William Spriggs

1955(?)—

Economist, educator, writer

William Spriggs is one of the most prominent economists in the United States. His career is an amalgam of public service, academic research, teaching, and copious writing. In early 2008 he was both chair of the economics department at Howard University in Washington, DC, and a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, also in Washington. While his work has focused on the effects of minimum-wage laws and social security, he has also written extensively on free trade agreements, welfare policy, and African-American unemployment. A frequent commentator in newspapers and on television, he has served on the boards of nearly two dozen nonprofit organizations.

Spriggs was educated at Williams College, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1977, and at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he did his graduate work, receiving his master's degree in 1979 and his doctorate five years later. His doctoral dissertation, a study of the effects of discrimination upon the accumulation of wealth by African Americans in Virginia between 1900 and 1914, brought Spriggs the National Economic Association (NEA)'s 1985 dissertation prize. Spriggs' association with the NEA, the nation's preeminent group of African-American economists, has been a constant throughout his career, and in 2000 he served a term as its president.

Spriggs' first academic position was at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he taught economics as an assistant professor from 1983 to 1984. He then moved north to Norfolk State University in Virginia, where he received an appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of Management. Spriggs would remain at Norfolk until 1990, teaching a variety of courses including statistics, labor relations, and collective bargaining. His interest in labor relations persisted when he moved on to Washington's Economic Policy Institute (EPI), where he designed a research program focusing on the history of labor-management conflict. He also oversaw a major study on the minimum wage, a subject that would soon become one of his specialties. After three years at EPI, he accepted a one-year appointment as director designate at the National Commission for Employment Policy (NCEP), which assists the President and Congress in their efforts to reduce unemployment and improve job security. With responsibility for fifteen staff members and a $2,000,000 budget, Spriggs gained at NCEP the administrative expertise he would increasingly need as he moved upward through Washington's dizzying array of agencies and commissions.

Spriggs' next position after NCEP was with the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of Congress, where he worked as a senior economist from 1994 to 1997. He worked on the so-called "minority side," a term that refers not to race but to the minority party in Congress, which, during his tenure, was the Democrats. Working directly under prominent Democratic representatives and senators, Spriggs researched a wide range of economic issues, including the earned income tax credit, government contracts for minority businesses, and, once again, the minimum wage. From the JEC, Spriggs moved to the Commerce Department's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), where he spent a year as a senior adviser to the undersecretary for economics and statistics. Most of his time at the ESA was spent helping to draft new regulations for the awarding of federal contracts to minority businesses. As part of that effort, Spriggs worked closely with an interagency task force that included staff from the White House Counsel's Office, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, and the Small Business Administration (SBA). The SBA would be his next employer, and he would work on many of the same issues as senior adviser in its Office of Government Contracting and Minority Business Development. Within a year, however, he moved once again, this time to the National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality (NULIOE).

According to its Web site, the National Urban League is "the nation's oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream." Spriggs remained there for six years, from 1998 to 2004, serving as senior vice president and as executive director of NULIOE, which was originally an outgrowth of the League's Washington office but had developed by Spriggs' tenure into its principal research and public-policy wing. Spriggs' duties as director included oversight of the League's publications and liaison work with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Black Leadership Forum, the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, and other groups sharing the League's goals. He was also called to give expert testimony before Congressional subcommittees at least four times.

Spriggs left the Urban League in 2004 to accept two concurrent positions. The first of these was with Howard University, where he chairs the economics department. The second was with the Economic Policy Institute, for whom he had worked in the early 1990s. He now holds the position there of senior fellow. He also continues to serve as an adviser and board member to a wide variety of advocacy groups and other nonprofit organizations, including the National Academy of Social Insurance, the National Employment Law Project, the Political Education and Leadership Institute of the Congressional Black Caucus, which selected him as a cowinner of its 2004 chairman's award, and the Community Service Society (CSS) of New York, which appointed him a senior fellow in 2007.

At a Glance …

Born William Edward Spriggs in 1955(?). Education: Williams College, BA, economics and political science, 1977; University of Wisconsin-Madison, MA, economics, 1979, PhD, 1984.

Career: North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, assistant professor of economics, 1983-84; Norfolk State University, Department of Management, Norfolk, VA, assistant professor, 1984-90; Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC, economist, 1990-93; National Commission for Employment Policy, Washington, DC, director designate, 1993-94; U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Washington, DC, senior economist, 1994-97; U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, Washington, DC, senior adviser and economist, 1997-98; U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Government Contracting and Minority Business Development, Washington, DC, senior adviser, 1998; National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality, Washington, DC, executive director, 1998-2004; Economic Policy Institute, Washington, DC, senior fellow, 2005—; Howard University, Department of Economics, Washington, DC, professor and chair, 2005—; Community Service Society, New York City, senior fellow, 2007—.

Selected memberships: Black Enterprise magazine, member of board of economists; Retirement Health Administration Company, board member; Independent Health Care Trust for UAW Retirees of Ford Motor Company, board chair; National Academy of Social Insurance, board member; National Employment Law Project, board member; Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute, board member; National Economic Association, former president.

Selected awards: National Science Foundation, minority graduate fellowship, 1979-84; University of Wisconsin—Madison, Harold Graves Essay Prize, 1980; National Economic Association, dissertation award, 1985; Congressional Black Caucus, chairman's award, 2003.

Addresses: Office—c/o Department of Economics, Howard University, 2400 Sixth Street NW, Washington, DC 20059.

For more than twenty years Spriggs has moved easily from academia to government and back again. In helping to guide public debate on subjects like the minimum wage and social security, he has shown an abiding interest in improving the lives of the country's poorest and most vulnerable citizens. In 2007, on the occasion of his CSS appointment, CSS president David R. Jones said in a press release, "Dr. Spriggs is one of the nation's foremost experts on economics in the area of labor research, public policy, advocacy and legislation. Someone of Dr. Spriggs caliber, expertise and experience will advance research and advocacy on issues of poverty and the working poor." Over the course of a long and distinguished public career, it seems fair to say Spriggs has already done precisely that.

Selected writings

Books and book chapters

(Editor) Employee Rights in a Changing Economy: The Issue of Replacement Workers, Economic Policy Institute, 1991.

(With Bruce Klein) Raising the Floor: The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Low-Wage Workers, Economic Policy Institute, 1994.

(With Robert Blecker) "On Beyond NAFTA: Employment, Growth, and Income Distribution Effects of a Western Hemisphere Free Trade Area," in Trade Liberalization in the Western Hemisphere, Inter-American Development Bank and U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 1995.

(Editor with Kathleen Buto, Martha Priddy Patterson, and Maya Rockeymoore) Strengthening Community: Social Insurance in a Diverse America, National Academy of Social Insurance and the Brookings Institution Press, 2004.

Academic journals

"The Virginia Farmers' Alliance: A Case Study in Race and Class Identity," Journal of Negro History, Summer 1979, pp. 191-204.

"Changes in the Federal Minimum Wage, a Test of Wage Norms," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Winter 1993-94, pp. 221-39.

(With Kenya Covington) "Negative Effects of State Welfare Policy on Recipient College Enrollment," Review of Black Political Economy, Fall 2004, pp. 7-26.

Periodicals

(With Valerie A. Rawlston) "Social Security Helps Reduce Child Poverty," National Voter, December 2000/January 2001, pp. 20-23.

"African Americans and Social Security," Dollars and Sense, November/December 2004.

"Another Mistaken Racial Stereotype," American Prospect, February 2005.

"Poverty in America: The Poor Are Getting Poorer," Crisis, January/February 2006.

Sources

Periodicals

New York Times, January 25, 2008.

Online

"Institute for Opportunity and Equality," National Urban League, http://www.nul.org/instituteforopportunityandequality.html (accessed February 24, 2008).

"Press Release: Nationally Recognized Expert on Labor and Wage Disparities Joins New York Based Public Policy Organization Focused on Poverty," Community Service Society, http://www.cssny.org/news/releases/2007_0508.html (accessed February 24, 2008).

"William E. Spriggs," Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, http://www.cas.uiuc.edu/spriggs.html (accessed February 23, 2008).

"William Spriggs," Howard University Department of Economics, http://www.coas.howard.edu/economics/faculty/WilliamSpriggs/index.html (accessed February 23, 2008).

"William Spriggs" (television transcript), Tavis Smiley, PBS, January 25, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200701/20070125_spriggs.html (accessed February 23, 2008).

—R. Anthony Kugler