10, 2014 -
(Also in The Herald Business, Inside Bay Area)
Just a few days ago, representatives from Yahoo, Cisco Systems, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and other Bay Area companies met with about 65 members of Congress to discuss H-1B and related issues, Lam said. Most of the lawmakers they talked to were in the House, she said, since the Senate already has passed a bill, which besides reforming various aspects of immigration law would increase the number of visas to between 115,000 and 180,000 a year, depending on economic factors.But immigration reform has faced a more difficult road in the Republican-controlled House and critics of the proposed H-1B expansion contend it would be detrimental to U.S.-born workers.
“It undercuts the American labor market,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor and immigration expert at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, citing studies that have found many firms pay their H-1B workers extremely low pay. “It reduces wages and job opportunities for Americans. It reduces our standard of living. So it’s a bad idea.”
Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, agreed, and said he sees “a very, very small chance” of Congress expanding the program this year.
Bloomberg Businesweek April 8, 2014