While the Great Recession and recovery brought the importance of savings to the forefront — for everyone, not just the poor — persistent unemployment and stagnant wages have made it difficult for Americans to put any money away. Low- and middle-income Americans were hit harder by the recession and slow recovery than their wealthy counterparts. The annual wages of the bottom 90 percent of workers declined between 2009 and 2011, according to a January analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. The wages of the top one percent rose 8.2 percent during the same period.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013
But one chart, produced on Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, blows away this argument, too. It tracks the income advantage of the college-educated against the income advantage of the top 1 percent of earners.
If Mankiw’s claim is correct, then these two lines should track each other closely. But they don’t. (Story continues below chart.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013
The bottom line is that working families are paying the price for America’s neglect of basic wage standards. The decline in the minimum wage accounts for more than half of the inequality that has emerged between the lowest-paid workers and those in the middle over the past 30 years, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
June 27, 2013
“The question is, ‘Is this person an employee?’ If they’re doing work for the benefit of the employer, they are,” Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute think-tank in Washington, told ABCNews.com. “Instead, these [internship programs] are finding a way to get young people to work for nothing, and that’s not going to satisfy the law.”
Eisenbrey said the U.S. Department of Labor raised the profile of unpaid internship issues three years ago when it published a fact sheet that listed guidelines for employers to decide whether interns must be paid minimum wage and overtime in the for-profit, private sector.
ABC News
June 27, 2013
The average CEO makes hundreds of times what the average worker makes. And the average CEO probably didn’t earn it all.
The average chief executive of one of the 350 biggest U.S. companies made about $14.07 million in 2012, including exercised stock options, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. In contrast, the average national pay for a non-supervisory worker was $51,200 last year. That means that in a typical top-350 company, the CEO made 273 times more than worker drones, by the EPI’s estimate.
The Huffington Post
June 27, 2013
In the U.S., the ratio of chief executive pay including stock options to worker compensation was 29 to 1 in 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The ratio peaked at 383.4 to 1 in 2000, and in 2012 it remained at a still lofty 272.9 to 1.
Bloomberg Businesweek
June 27, 2013
Want to know exactly how much richer the average chief executive is than you and me? Take a look at the Economic Policy Institute’s latest white paper, which tracks the growth of CEO compensation over the last half century.
The Washington Post
June 27, 2013
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, CEO compensation at large U.S. companies was 243 times that of the average U.S. worker. At Whole Foods that multiple is 19, capping compensation for top execs at $705,000.
Wall Street Journal Barron’s
June 18, 2013
“I thought it was great,” said Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute. “I thought the judge got right to the heart of the matter, that this was for the benefit of the corporation and wasn’t created to provide an educational experience for the intern. It is huge that this came from an important court, and the Southern District Court of New York is an important court.”
Most encouraging to Eisenbrey and others is that Pauley cited the Department of Labor guidelines for determining whether an internship must be paid, which include stipulations that the internship be similar to what one would receive in an educational environment; that the internship be closely supervised; and that the intern not displace a paid worker. The guidelines also state that the internship must be primarily for the benefit of the intern and that “The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the intern; and on occasion its operations may actually be impeded.”
The Daily Beast
June 18, 2013
The days of the unpaid internship may be coming to an end, at least at businesses.
Yesterday, a federal judge in New York ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal and state labor laws when it didn’t pay production interns. Today, the liberal Economic held a press call featuring the lead plaintiff in the case and his lawyer. Their message: If you’re a for-profit enterprise, and you’re not paying your interns, you’re probably violating the law.
“If you’re deriving profit from labor performed in your workplace, why shouldn’t you pay for it?” asked Eric Glatt, the lead plaintiff in the Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Philadelphia Business Journal
June 18, 2013
There are up to 1 million unpaid internships offered in the United States every year, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. He said the number of internships has grown as the economy tumbled and he blamed them for exploiting young workers and driving down wages.
“The return on a college investment has fallen, students are facing higher and higher debt burdens, and the reaction of employers is to make matters worse for them by hiring more and more people without paying them,” Eisenbrey said.
AP
June 18, 2013
Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, said would-be interns would be wise to think twice about agreeing to work without pay, even to get a foot in the door.
“You signal to employers that you aren’t worth that much if you’re willing to work for nothing,” Eisenbrey said.
Reuters
June 18, 2013
The 10 highest-paid chief executive officers running Wisconsin public companies scored an average pay increase of 31% last year, bringing their average compensation up to $10.5 million. Meanwhile, pay for the typical worker in the state increased 2.37%.
Bottom line: The top 10 Wisconsin CEOs made, on average, 251 times more than Joe Average did last year.
“We’ve built an economy where these guys are doing well when everybody else doesn’t do well,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank. “There’s something wrong with that.”
…
Nationally, estimates of the gap between CEOs and average workers vary greatly, and they are based on the compensation of CEOs only at large companies. The Economic Policy Institute estimates it at more than 200 times. The AFL-CIO says the typical CEO made 354 times more than the average worker last year.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
June 18, 2013
Several months after it officially kicked in, sequestration is far from the hottest story coming out of Washington. Naturally enough, reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is getting lots of attention, even if final passage of an actual bill seems pretty remote. But sequestration hasn’t simply dissipated into thin air. In fact, a new paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released yesterday tries to show exactly how the impact of the “automatic” budget cuts has played out on a state-by-state basis.
Education Week
June 18, 2013
Here’s a remarkable chart from EPI. Actually, no: strike that. It’s true that in a normal world it would be remarkable, but in the world we live in it’s actually totally unsurprising. It illustrates the rise in income inequality over the past three decades (top dark blue line), and as you can see, it’s been rising steadily. Totally unsurprising.
Mother Jones
June 18, 2013
Raising taxes on the rich often gets proposed as a way of combating the rise of financial inequality. But how important is tax policy, really?
Andrew Fieldhouse, a federal budget policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation, has a new paper out of EPI that does a great job of illustrating the limits of tax policy in this area.
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013
Over the past three decades, there has been improvement, a narrowing of the gap. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out, the median hourly wage for women in 1979 was 62.7 of the median for men. In 2012, it was 82.8 percent:
Daily Kos
June 18, 2013
The U.S. jobs picture is bleaker than the most recent jobs reports may make you think. The economy added 175,000 jobs last month, but at the rate things are going, it would take almost a decade to get back to prerecession employment levels. A Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics digs in on the bad news: The number of job openings in the U.S. actually fell by 118,000 in April to 3.8 million.
How bad can 3.8 million job openings be? The Economic Policy Institute looks at the number and sees that “the main problem in the labor market is a broad-based lack of demand for workers—and not, as is often claimed, available workers lacking the skills needed for the sectors with job openings.” To bolster this point, they put forward this chart:
National Journal
June 18, 2013
There’s nothing new or surprising about this chart from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz. It’s just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in very bad shape — despite recent improvements:
The Washington Post
June 18, 2013
The Department of Labor released its latest report on job openings yesterday, and while not much changed from last month, it was a reminder that the labor market is still pretty much murder. With more than 11.7 million unemployed Americans still out there, the government estimates that there are 3.8 million jobs to be had — a ratio of 3.1-to-1, as shown on this graph from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
June 18, 2013
For young college graduates the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, and the underemployment rate, which includes those who have given up looking for a job or who are working part time because they cannot find a full-time job, is about.
The New York Times
June 18, 2013
A 2012 report from the Economic Policy Institute showed that by increasing the minimum wage to $10 per hour, more than a half a million Massachusetts workers would benefit from the raise, and create thousands of new jobs.
Boston Magazine
June 13, 2013
Things are gonna get better. That’s at least according to blacks and Latinos living in the U.S.
Although blacks and Latinos were hit hardest by the housing crisis and financial downturn of recent years, both groups say they are happy and the economy will improve.
ABC News
June 13, 2013
These numbers mirror a simultaneous trend in eroding security among ambitious black Americans with shrinking access to middle-class jobs. It’s true that the country’s middle class is collapsing for everyone, but that trend is most profound among African-Americans. In 2008, as black folks flocked into higher ed, the Economic Policy Institute found that 45 percent of African-Americans born into the middle class were living at or near poverty as adults.
The Root
June 13, 2013
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, CEO compensation at large U.S. companies was 243 times that of the average U.S. worker. At Whole Foods that multiple is 19, capping compensation for top execs at $705,000.
Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2013
The golden years aren’t turning out to be that golden for many current seniors and retirees, according to two reports that shed light on which older Americans are most likely to be economically vulnerable.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds that black, Hispanic or female seniors, or people 80 and older are more likely to face economic woes than other older Americans.
“Public programs like Social Security and Medicare do a fairly decent job of keeping people out of absolute deprivation – absolute poverty – but there’s still a huge swath of the elderly that are living pretty close to the line,” said David Cooper, an economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, and co-author of the report.
NBC News
June 13, 2013
There’s nothing new or surprising about this chart from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Sheirholz. It’s just a reminder that the U.S. labor market is still in very bad shape — despite recent improvements:
The Washington Post
June 13, 2013
The Department of Labor released its latest report on job openings yesterday, and while not much changed from last month, it was a reminder that the labor market is still pretty much murder. With more than 11.7 million unemployed Americans still out there, the government estimates that there are 3.8 million jobs to be had — a ratio of 3.1-to-1, as shown on this graph from the Economic Policy Institute.
The Atlantic
June 13, 2013
There’s a long way to go before the churn in the labor market looks normal. “The most striking aspect of the JOLTS data continues to be the low level of both hires and separations: Turnover in the labor market remains down sharply relative to before the crisis,” wrote Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics in a note to clients before Tuesday’s data release. Voluntary quits are still 22 percent below their 2007 level, according to Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Fiscal Times
June 13, 2013
Problems are also increasingly apparent on the demand side: high unemployment and underemployment rates among college graduates.
The New York Times
June 13, 2013