Asian American’s are the best educated ethnic group in the United States, by a long shot.* Logically, that means they should have the least severe unemployment, given that more educated workers tend to have an easier time in the job market. Instead, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, the Asian community suffered from the most severe long-term joblessness of any racial demographic in 2010, during the slow, early period of the economic recovery.
As shown in the graph below, 48.7 percent of unemployed Asian Americans had been out of a job for 27 weeks or more. Blacks were next, at 48.5 percent, followed by Whites, at 42.7 percent.
The Atlantic
May 31, 2012
As the academic year ends, the number of teens looking for summer jobs increases, however, job opportunities are few and far between for underprivileged African American teens, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Poor African American teens trail Hispanic and White teens when it comes to securing a summer job by over 10%. In fact, 36% of white and 31% of Hispanic underserved teens—between the ages of 16 and 19—were able to find employment, while only 20% of Black teens in that same age bracket were as lucky. Middle-class African American teens were only slightly more likely to find work in comparison to their white counterparts.
Black Enterprise
May 30, 2012
“Profits recovered their pre-recession peak very quickly,” said Josh Bivens, research director for the Economic Policy Institute, which closely follows worker income trends in the U.S. “Unit profits in the corporate sector are now at a 45-year high.”
The Fiscal Times
May 30, 2012
Rebecca Thiess of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute lobbed a harsher critique, saying Pelosi’s high-profile endorsement of the $1 million figure is indication that “the Democratic leadership is now comfortable perpetuating the notion that taxpayers earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual income deserve a tax cut.
“Policy-wise this is definitely not something we want to see at all,” Thiess said. “The middle class has become completely lost in this debate; the conversation has now shifted to which strata of the very wealthy deserve a hefty tax cut.”
The Hill
May 30, 2012
In the Republican weekly address, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) blamed the president for American “dependence on government.”
“Instead of concentrating on job creation, President Obama has concentrated on growing government and increasing its control over our lives,” Johnson said. “Because of his policies, dependence on government has increased, and individual opportunity has declined.”
At least one analysis takes issue with Senator Johnson’s statement. According to the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, government jobs have decreased by 584,000 at the federal, state and local level since June of 2009.
CBS News
May 24, 2012
The economy is missing between 5 million and 6 million workers. That’s how much bigger our labor force would be if there had been no Great Recession, per the Congressional Budget Office.
So, who are the missing five million? That’s the question
Greg Ip of
The Economist recently asked. The above chart from the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) gives us a hint of at least part of the answer: the young.
The Atlantic
May 24, 2012
Last year’s young college graduates lucky enough to land jobs had an average hourly wage of only $16.81, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about $35,000 a year — lower than the yearly earnings of young college graduates in 2007, before the Great Recession. The typical wage of young college graduates dropped 4.6 percent between 2007 and 2011, adjusted for inflation.
The Huffington Post
May 24, 2012
If you’re wondering why so many young college graduatesare living at home, you only have to look at the kind of salaries that they are earning.
These college graduates (ages 21-24) are making an average hourly wage of $16.81 per hour, which equals a yearly salary of roughly $35,000, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
CBS News
May 24, 2012
The bill that ended last August’s standoff over the debt ceiling — when House Republicans held the nation’s creditworthiness hostage for spending cuts — will cause hundreds of thousands of students to face reductions in their Pell Grants or to lose the grants entirely. As the San Jose Mercury News reported today, “Among those who will lose Pell Grants in the summer are at least 65,000 new college students without high school diplomas…Changes in income requirements will reduce or eliminate grants for nearly 300,000 others.” Those cuts also cost the economy 1.8 million jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) is already preparing another debt ceiling showdown for this winter.
Think Progress
May 24, 2012
Not only would Ryan’s plan add to the debt, it would also increase the number of people who are looking for a job, resulting in a net loss of 4.1 million jobs over the next two years, according to the Economic Policy Institute:
The Ryan budget would nevertheless immediately enact aggressive spending cuts — particularly to the social safety net — which would reduce employment by 1.3 million jobs in fiscal 2013 and 2.8 million jobs in fiscal 2014, relative to current budget policies.
Think Progress
May 24, 2012
That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”
Think Progress
May 17, 2012
The Center for American Progress’s Pat Garofalo caught this little tidbit and nicely summarized why the idea of Bush writing a book on economic growth is ludicrous.
After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”
And there was the matter of the Great Recession.
US News and World Report
May 17, 2012
Last summer’s walkout by foreign students working for a Hershey chocolate subcontractor under the government’s Summer Work Travel program prompted an investigation by the State Department, which is responsible for overseeing the program. Recently, the State Department issued new rules for the Summer Work Travel program, including capping it at 109,000, down from a 2008 high of 152,000. Assessing the new rules, the Economic Policy Institute’s Daniel Costa and Ross Eisenbrey conclude that the rules are not perfect but are “a significant improvement and go far toward protecting the rights of U.S. and J-1 workers.”
Daily Kos
May 17, 2012
According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, “between 2000 and 2011, the wages of young college graduates [aged 21-24] dropped 5.4 percent (1.6 percent for men and 8.5 percent for women),” after they grew 19 percent between 1995 and 2000. As EPI noted, “young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of strength (e.g. 1995–2000) face much stronger wage prospects than young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of weakness (e.g. 2001 to the present).”
Think Progress
May 17, 2012
Atlanta Journal Constitution
May 17, 2012
Private industry employers have been slowly adding jobs for 19 months. A net gain of 130,000 jobs was reported last week for the month of April. Meanwhile, though, the public sector lost 15,000 jobs in the month, continuing a nearly four-year-old cutback trend.
Those government job cuts have eliminated many jobs held predominantly by women and African-Americans.
“The disproportionate share of women and African-Americans working in state and local government has translated into higher rates of job loss for both groups in these sectors,” a report by the Economic Policy Institute said.
From 2007 to 2011, state and local governments shed about 765,000 jobs nationally. Women made up 70 percent and African-Americans 20 percent of those job losses, the institute said in a report last week.
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/05/15/148845/tepid-job-market-still-hurting.html#storylink=cpy
McClatchy
May 17, 2012
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts demanded by the GOP in exchange for raising the debt limit will cost the economy 1.8 million jobs this year. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner already pushed back on Boehner’s remarks, saying, “this commitment to meet the obligations of the nation, this commitment to protect the creditworthiness of the country, is a fundamental commitment that you can never call into question or violate.”
Think Progress
May 16, 2012
“We’re adding jobs, but just enough to keep up with growth in the normal working-age population, not enough to start really putting the backlog of unemployed workers back to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses its research on low- and middle-income workers.
MSNBC
May 15, 2012
About half of the nation’s internships are unpaid, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president for the Economic Policy Institute, aWashington, D.C., think tank. Internships should provide training similar to what students are offered at a school, according to the U.S. Labor Department.
The Labor Department has received few complaints about this, a spokeswoman said.
But Eisenbrey said that’s because most interns are afraid to complain when they’re just starting out. The institute discussed these questionable internships at a recent forum with a Labor Department regulator, who said the agency is too understaffed to adequately monitor this.
Baltimore Sun
May 15, 2012
Indeed, between 1979 and 2009 worker wages increased by just 10.1 percent compared to an 80 percent increase in worker productivity, according to a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
May 14, 2012
There are still more than three job seekers for every available opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and more than 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Considering those numbers, it makes no sense to cut people off from unemployment benefits, which have ensured that millions of Americans don’t slip below the poverty line. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 percent of those cut off from unemployment benefits by early 2010 fell into poverty.
Think Progress
May 14, 2012
It pays to be rich. Literally.
Since Bill Clinton’s first term, taxes have fallen the most for the wealthiest Americans. Federal tax rates plunged 9.4 percent between 1995 and 2007 for the top 0.01 percent of households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The Huffington Post
May 14, 2012
“I don’t think that kind of job creation is likely to happen anytime soon, but I’m all for setting ambitious benchmarks to get the unemployment rate down,” said Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington group that says it focuses on the economic condition of low- and middle-class Americans.
“To me, the bigger issue is who has policies that are more likely to do that, and I don’t think Romney has identified any,” Bivens said. “Nobody is putting policies on the table right now that would lead us to a rapid recovery.”
Bloomberg
May 11, 2012
How does offshoring relate to America’s growing trade deficit? Both stifle job-creation, which in turn is affected by U.S. trade policy. Since 2001, for example, the U.S. trade gap with China has resulted in a loss of 2.8 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank. More broadly, a widening deficit can act as a drag on the economy by muting the job-creating effects of consumer spending. Why? Because when people hit their local mall or big-box retailer, what they buy is mostly made abroad.
CBS News
May 11, 2012
In a new paper the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, calculates that chief executives at America’s 350 biggest companies were paid 231 times as much as the average private-sector worker in 2011
The Economist
May 9, 2012
The voluntary quits rate is an indicator of how willing and able workers are to leave one job for another. During an economic downturn, far fewer people quit because finding another position is tougher. In March, quits rose slightly. The number of quits was 2.1 million in March 2012, up from 1.8 million at the end of the recession in June 2009.
Quits increased in March by 75,000. They are up about 8.5 percent over March 2011 and registering the highest level since 2008. But voluntary quits are still 25.6 percent below their 2007 average.
As Heidi Shiefholz at the Economic Policy Institute points outs, however, the odds are still stacked against workers:
[T]he “job seekers ratio”—the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings—declined moderately to 3.4-to-1.
Daily Kos
May 9, 2012
While the number of jobs added to the economy was disappointing and a drop from recent months economists says given seasonal factors, the average job growth of the last three months — 176,000 jobs — is probably a better measure of the jobs market trend.
“This trend is well above the roughly 100,000 jobs per month we need to keep the unemployment rate stable, so the labor market continues to very slowly improve, but it is a far cry from the 300,000 or 400,000 jobs we would need per month to get back to full employment in a reasonable timeframe, “said the Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think thank.
Philadelphia Tribune
May 9, 2012
A fairer tax would not only be, well… fairer and simpler, but also could generate jobs, says a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. In “A Perfect Match: Coupling tax fairness with job creation for a stronger economy,” senior policy analyst Ethan Pollack, states, “Congress could simply use tax fairness reforms to pay for job creation policies.”
Business Finance
May 9, 2012
“The improvement in the unemployment rate we saw in April was entirely due to people dropping out of — or not entering — the labor force because of weak job prospects,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
May 7, 2012
“A few years ago you hardly heard about college graduates taking unpaid internships,” said Ross Eisenbrey, a vice president at the Economic Policy Institute who has done several studies on interns. “But now I’ve even heard of people taking unpaid internships after graduating from Ivy League schools.”
Matt Gioe had little luck breaking into the music and entertainment industry after graduating with a philosophy degree from Bucknell last year. To get hands-on experience, he took an unpaid position with a Manhattan talent agency that booked musical acts. He said he answered phones and looked up venues. Although he was sometimes told to make bookings, he said he received virtually no guidance on how to strike a deal or how much to charge. But the boss did sometimes ask him to run errands like buying groceries.
“It was basically three wasted months,” he said.
Mr. Eisenbrey said many companies were taking advantage of the weak labor market to use unpaid interns to handle chores like photocopying or running errands once done by regular employees, which can raise sticky legal questions.
The New York Times
May 7, 2012