EPI: Here’s How to Achieve Full Employment by Lawrence Mishel

Here is the testimony of Economic Policy Institute President Lawrence Mishel before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing on on February 4, 2014: “Expanding Opportunity in America’s Schools and Workplaces”

In summation, economic policies ought to facilitate:

A. job creation via —

1. the Federal Reserve Board embarking on wage growth matching productivity
   
2. targeted employment programs
   
3. public investment and infrastructure
   

B. broad-based wage growth through —

1. aggregate factors (excessive unemployment, unleashing the top 1 percent by addressing finance and executive pay)
   
2. labor standards, labor market institutions, and business practices (raising the minimum wage, updating overtime rules, bolstering collective bargaining rights, regularizing undocumented workers, terminating forced arbitration, modernizing labor standards of sick and paid family leave, closing gender and racial inequities, fair contracting, tackling misclassification and wage theft)
   

C. job quality improvement 

For full details on the EPI’s policy recommendations—along with their warnings of primed-to-fail initiatives—be sure to check out the full report.

[cf., source material]