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Marshall & Aldy for Democracy Journal, “The Great Swap”

Posted on February 15, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Does a deal now gaining momentum across the aisle actually have the potential to break the stalemate on climate change?

Is Donald Trump serious about keeping an “open mind” on climate change? Considering the “drill, baby, drill” cheerleaders he’s put in key Cabinet posts, it’s easy to fear the worst. They appear more than eager to roll back the Obama Administration’s energy and climate policies as soon as possible.

So the safest bet is probably to buckle up for four more years of intractable partisan warfare in Washington over dueling fuels and “alternative” climate science. And yet, there is rising interest, on both sides of the political spectrum, for an idea that has the potential to break this impasse in energy and environmental policy: swapping a carbon tax for many existing environmental regulations and using the revenues to support broader tax reform.

Last week, a group of Republican graybeards led by former secretaries of state James Baker and George Schultz called for a $40 per ton carbon tax, with the proceeds being turned into rebates in the form of dividends to all Americans. Senator Bernie Sanders endorsed a carbon tax during his campaign, and Trump and his daughter Ivanka discussed it with climate change crusader Al Gore after the election.

The Baker-Schultz plan also envisions swapping the carbon tax for an array of less comprehensive regulations—including the proposed Clean Power Plan—that most economists believe are less efficient than an economy-wide carbon tax. All this points to an opportunity for a President who calls himself a world-class dealmaker to craft a grand bargain that gets U.S. energy and climate policy unstuck. It’s a long shot, but the alternative is an endless game of political ping pong in which Republicans ram their energy preferences through Congress unilaterally, only to be reversed when Democrats return to power.

Continue Reading at Democracy Journal.

Goldberg Testifies in Missouri for Venue and Joinder Legislation

Posted on February 8, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Phil Goldberg, Director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for Civil Justice, testified in the Missouri Legislature on Monday, January 30 to urge the House Special Committee on Litigation Reform to adopt a package of bills to address venue and joinder abuse in the state. The testimony, provided on behalf of the American Tort Reform Association, explained that ensuring that lawsuits are brought in the proper venue should not be partisan issue.

“Missouri has become America’s courtroom,” Goldberg told the legislators. “People who live outside of Missouri, are alleging injuries outside of Missouri, and are suing companies who are not from Missouri are nonetheless filing lawsuits in Missouri – and they are doing so by the thousands. Legislators from both parties have an interest in seeing that the Missouri courts provide even-handed justice and that litigation gamesmanship does not take over the courts.”

The most favored destination is the City of St. Louis, where out-of-state claims have skyrocketed in the past three years. The Office of State Courts Administrator’s statistics have found that filings in St. Louis from 2014 to 2015 jumped from 3,000 to more than 12,000. In 2016, there were 140 aggregated mass tort cases pending in St. Louis, with 8,400 plaintiffs in these cases having nothing to do with Missouri. Also, St. Louis is also now the 4th most active jurisdiction for asbestos filings, and most of the claims have nothing to do with Missouri or Missourians.

Generally, the proper place for a lawsuit is where the plaintiff lives, where he or she was injured, or where the defendant has its business. Those states have laws to govern these allegations. But, as Bloomberg News reported in September 2016, the claims are being filed in St. Louis because the city “has developed a reputation for fast trials, favorable rulings, and big awards.” In short, Goldberg continued, “They like the ballparks here rather than their ballparks at home.”

Consider the major St. Louis verdicts grabbing national attention. The plaintiffs were from Alabama, Alaska, South Dakota, California, Michigan, Minnesota and Oklahoma – none from Missouri. They all involved allegations of injuries outside of Missouri. None of the defendants were local to the City of St. Louis, and all three trials ended in awards for tens of millions of dollars. By contrast, comparable claims in other states resulted in dismissals or defense verdicts. It was for this reason that St. Louis was named the worst “Judicial Hellhole” in the nation.

The legislation addresses this problem by clarifying that each plaintiff must independently establish that St. Louis is the proper venue for his or her lawsuit. He or she cannot, as is being done now, hitch his or her out-of-state claim to a local St. Louis plaintiff’s case in an effort to get around the state’s venue laws. The ability to join claims can make sense when family members are injured in a single accident, but not when plaintiffs have nothing to do with each other.

In addition to creating an undue burden on Missouri taxpayers, “the current situation sacrifices the ability of the courts to dispense justice,” Goldberg testified. “St. Louis residents, who may have a car accident case, a medical malpractice or employment matter, will have to wait behind the earlier filed out-of-state plaintiffs. Also, even the best judges may take shortcuts in an effort to process thousands of claims. Rather than make sure each claim is resolved on its own merits, they may consolidate claims or encourage mass settlement even when not warranted.”

The Committee is expected to vote on this package of bills over the next couple of weeks.

Net Neutrality: The Debate That Would Not Die

Posted on February 7, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the biggest puzzles in democratic societies across the world these days is what to do about regulation. On the one hand, regulation is important for a well-functioning society. On the other hand, too much regulation can hamper innovation and growth.

Moreover, there’s a feeling that democratic governance has broken down. We don’t seem to have a good process for coming to collective decisions.

Case in point: The “open internet” debate. When the FCC issued its Open Internet Order in March 2015, we said it was “time for Congress to act.” We believed and still believe that in the importance of an open internet, but the FCC was unilaterally picking the wrong approach. The imposition of Title II rules was unnecessary to keep the Internet open.

Now that the FCC may be backing from the 2015 Open Internet Order under new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, we say the same thing: It’s time for Congress to act. These big swings back and forth in policy don’t do anyone any good.

Consumers, tech firms, ecommerce and content companies, and telecom providers all need certainty about the rules of the road, and that means legislation that enacts the open internet into law without an excessive and unnecessary regulatory structure. It may not be quick and pretty, but it’s the right way to go.

Why Progressives Should Oppose the Nomination of Betsy DeVos

Posted on February 6, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The U.S. Senate will soon vote on the nomination of Betsy DeVos, and it appears the vote may be a 50-50 tie, in which case Vice President Pence will break the tie. We believe DeVos’s confirmation would be a mistake, and we urge senators to vote against it. She supports the idea that every student should be able to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, and we believe such broad voucher programs would be a huge mistake.

States have already begun to pass voucher programs available to almost every student. Louisiana’s program allows almost half of public school students to apply for vouchers. Nevada passed a bill allowing virtually every family access, but fortunately, the courts ruled it unconstitutional. The Arizona House passed a similar bill. With DeVos as Secretary of Education, there will be high-level national support for such legislation.

We understand that vouchers for poor, inner-city children expand the opportunities available to them. But when vouchers are available to all or almost all, they will undermine what little equal opportunity still exists in our public schools. Wealthy parents will add money to the voucher—because they love their children—and buy $30,000-per-year educations. Upper middle class parents will buy $20,000-a-year educations; middle class parents will buy $15,000-a-year educations; and poor and working class parents will be stuck in schools that accept the voucher as full payment.

What little mixing of income levels we have today will vanish, and with it any hope of equal opportunity. Children will also lose the chance to rub elbows with those from different social classes, races, and ethnic groups. That experience creates a more tolerant society, willing to embrace diversity—a huge asset in a racially and culturally diverse nation such as ours. Its absence creates the opposite.

We also believe that all schools receiving public funds should be held accountable for their performance. Louisiana and Indiana do this with vouchers, but most voucher programs include no accountability to the public. If students don’t learn to read and do math, nothing happens—the schools continue to collect the vouchers. Some parents might pull their children out of school, but if students don’t take standardized tests, how will their parents know? Experience with charter schools teaches that some parents will stick with a school if it is safe and nurturing even if reading and math scores are abysmal, so we cannot rely on parents to abandon all failing schools even if we do require testing.

Should more states enact broad voucher programs accessible to most students, we doubt there will be political support for accountability. Once every private school and almost every family is eligible for voucher money, the lobbying pressure against public accountability will be too strong.

Eli Broad, founder of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (a PPI funder), wrote a letter to all senators last week to “urge them to vote against Mrs. DeVos confirmation.” No one has been a fiercer advocate for education reform, including public charter schools, than Mr. Broad. We agree with him when he writes, “We must have a Secretary of Education who will vigorously defend the rights of all students to have safe, fair and equitable learning opportunities.”

Northern California Record: California PCB Cases Could Expose Businesses Everywhere

Posted on February 2, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

By W.J Kennedy

SACRAMENTO – Legal actions taken by ten governments on the West Coast against the chemical giant Monsanto could eventually ensnare thousands of other manufacturers (even of discontinued products) in the same types of these highly speculative, virtually defenseless actions, legal experts warn.

“Any business that makes anything could face the threat of enormous liability exposure if these lawsuits are allowed by the courts,” said Phil Goldberg of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, and director of the new Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for Civil Justice. “Businesses around the country, especially manufacturers, need to be following these cases very closely.”

The lawsuits by the cities of San Diego, Long Beach, Portland, Ore., the state of Washington, and others, claim that Monsanto, the maker of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), an insulation used in electronic equipment from 1935 though 1977, should cover cleanup costs of waterways contaminated by the synthetic material, now believed by some to be a carcinogen. Even though the company had manufactured a lawful product at the time, and had nothing to do with how or where the products that contained PCBs were disposed, the lawsuits have managed to gain traction in several courts.

The two plaintiffs’ firms engineering the cases, Baron & Budd and Gomez Trial Attorneys, are working together under the banner “EcoLawyers.” In their arguments for the governments, they are relying on the centuries-old, but still vague, public nuisance tort. It carries with it no statute of limitations.

In its traditional sense, the public nuisance tort has been employed by governments to stop the conduct of an individual interfering with the public good – blocking a road or other public right of way is one example. Over the years there have been attempts to stretch the law’s application well beyond that original intent.

“It’s been the fall back when an action doesn’t meet the criteria for strict liability or negligence,” said Donald G. Gifford, the Jacob A. France professor of torts at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “So over the years there have been some weird applications of the (public nuisance) law, but it has been only marginally successful.”

The trouble for businesses is that success in any one of the ten California cases (before eight judges) will almost certainly encourage other plaintiffs’ firms to approach governments all over the country to pursue product manufacturers, especially if the products were improperly disposed of or improperly applied by the end user.

“The sheer number of cases is cause for concern,” said one attorney familiar with the cases, who asked not to be identified. “It only takes one to gain some traction. What to watch for as these cases move along is how many other plaintiffs firms start reaching out to governments seducing them with the same legal argument.”

A successful case for the plaintiffs’ attorneys, moreover, could undermine the very law itself. Products liability law with its strict evidentiary requirements, including causation, could be “laid waste” by these actions, Gifford said.

On the side of the plaintiffs is a 2013 case brought by ten California counties where the judge ruled that the presence of lead paint in residences constituted a public nuisance, and that the companies who manufactured lead pigment and paints more than a half century ago must be responsible now for removing them. The ruling amounted to a $1.15 billion judgment against a few pigment and paint manufacturers still in business today.

The state court judge’s decision, in effect, labeled all residential properties built before 1981 a public nuisance. The Los Angeles County Boards of Real Estate said this precedent “could precipitate the worst plunge in California home values since the housing crash of 2007.”

The case is on appeal at the California Supreme Court.

So far five of the ten Monsanto cases have been dismissed (all in California), but none has been dismissed with prejudice (final judgment); they are still permitted to amend their complaints. Two cases in Oregon and two in Washington have yet to the be ruled on, but in late October, in a case brought by the city of Spokane, the judge rejected Monsanto’s argument for initial dismissal. There will be another opportunity to dismiss after discovery in a summary judgment motion. If that is denied, then the case will be set for trial.

In San Diego, the cases have the government entities turning on one another. The San Diego Airport Authority is now pointing to the City’s case against Monsanto as evidence of why the city should be named by the state of California as an additional responsible party.

Scott Barnett, executive director of San Diego Taxpayers Advocate, calls the litigation a “circular firing squad.”

“Everyone stands to lose here,” Barnett said. “The city’s largest employer, the Navy, and bio medical and high tech companies that call the city home.”

The business community, behind the National Association of Manufacturers and National Federation of Independent Business, joined against the California lead paint case and a similar case in Rhode Island. There, in 2008, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out a 2006 jury decision against three paint manufacturers, saying the lawsuit should have been dismissed at the outset because “public nuisance law simply does not provide a remedy for this harm.”

The paint manufactures weren’t so lucky in California, and the economic consequences could be dire.

An amicus filed in the California lead paint case by the business community stated in part: “Tort liability is a significant factor in a business’ consideration of whether to expand its operations, create new jobs, or provide goods and services in a given market. If …sellers of a legal product may be held liable for causing a public nuisance decades after engaging in an activity that was lawful at the time, businesses will face constant uncertainty and a disincentive to operate in California.”

Phil Goldberg, the director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, is a partner at Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP. Donald G. Gifford is on PPI’s Center for Civil Justice Advisory Board.

Thank you Governor Cuomo!

Posted on January 31, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Kudos to Governor Andrew Cuomo for proposing that the New York State legislature abolish the charter schools cap that limits the sector’s expansion in New York City. As a group, the city’s charters have long been high performers. Despite opposition from adults in the system – particularly the teachers’ union – we must never lose sight of what is most important: the students. Lifting the cap will help poor and minority students who need help the most.

Cuomo’s proposal is in direct contrast to the unwise decision made by Massachusetts voters to keep their charter school cap. Massachusetts has some of the highest-performing charters in the country. Why would people want to deny them to poor, minority kids in Boston, Springfield, Worcester, Lawrence, and other urban centers? Could it be because the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent millions of dollars misleading people, warning that charters would drain money from their school districts?

This is not the first time Governor Cuomo has stood up for public school choice and innovation. During his campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he wanted to stop co-locating charters with traditional schools and start charging charters rent if they were in district buildings. He then withdrew permission for three charter schools to share space with traditional schools. In response, Governor Cuomo pushed through a budget agreement that required New York City to find space for charter schools inside public school buildings or pay much of the cost to house them in private space. The legislation also prohibited the city from charging rent to charter schools, something de Blasio had suggested. Governor Cuomo vowed to make sure the city’s charters had “the financial capacity and physical space and government support to thrive and grow.

Progressives have long supported charter schools. While Republicans were focused on vouchers, Democrats led the charge in early charter states: Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, and Colorado among them. President Bill Clinton proposed the first national charter school program in the 1990s, which has since provided $3 billion to start charter schools. President Barack Obama continued to support charters with his Race to the Top grants.

So Governor Cuomo stands in a long line of progressive, reform-minded Democrats who have had the courage to stand up to the teachers unions. For that, we applaud him.

Trump’s Executive Order on Regulations: All Show, No Substance

Posted on January 30, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring agencies to cut two existing regulations for every new rule introduced, “to the extent permitted by law.” Trump, of course, already has control of new regulations from the executive branch, so the executive order was not needed. At the same time, his attempt to pare back existing regulations by executive order is not new. In fact, every president since Jimmy Carter, Democrat or Republican has issued executive orders calling on agencies to review and cut down existing regulations. Unfortunately, these executive orders have never worked, for three reasons:

First, most regulations are issued in response to Congressional mandates or legislation, which agencies can’t override without Congressional action.
Second, no matter their political stripe, presidents tend to impose new regulations when they think they are necessary, ignoring the economic cost. For example, George W. Bush created an entirely new agency and regulatory apparatus, the Transportation Security Administration, in response to 9/11. Similarly, Trump’s executive order exempts “military, national security, or foreign affairs” regulations. Notably, his immigration executive order has the potential to impose large regulatory costs on American businesses.
Third, it’s a difficult process for agencies estimate the impact of repealing an existing regulation, requiring intrusive data gathering from businesses.

Moreover, even if agencies manage to identify regulations to repeal, these changes are more likely to benefit large businesses which have the clout to lobby agencies, rather than small businesses.

That’s why the Progressive Policy Institute supports legislation such as the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015 (HR 1407 and S 708), which had sponsors from both parties. This legislation would set up an independent Regulatory Improvement Commission to collect testimony from businesses and individuals to help identify which regulations needed to be repealed or improved. Then the Commission would make recommendations to Congress, which would vote the Commission’s proposal up or down.

Trump and the Republicans have the chance to move forward, if they want, on important regulatory improvement. This executive order does nothing to help small businesses.

PPI President: Override This Odious Order

Posted on January 30, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Trump evidently believes many things that have no basis in fact. Only a week into his presidency, his make-believe world is colliding with reality – to the detriment and even shame of our country.

There’s no better example than his order temporarily preventing citizens of seven Muslim countries from entering our country. It is an affront to American ideals that has sparked protests here and around the world, embarrassed our friends and handed our Islamist enemies a propaganda windfall.

Trump says the temporary ban is necessary to give the Administration time to set up an “extreme” vetting regime for visitors and immigrants from countries where terrorists operate. But we already have a rigorous system for screening immigrants, and the White House order falls heavily on refugees – many of them fleeing terrorist fanaticism and violence.

Notes Blake Houndshell in Politico, “Since 1990, of the 182 radical Islamic terrorists who plotted attacks in the United States or on inbound airplanes, just two entered the U.S. as refugees. Little wonder-since refugees are among the most carefully vetted immigrant groups, and the bulk of them are women and children.” Oddly, the White House list of proscribed countries includes Iraq, our partner in the fight to destroy the Islamic State’s homicidal “caliphate,” but not Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 attackers came from.

Making life more miserable for refugees won’t make America safer. It’s impossible to listen to the heartrending stories of legal migrants being denied entry, detained and separated from their families without wondering whether the nation’s new political leaders have any idea what they are doing.

The Trump policy – or more likely, the Bannon policy – is unnecessary, cruel and strategically stupid. The word that America is now slamming its doors to Muslims while welcoming Christians is burning up jihadist websites, bolstering their claim to be defending Muslims against U.S. and Western “crusaders.” Our two previous presidents have understood that reinforcing the jihadists’ apocalyptic narrative can only alienate America’s Muslim allies around the world. It’s unsettling that this obvious point eludes Trump’s grasp.

But it’s heartening to see Americans protesting Trump’s order and going to airports to welcome people from Muslim countries. Lawyers have volunteered to help refugees and some judges have issued staying orders.

So is Trump’s policy really America’s policy? That’s for Congress to decide. For Republicans particularly it’s a moment of truth. Will they abet Trump in traducing America’s core values of religious freedom and pluralism? They will if they don’t join Democrats in overriding this odious presidential decree.

Bledsoe for RCP: The Shared Illusions of Brexit and Obamacare Repeal

Posted on January 27, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

“Have your cake and eat it.” With these six aggressively monosyllabic words, the redoubtable Boris Johnson came clean, almost despite himself, about the contradictions of Brexit, and perhaps those of today’s right-of-center populism altogether. In time, the phrase may be seen as the defining utterance of the post-truth era in trans-Atlantic politics.

The Washington corollary was minted by an aide to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell regarding Obamacare – “repeal and replace.” Less elegant, perhaps, but the inherent hubris and contradictions are much the same: After throwing them off the system, we can then provide more than 20 million Americans health insurance, without patient costs, government expenditure or regulation, since our ideology forbids considering those policies.

Of course, in real life, and even eventually in politics, one must choose to either eat cake or have it. Britain currently seems to have a slightly stale piece of cake, and a largely hungry populace. Their American cousins, meanwhile, have a simple homespun saying: “You can’t replace something with nothing.” Yet, for the time being, that is precisely what congressional Republicans plan to do regarding Obamacare.

Continue reading at Real Clear Politics.

Bledsoe for LA Times: As Trump ignores record temperatures, taxpayers are footing the (huge) bill for climate change

Posted on January 26, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Global temperatures were the highest on record in 2016 for the third straight year, scientists at NASA and elsewhere reported last week. This is just the latest proof of rapid climate change that has experts and governments around the world deeply alarmed. And yet President Trump and many other Republicans have so far paid no political price for questioning or downplaying the scientific evidence on climate change and undermining environmental policies that reduce risk.

One reason for their apparent immunity is that climate denialists exaggerate the economic costs of laws that aim to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, advocates of effective climate policies have lacked hard numbers on the current and future economic toll of global warming.

But this is starting to change. Over the past several years, a number of peer-reviewed studies have established that climate change is already costing American taxpayers and consumers tens of billions of dollars. As these costs to businesses, states and the federal budget mount, Trump and Congress may finally face pressure to act.

Continue reading at Los Angeles Times.

Marshall for The Hill: Why the era of US global leadership is over

Posted on January 24, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The era of U.S. international leadership is over. How do I know? Because President Trump so decreed in his inaugural address. He put the world on notice: Henceforth, America will be looking out exclusively for No. 1.

Do the people, whose instrument Trump claims to be, share his vision of an insular America? We’ll see, but it’s hard to find a popular mandate for Trump’s retro-nationalism in the 2016 election results.

No doubt plenty of Trump voters respond favorably to his “America First” message, but the president seemed oblivious to the reality that he presides over a closely divided country and political system. After all, he was U.S. voters’ second choice for president, by a non-trivial margin of nearly 3 millions votes.

Polls on the eve of the inauguration found that he is the least-popular new president in memory (with an approval rating of just 45 percent) and a solid majority of Americans on Election Day said Trump is lacking in presidential temperament.

Continue reading at The Hill.

PPI Statement on President Trump’s Executive Order to Withdraw the U.S. From the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Posted on January 23, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute issued the following statement in response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP):

In announcing his decision today to withdraw from the TPP, President Trump claimed that this step was a “great thing.” We strongly disagree. The President’s hasty action on the TPP is bad news for American businesses and workers, for the American economy, and for America’s global influence.

Abandoning the TPP is hardly good news for American exporters and their workers. The TPP would have slashed thousands of high foreign duties and other serious trade barriers, making it significantly easier to sell ‘Made in America’ goods and services to a rapidly growing Asia-Pacific middle class.

Withdrawing from the TPP isn’t good news for hundreds of thousands of American small business exporters, who would have boosted their exports under TPP rules that would “democratize” trade—making it easier for them to connect with customers, make sales, and deliver their goods and services.

Walking out of the TPP is bad news for the digital economy and the future of global commerce. The President’s order risks the loss of years of American-led progress in writing strong rules for digital trade, which is vital to all types of American business and is an area in which America is a global leader.

Cutting and running from our TPP allies is, perhaps most significantly, very bad news for America’s influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Under the TPP, the United States was a leader in setting strong rules that reflect American values on such key issues as environmental protection, labor rights, and intellectual property protection. Equally important, our Asia-Pacific allies saw America’s participation in the TPP as tangible evidence of our strong geopolitical commitment to their region.

The President’s action raises the risk that countries like China—which often don’t share our values or interests—will now have much greater influence in this vital region.

For America to grow, support good jobs, and generate more broadly shared prosperity, we must expand our trade and enhance our global connections. Walking away from the TPP will do neither.

Medicaid patients need options in opioid fight

Posted on January 21, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the sad geography of America’s opioid-overdose crisis, Ohio is at the center of the map. In 2015, 2,700 of its people died from prescription and illicit opioids, a number far higher than any other state and one that shot up by 28 percent in one year.

In response, Gov. John Kasich signed a bill this month to expand access to the treatment drug naloxone, therapy, and social supports.

Why more than 50,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2015, and why Ohio — or Massachusetts, for that matter — has opioid death rates 12 times that of California or Texas are critical questions. But just as critical is preventing and treating the nation’s 2.6 million opioid addicts and other users, reducing the availability of illicit drugs like heroin, reversing the prescription frenzy that now results in about one opioid prescription per year for every adult American, and fighting the lobbying behemoth of pharmaceutical companies making prescription painkillers like OxyContin and fentanyl.

Continue reading at the Toledo Blade

Ecommerce Jobs Show Fast-Rising Real Wages and Productivity

Posted on January 16, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ecommerce jobs for production and nonsupervisory workers are paid on average about 25% more than production and nonsupervisory jobs for the private sector as a whole. That’s according to BLS data.

Economic theory suggests that industries with faster productivity growth should have faster real wage growth. That’s exactly what we see in the case of the electronic shopping industry.

The figure below compares labor productivity growth in the “electronic shopping and mail order” industry (NAICS code 45411) with productivity growth in retailing as a whole. We can see an enormous difference. From 2000 to 2015, ecommerce productivity rose at an annual rate of 8.7% annually, compared to 2.6% for retailing as a whole.

This difference in productivity growth is reflected in the growth of real wages. The figure below compares average hourly wages, in 2016 dollars, for production and nonsupervisory workers in three industries or sector: electronic shopping, all retail trade, and all private sector workers. We see that production and nonsupervisory workers in electronic shopping earned an average wage of $25 per hour. That’s not bad at all–it’s about 25% higher than average hourly wages for all production and nonsupervisory workers, and about 80% higher than average hourly wages for all retail workers.

Depending how we define middle-class, these figures imply that production and nonsupervisory jobs in ecommerce

What about jobs? Since 2007, the number of retail jobs has risen by roughly 420K, while the number of “electronic shopping” jobs has risen by 140K. And that latter number is most likely an underestimate, because it doesn’t include ecommerce jobs that are part of larger retail establishments. So ecommerce is a major driver of good job creation in the retail sector.

The implication is that as more and more retail jobs shift to ecommerce, both wages and productivity will rise.

Press Release: New PPI Historical Study Shows Tech Company Jobs Growing As Fast or Faster Than U.S. Employment Leaders of the Past

Posted on January 13, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

WASHINGTON— The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new study, “A Historical Perspective on Tech Jobs,” authored by PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel comparing job creation performance among tech companies in the United States to employment leaders of the past. The study finds that today’s big tech companies are following a similar or better employment trajectory than big job creators of the past, while average hourly wages for many tech and telecom industry jobs fall solidly into the rank of “middle-class” jobs, though the concept of “middle-class” requires greater analysis and examination.

“When we compare today’s tech leaders with the employment leaders of the past at a similar stage of development, it turns out that the job creation performance of the tech sector looks quite good,” writes Mandel. “We remember the giant corporate employers of the post World War II period, but we fail to remember how they had generally been in existence for many decades before they reached that mammoth size. And just like it takes many years for an oak tree to grow from an acorn, it turns out that employment growth simply takes time.”

PPI’s study finds that in 2016, Amazon became the fastest American company to reach 300,000 workers, hitting that mark in its twentieth year as a public company. This figure, which does not include contractors or temporary workers, represents an average employment growth rate of roughly 30 percent annually.

By contrast, General Motors reached 300,000 employees in 1941, 32 years after its 1909 founding. American Telephone & Telegraph hit the same milestone in 1926, 27 years after its 1899 absorption of the local Bell systems. And Walmart went over 300,000 associates in its 1991 fiscal year, its twenty-first year as a public company.

According to the study, Amazon is not alone; In fact, tech giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft are adding jobs as fast or faster than the great job-producing companies of the past, like General Motors, AT&T, Walmart, IBM, General Electric, U.S. Steel, and Bethlehem Steel.

The study includes charts and tables highlighting the historical comparisons, as well as a comparison of average hourly wages for selected tech and telecom industries. This comparison previews an upcoming paper on the quality and wages of tech and telecom jobs, including upstream and downstream jobs.

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