Media clips
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The Employment Policies Institute has received funding from the restaurant industry, and the think tank has sponsored some of Wessels’s work.
The study has many supporters, as well. Michael Reich, a UC Berkeley economist and director of the university’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, said he and colleagues reviewed the study, along with all others released by the institute’s researchers, to ensure they meet the university’s research standards — which he called “the highest in the world.”
“I think the report’s methodology is sound,” said David Cooper, an economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., liberal-leaning think tank. “Reasonable people can debate their conclusions and policy implications.”
Wall Street Journal November 8, 2013 -
The effects of the H-1B visa program on wages is of particular interest to both economists and American unions. The Public Policy Institute of California, which has received funding from the tech industry, published a paper in December 2011 that shows H1-B visa holders are paid more than native workers and are more educated.
Hira, who previously conducted studies funded by the pro-union Economic Policy Institute, studied a smaller sample of H1-B workers and companies from 2010 to 2012 and found companies like Infosys typically paid foreign engineers only the minimum threshold that permits companies to bypass certain requirements under immigration law.
ABC News November 8, 2013 -
Lower tax burdens: Prior to the 1980s, taxes were much higher for the rich. The top income tax rate in 1980 was 70 percent. In 1945 it was 94 percent.”Why would you pay someone millions of dollars a year if the government was going to take 90% of it?” said Lawrence Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute.Now, the top tax rate is 39.5 percent. Lower taxes mean there’s now more of an incentive for people to chase, and for companies to give, huge paychecks.
CNNMoney November 8, 2013 -
The effects of the H-1B visa program on wages is of particular interest to both economists and American unions. The Public Policy Institute of California, which has received funding from the tech industry, published a paper in December 2011 that shows H1-B visa holders are paid more than native workers and are more educated.
Hira, who previously conducted studies funded by the pro-union Economic Policy Institute, studied a smaller sample of H1-B workers and companies from 2010 to 2012 and found companies like Infosys typically paid foreign engineers only the minimum threshold that permits companies to bypass certain requirements under immigration law.
ABC News November 6, 2013 -
On the other side, groups like the Economic Policy Institute assert that the H-1B program is filled with loopholes that allow firms to hire guest works without first recruiting qualified and available U.S. workers. As the report explained, high-skilled guest workers may be taking the jobs that equally qualified college-educated workers could fill. If the number of guest workers rises as provided for in the bills Congress is presently considering, there will be more guest workers and STEM green card holders than college graduates in the information technology areas. Guest workers will more than fill the STEM jobs available, as an earlier report by the EPI noted.
The Washington Post November 6, 2013 -
There’s no question that a part-time economy has taken hold in the U.S.
Since 2007, the rate of Americans working part-time rose from 17% to nearly 20%, a trend that has as much to do with the sluggish economic recovery as with employers’ general wariness about hiring.
And it can be worrisome for today’s young workers.
One in five college graduates are considered underemployed in the U.S., according a report by the Economic Policy Institute, leading many young adults to scrape by with a patchwork of part-time, contract or temporary gigs and none of the usual benefits of full-time employment, like health care and retirement accounts.
That leaves a lot of workers with a nagging uncertainty about being able to pay next month’s rent. Others, meanwhile, wouldn’t have it any other way, preferring the flexibility and freedom that comes with not being tied to a 9-to-5 office job.
Yahoo Finance November 5, 2013 -
Less well-covered has been the assault on workers’ rights as part of a coordinated, strategic, national and ideological program. There’s been excellent coverage of efforts by individual state legislatures, particularly efforts to roll back unionization for public-sector workers in Wisconsin and Michigan. But there hasn’t been a solid overview of how all these efforts hang together and how extensive and coordinated they are.
That has changed with a remarkable paper by the University of Oregon’s Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute, titled “The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012.” Lafer documents how extensive anti-labor efforts have been with the wave of newly conservative state governments, and he paints a picture of the forest that arises out of all these anti-labor trees.
The Washington Post November 5, 2013 -
EPI Research Associate Gordon Lafer describes the implications of his latest paper in The Nation, saying, “None of this comes from individual legislators. . . . This is coordinated and national.”
The Nation November 1, 2013 -
There are plenty of problems in public education, but here’s the biggest, from Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, a project of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute that recognizes the impact of social and economic disadvantage on many schools and students, and works to better the conditions that limit many children’s readiness to learn.
The Washington Post November 1, 2013 -
For women, the good news is that, according to the latest payrolls data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of jobs held by women is now higher than when the Great Recession officially began nearly six years ago, in December of 2007.
But the bad news is that while some women have certainly scored good jobs, others are struggling with positions that are low-paid, part-time or temporary, and perhaps lacking benefits. Economists say that’s partly because the sectors that have seen some of the strongest jobs gains amid the tepid economic recovery, such as leisure and hospitality, tend not to pay that well.
“It’s the low-wage industries that are disproportionately growing right now,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News November 1, 2013 -
Last year, Tennessee school teachers lost their collective bargaining rights. So did municipal workers in Oklahoma. And farm workers and childcare providers in Maine. Research assistants in Michigan, too.
These attacks on labor were not isolated instances of ideological union-busting, according to areport released today by the Economic Policy Institute. The study traces the rise of a broad and coordinated campaign, fueled by corporate cash and conservative state legislators, to strip workers in both public and private sectors of their rights.The Nation November 1, 2013 -
“People in any given place, if they’re dealing with a minimum wage repeal in New Hampshire or something, mostly experience that as if it comes from a particular legislator in their state, and it’s explained as a response to the conditions in their state,” report author Gordon Lafer told Salon. “So when you put all the pieces together over the 50 states, one of the things you see is how concerted an effort it is, and how cookie-cutter the legislation is – and how much it’s not being driven by individual legislators, but by a national corporate lobby.” Lafer, a University of Oregon political economist who’s served as a policy adviser in the U.S. House, wrote the paper for the Economic Policy Institute, a D.C.-based progressive think tank whose funders have included foundations and unions.
Salon November 1, 2013 -
Rules have been enacted to prevent minimum wage hikes and mandated paid sick leave, while others have made it harder to recover unpaid wages or collect unemployment benefits.
“This is coordinated and national,” the report’s author, University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, said during a Thursday morning panel unveiling the report. It was produced for the Economic Policy Institute, which focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers, and where Lafer is a research associate. (Disclaimer: I moderated Thursday’s panel.)
The paper explores a series of free-market policies pursued or enacted in 2011 and 2012. Four states limited the minimum wage or at least to whom it applied, another four made it easier for children to work and 16 imposed new limits on unemployment benefits.
The Washington Post November 1, 2013 -
–Teacher Gap: Heidi Shierholz notes that despite more students, the U.S. has fewer teachers. “Of the decline in public-sector employment in the last five years, around 40 percent (258,000) is in local government education, which largely consists of jobs in public K–12 education (the majority of which are teachers, but also included are teacher aides, guidance counselors, and administrators, among others). Over the same period, public K–12 enrollment increased by 1.6 percent. Just to keep up with this growth in the student population, employment in local public education should have grown at roughly the same rate, which would have meant adding 132,000 jobs. Putting these numbers together (i.e., what was lost plus what should have been added to keep up with the expanding student population) means that the total jobs gap in local public education as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath is around 389,000 jobs, as shown in the figure below.”
Wall Street Journal October 25, 2013 -
For high-income countries, an inverse correlation exists between the willingness to admit foreign guestworkers and the level of rights such workers are granted, speakers said Oct. 21 at an event sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute.
As such, restricting at least some guestworker rights could lead wealthy countries to be more open to admitting guestworkers, they said.
The discussion centered on the findings of “The Price of Rights: Regulating International Labor Migration,” a book by Martin Ruhs, an Oxford University professor who also is a researcher for the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society and a member of the U.K. Migration Advisory Committee.
Ruhs said he focused on the “tension” between countries’ openness to admitting greater numbers of guestworkers and granting rights to those guestworkers—with greater admission tending to lead to fewer rights for the foreign workers.
The author said he examined the relationship among the “three fundamental questions” countries must answer in determining immigration policy: how many guestworkers to admit; what types to admit; and what rights to provide when they arrive.
Bloomberg BNA October 24, 2013 -
It’s a genuinely bare-bones budget. It takes a wage of nearly $12 an hour earned by 1 2/3 full-time workers to reach an income of $40,000 a year for a family with two adults and two children. More than 50 million workers receive less than that pay or are unemployed and trying to find work.
To be sure, there have been increases in wages over the years, but they have gone mostly to the very top. Even for the American worker right in the middle, pay has risen by barely 10% in real terms over the last 40 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Contrast that with the near tripling of pay for the top 1%.
Los Angeles Times October 24, 2013 -
The right has long had a set of institutions that serve a similar role. The best known of these is the Heritage Foundation, which after its establishment in 1973 helped craft the conservative policy revolution that started with the election Ronald Reagan and crested, finally, during the presidency of George W. Bush. Heritage served multiple roles during that span—as an incubator of ideas, a supplier of arguments, and a source of talent. The brains and money behind Heritage saw the think-tank as an antidote to the prevailing liberal consensus in Washington, as put forth by places like the Brookings Institution (and academia generally) and reinforced by the New York Times(and rest of the media establishment). But there was a certain irony in this mandate: Whatever the ideological sympathies of these supposedly liberal institutions, or the people within them, they were not avowedly political organizations. On the contrary, they strove to maintain—and, I would argue, succeeded in maintaining—a strict posture of non-partisanship and even non-ideology. Other think-tanks and organizations had more clearly progressive outlooks, but even they tended to be heavily analytical and/or narrowly focused. They did invaluable work. (The Economic Policy Institute‘s annual State of Working America may be the single most important non-government report on inequality.) But one niche remained unfilled.
The New Republic October 24, 2013 -
Week in Charts: India has fastest inflation of G20, and marijuana license fees
Still recovering from the all-night kegger your colleagues threw to celebrate annual Boss’s Day on Wednesday? Here’s a statistic to sober you up: The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 273 in 2012, down from 383 in 2000, but far higher than 20 in 1965, according to analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. Those statistics are based on the 350 publicly owned firms with the largest revenue each year, and take into account realized options.
Wall Street Journal October 24, 2013 -
The gap between skyrocketing CEO pay and relatively stagnant compensation for everyone else has been widening for decades. While annual CEO compensation increased by 726.7% between 1978 and 2011, average worker compensation only went up 5.7% during the same time, according to a 2012 study by the Economic Policy Institute.
MSNBC October 24, 2013 -
The recession could be the defining event in the lives of millennials. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, young college graduates faced an unemployment rate of 10.1 percent in 2011, but an underemployment rate almost twice that. Furthermore, pay for new graduates decreased 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012.
The Washington Post October 24, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute points out a big hole in the BLS calculations:
In today’s labor market, the unemployment rate drastically understates the weakness of job opportunities. This is due to the existence of a large pool of “missing workers”—potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. In other words, these are people who would be either working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger. Because jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work, these “missing workers” are not reflected in the unemployment rate.
By EPI’s gauge, there were in August, 4.97 million “missing workers.” If they were seeking work, the unemployment rate for that month would have been 10.1 percent, not the actually reported 7.3 percent.
Daily Kos October 24, 2013 -
The Labor Department announced Tuesday that the unemployment rate took a dip last month, falling slightly to 7.2 percent from 7.3 percent in August.
Not accounted for in that calculation were the more than 5 million people who have given up looking for work. Known as “missing workers,” these Americans have vanished from the job market and subsequently the official calculation of the country’s unemployment rate. As you can see, their ranks continue to swell:
As noted by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (who produced the two graphics in this post), if these missing persons were counted in our nation’s jobless rate, the situation would look a lot worse — like above-10-percent bad:
The Huffington Post October 24, 2013 -
Let’s start with the basics: 148,000 jobs were added in September. “If we were to put the 148,000 in context, it’s lower than the previous 12 month average, which was 185,000 jobs per month,” says Elise Gould from the Economic Policy Institute. “We also see that the unemployment rate was little changed. It went from 7.3 percent in August to 7.2 percent in September.”
Gould says that overall, this report tells us that the U.S. is far from a full recovery. But, looking at the jobs numbers from month-to-month doesn’t always give the most accurate assessment of the economy. The yearly data often paints the clearest picture.
Marketplace October 24, 2013 -
An increase will add vitality to the D.C. economy by putting money in the pockets of people who are most likely to spend it. A $10.10 wage — the rate proposed for the entire country by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) — would help 36,000 D.C. workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The estimated $58 million in increased wages would be spent at markets, clothing shops and hardware stores, aiding D.C. businesses large and small. The direct and indirect effects would help thousands of children. And arguments that minimum-wage earners are dominated by teenagers don’t hold up to scrutiny. Almost all affected workers — 95 percent — would be age 20 or older. Economists have studied the impact of minimum wage increases for decades. And the vast weight of the research finds that they raise workers’ take home pay without leading to notable job cuts.
The Washington Post October 18, 2013 -
The sequester is merely one manifestation of Congress’s love for austerity in the post-recession era. From the inception, recovery programs have never been as large or robust as they needed to be, despite evidence that even harsher austerity regimes kept much of Europe mired in slumps.
The Economic Policy Institute displays the harvest graphically (see above). The chart shows that the recovery has barely progressed, falling well below the growth of every recovery period since before the 1980s. Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of EPI have more here. If post-2008 government spending had matched that of earlier recoveries, 5 million more people would be employed today.
Los Angeles Times October 18, 2013 -
Everything will be backed up: Mortgage applications, work permits, backpay for furloughed workers. Stier says after the government re-opens, people will have to wait weeks or even months to get the services they need.
Meanwhile, the backlog will keep getting bigger.
“There’s real damage being done here,” says Josh Bivens, head of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. “There’s really a loss of productivity both going into the shutdown and then another period of low productivity as you sort of ramp it all back up.”
As far as long term effects go, Bivens says this could permanently lower confidence in the US economy, both for foreign investors and people just trying to get a mortgage application in.
Marketplace October 18, 2013 -
Indeed, some experts fear that any remedies lawmakers might devise as part of future budget talks, such as a proposed plan to slow the growth of Social Security payments, could prove worse than the cure. Josh Bivens, research and policy director with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, warns that a renewed focus in Washington on deficit-reduction could hurt the recovery by diminishing people’s income. Consumer spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of economic activity in the U.S.
CBS Moneywatch October 18, 2013 -
That huge gap between the top and the middle is the result of a boom in executive compensation, which rose eight hundred and seventy-six per cent between 1978 and 2011, according to a study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute. In response, we’ve had a host of regulatory reforms designed to curb executive pay. The latest of these is a rule, unveiled by the S.E.C. last month, requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages.
The New Yorker October 18, 2013 -
The US has seen a net loss of 5.7 million manufacturing jobs since 1998, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The gaping trade deficit with China alone “displaced” 2.7 million US workers between 2001 and 2011, the EPI’s Robert Scott says.
New York state lost some 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the last five years. And the recovery of all the local jobs lost during the Great Recession is masked by thousands of new, lower-paid jobs with reduced benefits.
Lee Conrad, national coordinator in New York for a small group of union-affiliated IBM workers, said his group uncovered the latest local IBM cuts. IBM has stopped reporting head count by location in recent years.
New York Post October 11, 2013 -
Last year, the federal poverty line was set at $23,283 for a family of four, which, according to the Economic Policy Institute, is one-quarter of the cost of living in New York City and one-third the cost of living in St. Louis. EPI found that in 615 cities across the country, a family with three children requires a total income of at least twice the federal poverty line to afford basic expenses such as housing, childcare, healthcare and food. The number jumps considerably if the family owns a car or wishes to send its children to college. Car insurance is a significant expenditure and college tuition continues to skyrocket.
US News and World Report October 11, 2013