Media clips
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Older households are more likely to be indebted than they were three decades ago and a typical older household held roughly three times as much debt in 2016 as it did in 1989, adjusted for inflation. The increase in financial fragility is highlighted in the forthcoming Older Workers and Retirement Security Chartbook, a research collaboration between The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and the Economic Policy Institute funded by the RRF Foundation for Aging.
Forbes October 21, 2022 -
In capitalist societies, it’s a given that corporations are run for elite owners and investors, not the workers who actually create the value and profits. It’s also a given that corporations will try to pay their employees as little as they possibly can. In 2021, CEO compensation packages at the top 350 U.S. corporations averaged $27.8 million annually, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Overall, CEOs earned 399 times as much as the average worker. In 1965, CEOs by contrast earned only 20 times the average worker compensation. But it’s actually worse for many. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the 300 largest corporations paying the lowest median wages in 2020 had a CEO to worker pay gap of 670 to 1!
CityWatch LA October 21, 2022 -
But Josh Bivens, the director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that inflation has been ubiquitous “across every advanced economy” since the pandemic began and he didn’t believe the American Rescue Plan was a major contributor to inflation. An analysis published in August by Bivens, Asha Banerjee, and Mariia Dzholos examined the United States’ core inflation from December 2020 to May 2022 and compared it to core inflation in other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. To calculate the rate of acceleration in each country, the researchers took the difference between the “post-pandemic” core inflation and the “pre-pandemic” core inflation using data from 2018 and 2019.
Bivens also pointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s research on housing inflation and said that price gains in the United States were mostly driven by pandemic-related events that would have occurred without the stimulus — like supply chain disruptions and increased demand for housing. And although he said he believed the American Rescue Plan had inflationary impacts, the trade-off was necessary to stave off higher unemployment numbers.
“We could have kept inflation much lower in the US if we had raised interest rates through the roof beginning in early 2021 and hadn’t done the stimulus package,” Bivens said. “But there would be a huge cost to that. We’d be looking at a very different labor market with much higher unemployment.”
VOX October 21, 2022 -
A recent special issue of The Journal of Law and Political Economy casts a jaundiced eye on the convenient fiction that employment contracts reflect the free choices of employees. The issue was conceived and edited by Lawrence Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute.
“This is Econ 101 silliness, that any transaction between consenting adults is optimal,” Mishel said. “The basis of at-will employment is that if a worker can quit then an employer has to be able to quit a worker. That’s the logic. If you articulate it like that, people would be something between horrified and laughing.”
The main power workers do have is the threat to quit. But, Mishel wrote in his introduction to the special issue, “The death on the job of eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory and six in an Amazon warehouse when tornadoes struck the Midwest in December 2021 vividly illustrates the ineffectiveness of quitting, either as a constraint on employer exploitation or as a protection of basic worker freedoms.” (The final death toll in the Kentucky factory was nine.)
New York Times October 21, 2022 -
According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2019 teachers made about 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experiences.
WVUA 23 October 21, 2022 -
An April analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive economic think tank, put numbers behind the theory that corporate pricing is an inflationary driver.
Prices have risen at an annualized rate of over 6% since 2020’s second quarter compared with 1.8% during the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007-2019. EPI broke prices in the non-financial corporate sector into three main components: labor costs, non-labor inputs and profit margins.
Over half of the Covid recovery era increase “can be attributed to fatter profit margins” while labor costs represented less than 8%, the report’s author, Josh Bivens, wrote.
That’s nearly an exact flip of what was seen in the decades leading up to Covid, the report found.
“Companies are taking higher inputs, putting a bigger markup on them than they were previously, then passing that on to customers,” Bivens said.
Skyrocketing demand for durable goods coupled with supply chain problems has created “enormous pricing power” for companies that had stock on hand, Bivens said. Typically corporations attempt to widen margins by suppressing wages, but that changed during the Covid recovery, he added.
The situation is ever-evolving. Wages are falling, which should mean people are buying less and eroding corporations’ pricing power, Bivens said, and some supply chain issues are resolving themselves – the cost of some shipping containers is down by 64% from the same week last year.
Guardian October 21, 2022 -
“There is no silver bullet,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said. “But I think pay transparency moves us in the right direction.”
VOX October 21, 2022 -
Average wages in the U.S. have been stagnant for years, while the cost of living has grown and worker productivity has fueled increasing corporate profits. “Quiet fleecing” is the term the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, recently came up with to describe the situation. It’s a play on the more-viral term “quiet quitting” — the idea that workers do what’s required of them to keep their job and nothing more.
In recent years, any growth in wages has been outpaced by growth in worker productivity. Instead, that productivity has been funneled into greater corporate profits and ballooning executive salaries, according to data from EPI.
Billy Penn October 21, 2022 -
According to research by the Economic Policy Institute in 2019, gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would have directly lifted the wages of 28.1 million workers. The average directly affected worker who works all year would receive a $3,900 increase in annual wage income, equal to a raise of 20.9 percent.
AS USA October 21, 2022 -
Economists point to the gap between what teachers are paid compared to their peers with similar education. Economic Policy Institute research said in 1979, teachers made 7% less than those peers, but this year, the pay gap has grown to 23%, a record high.
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, citing 300,000 public education vacancies nationwide, said the issue boils down to two factors.
“What’s happening is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to find teachers, and other education personnel, who will take those jobs under current working conditions and at current wages,” Shierholz observed.
95.3 MNC October 21, 2022