Media clips
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Top Democrats are calling on President Biden to permanently reform unemployment and beef up benefits
“Unemployed workers really had totally different qualities of life, totally different standards of support based solely on where they live,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told Insider. “As a consequence of that, the data show that in those states where lawmakers had really weakened their state unemployment insurance systems, federal money made up for a larger and larger share of the support going to unemployed workers.”
The Democratic lawmakers also want UI benefits to be accessible to more workers. They cite the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which expanded eligibility of UI to gig workers and freelancers. According to the letter, over 16 million workers have received PUA benefits during the pandemic. A new EPI report found that, by the end of 2020, “PUA made up the largest share of federal UI assistance … contributing 33% of total UI income.”
Business Insider April 30, 2021 -
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, looks at the share of unemployment benefits as part of wage and salary income. They found that, prior to 2020, benefits from UI had never gone above 6% of a state’s salary and wage income; in 2020’s second quarter, it was above 20% in four states. EPI’s calculations used wage and salary data while Insider looked at unemployment insurance as a percentage of total personal income.
Importantly, according to the EPI report, the influx of federal UI benefits – both in the form of the additional $600 and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which made more workers eligible for employment benefits – helped fill the holes in states’ unemployment benefits.
“In particular, states with a higher share of Black residents were more reliant on federal assistance to provide UI benefits,” the EPI report says. “But if the pandemic programs fade with no structural reforms, the UI system will revert to being one that sees stingier benefits precisely in those states with higher Black population shares.”
The fact that those holes needed to be filled, and the amount of income that unemployment made up during the pandemic, shows the need for unemployment reform, according to EPI. They argue that reforms could help codify some of the expanded eligibility and equity from beefed-up pandemic-era benefits, and help shore up the system ahead of future downturns.
EPI found that, by the end of 2020, benefits that came from PUA – the program that opened unemployment eligibility to workers who normally wouldn’t be able to access benefits – became the greatest share of federal UI. David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at EPI, said that there were nine states where the money from PUA made up over half of all UI going to workers there.
“I mean, that’s remarkable, that that more than half the assistance provided is going to folks who would not normally qualify for traditional funding,” Cooper said. “That just shows me that our existing eligibility requirements are way out of whack.
The amount of federal money pouring into unemployment – and going to Americans who were out of work during an unprecedented pandemic – helped close gaps in state UI programs and provide direct relief. It also helped to address racial inequities, since, according to EPI, Black workers were more likely to live in states that had weaker UI; on the whole, workers of color, particularly Black workers, were disproportionately impacted by pandemic unemployment.
Business Insider April 30, 2021 -
American workers lost over $1 billion as a result of weak federal labor law that doesn’t make employers pay monetary penalties for illegally retaliating against those who attempt to organize their workplaces, according to a report
released by the progressive Economic Policy Institute.The report published Thursday by Lynn Rhinehart, an EPI senior fellow and Celine McNicholas, the organization’s director of government affairs, said the National Labor Relations Act’s anti-retaliation provisions are so weak that workers who faced illegal retaliation over the last decade could have received over $1.24 billion in damages had the NLRA been stronger.
“Because the anti-retaliation protections and remedies in the NLRA are much weaker than anti-retaliation and whistleblower protections in other labor and employment laws, the NLRA provides no real deterrent to employers retaliating against workers and interfering with their rights,” the report said.
Law360 April 30, 2021 -
Still, crowdfunding is not a sustainable way to keep money coming in and hasn’t made much of a dent on a broad scale in the past year — although it can help some individuals, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
…
The government has expanded unemployment benefits, doled out stimulus checks and forgiven some taxes during the pandemic, significant steps that Gould hopes the system will learn from and continue to adopt in certain cases. But, she said, the past year also showed how ill-equipped in some ways our social safety net was to deal with a crisis of this scale — a key example was unemployment systems that were overrun with requests and inaccessible to many people for weeks or months. That delay was devastating to many.
“So many people are living on the edge financially,” Gould said. “Maybe they’re able to make their bills when they have their paycheck, but you lose your paycheck, and maybe you can’t pay your rent this month.”
Washington Post April 30, 2021 -
That’s just one page from the epic tale of American industrial job loss. Nearly 5 million net manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute—roughly one out of every four. Though automation has played a dominant role in those job losses, critics also blame free-trade policies such as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The decline of American manufacturing jobs has helped shrink the middle class and worsen U.S. income inequality. Political scientists, moreover, have found strong links between the loss of those good jobs and the rise of political extremism in the U.S.
Fortune April 30, 2021 -
Faced with management’s intimidation campaigns, many pro-union workers become wary of expressing their support publicly — and not without reason. Research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that workers are fired in 1 out of 5 union election campaigns.
Clearly the election process needs to be fixed. But doing so leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: Why are employers allowed to intervene in union elections at all?
Washington Post April 30, 2021 -
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones April 30, 2021 -
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
New York Times April 30, 2021 -
April 30, 2021
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Instead of another round of broad checks, lawmakers should focus on extending unemployment benefits and the child tax credit because they could provide “longer-run fixes” for American households, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today April 28, 2021 -
For many Americans, that might sound like an ominous proposal as it would mean things like groceries, restaurant bills, and leisure activities would all cost more, but Robert Scott, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, says higher inflation is actually a good thing.
“A tight labor market and a rapidly growing economy, if we can get there, is going to sustain higher levels of wage increase,” explained Scott. “So, you might be paying more: 2-3% a year more for your food, and groceries, and rent, but your wages might be rising at 3% or 4% or 5% a year. That’s good news. If wages are rising more than prices, you’re going to see a rising standard of living.”
Scripps National News April 28, 2021 -
Taken altogether, the proposals mark a “meaningful investment in care, in paid leave, that will help many workers in the formal labor market,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “That will absolutely be good for economic growth.”
Bloomberg April 28, 2021 -
Under Biden’s executive order, an estimated 390,000 workers will directly benefit, which about half are women and the rest are Black or Hispanic, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Arizona Republic April 28, 2021 -
Another AFL-CIO alum and Drake’s former boss, Thea Lee, who is president of the labor-friendly Economic Policy Institute, will also be joining the Biden administration in a yet undisclosed role.
Politico April 28, 2021 -
The Economic Policy institute estimates that up to 390,000 low-wage federal contractors will see a raise under the policy and that the average annual pay increase for affected year-round workers would be approximately $3,100. Among those who are expected to see their wages rise, roughly half will be women and roughly half will be Black or Hispanic.
CNBC April 28, 2021 -
The liberal Economic Policy Institute estimates that as many as 390,000 low-wage federal contractors would receive a raise, with roughly half of the beneficiaries being Black or Hispanic workers. There are an estimated 5 million contract workers in the federal government, according to a posting last year for the Brookings Institution by Paul Light, a public policy professor at New York University.
Associated Press April 28, 2021 -
Schools have received even more support, including in the American Rescue Plan. “Almost $130 billion for K-12 education, and part of that was meant to allow for school reopening,” said Emma García, an education economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
García said the administration is hoping to add to that number through its infrastructure package. It’s also pushed a flurry of executive orders on the economy. But, so far, the administration’s been sticking to plans it can implement without Republican support, said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
NPR Marketplace April 28, 2021 -
Top Democrats are calling on President Biden to permanently reform unemployment and beef up benefits
“Unemployed workers really had totally different qualities of life, totally different standards of support based solely on where they live,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told Insider. “As a consequence of that, the data show that in those states where lawmakers had really weakened their state unemployment insurance systems, federal money made up for a larger and larger share of the support going to unemployed workers.”
The Democratic lawmakers also want UI benefits to be accessible to more workers. They cite the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which expanded eligibility of UI to gig workers and freelancers. According to the letter, over 16 million workers have received PUA benefits during the pandemic. A new EPI report found that, by the end of 2020, “PUA made up the largest share of federal UI assistance … contributing 33% of total UI income.”
Business Insider April 26, 2021 -
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, looks at the share of unemployment benefits as part of wage and salary income. They found that, prior to 2020, benefits from UI had never gone above 6% of a state’s salary and wage income; in 2020’s second quarter, it was above 20% in four states. EPI’s calculations used wage and salary data while Insider looked at unemployment insurance as a percentage of total personal income.
Importantly, according to the EPI report, the influx of federal UI benefits – both in the form of the additional $600 and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which made more workers eligible for employment benefits – helped fill the holes in states’ unemployment benefits.
“In particular, states with a higher share of Black residents were more reliant on federal assistance to provide UI benefits,” the EPI report says. “But if the pandemic programs fade with no structural reforms, the UI system will revert to being one that sees stingier benefits precisely in those states with higher Black population shares.”
The fact that those holes needed to be filled, and the amount of income that unemployment made up during the pandemic, shows the need for unemployment reform, according to EPI. They argue that reforms could help codify some of the expanded eligibility and equity from beefed-up pandemic-era benefits, and help shore up the system ahead of future downturns.
EPI found that, by the end of 2020, benefits that came from PUA – the program that opened unemployment eligibility to workers who normally wouldn’t be able to access benefits – became the greatest share of federal UI. David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at EPI, said that there were nine states where the money from PUA made up over half of all UI going to workers there.
“I mean, that’s remarkable, that that more than half the assistance provided is going to folks who would not normally qualify for traditional funding,” Cooper said. “That just shows me that our existing eligibility requirements are way out of whack.
The amount of federal money pouring into unemployment – and going to Americans who were out of work during an unprecedented pandemic – helped close gaps in state UI programs and provide direct relief. It also helped to address racial inequities, since, according to EPI, Black workers were more likely to live in states that had weaker UI; on the whole, workers of color, particularly Black workers, were disproportionately impacted by pandemic unemployment.
Business Insider April 26, 2021 -
American workers lost over $1 billion as a result of weak federal labor law that doesn’t make employers pay monetary penalties for illegally retaliating against those who attempt to organize.
Law360 April 26, 2021 -
Still, crowdfunding is not a sustainable way to keep money coming in and hasn’t made much of a dent on a broad scale in the past year — although it can help some individuals, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
…
The government has expanded unemployment benefits, doled out stimulus checks and forgiven some taxes during the pandemic, significant steps that Gould hopes the system will learn from and continue to adopt in certain cases. But, she said, the past year also showed how ill-equipped in some ways our social safety net was to deal with a crisis of this scale — a key example was unemployment systems that were overrun with requests and inaccessible to many people for weeks or months. That delay was devastating to many.
“So many people are living on the edge financially,” Gould said. “Maybe they’re able to make their bills when they have their paycheck, but you lose your paycheck, and maybe you can’t pay your rent this month.”
Washington Post April 26, 2021 -
That’s just one page from the epic tale of American industrial job loss. Nearly 5 million net manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute—roughly one out of every four. Though automation has played a dominant role in those job losses, critics also blame free-trade policies such as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The decline of American manufacturing jobs has helped shrink the middle class and worsen U.S. income inequality. Political scientists, moreover, have found strong links between the loss of those good jobs and the rise of political extremism in the U.S.
Fortune April 26, 2021 -
Faced with management’s intimidation campaigns, many pro-union workers become wary of expressing their support publicly — and not without reason. Research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that workers are fired in 1 out of 5 union election campaigns.
Clearly the election process needs to be fixed. But doing so leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: Why are employers allowed to intervene in union elections at all?
Washington Post April 26, 2021 -
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones April 26, 2021 -
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
New York Times April 26, 2021 -
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones April 26, 2021 -
The gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has been growing for decades. Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.
New York Times April 26, 2021 -
The past few months have brought some encouraging signs for low-paid workers. Big employers like Walmart Inc. have announced pay raises, and higher minimum wages took effect in 20 states as of Jan. 1, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg April 23, 2021 -
The median Black household earns 61 cents for every dollar earned by a comparable White household, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This not only makes it more difficult to afford a home, but also to accumulate and pass on generational wealth. A primary residence accounts for the largest percentage of the average American household’s net worth, according to the Latest Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances.
Adding to the problem is that Black-owned houses are typically worth less and are more likely to lose value than White-owned homes in similar neighborhoods.
TIME/Next Advisor April 23, 2021 -
Part 2. The Tactics Used by Amazon to Defeat Union Organizing Drives
Guest: Lynn Rhinehart is a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, where she works on labor and employment policy, with a focus on collective bargaining. She wrote the piece How Amazon Gerrymandered the Union Vote—And Won. The PRO Act would put voting decisions back in the hands of workers and the National Labor Relations Board.
KPFA April 23, 2021