A report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that Section 232 measures under Trump, which applied a 25% tariff on imported steel products and a 10% tariff on imported aluminum, protected the domestic steel industry from chronic global excess capacity in major exporting countries.
“These tariffs were directly and simply good for steel producers and their workers,” Robert Scott, a senior economist at EPI, told Yahoo Finance. “It generated more jobs and more investment and more output than the domestic steel industry. … The fact is there was no significant negative impact on the prices of downstream products like cars, one of the biggest users of domestic steel.”
Yahoo Finance
April 9, 2021
That’s no surprise to Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. When the economy tumbles, the job market tends to be worse for young people, she says.
“They’ll choose, all else equal, people with more experience,” Gould says about employers. “So young workers are left out in the cold and many are going to have a hard time starting their career.”
NPR
April 9, 2021
“Today’s number is certainly a promising sign for the recovery, especially as vaccinations increase and vital provisions in the American Rescue Plan have continued to ramp up since the March reference period to today’s data,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, in a blog post Friday. “The benefits of the ARP will continue to be captured in coming months.”
Sinclair Broadcast Group
April 9, 2021
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden fired Peter Robb, the Trump-appointed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing federal labor law.
Robb’s supporters protested that Biden had unfairly and illegally thrown him out of office 10 months before the end of his four-year term. In reality, Biden had ample legal authority for removing Robb, much of which is set forth in a legal memo penned by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts when he worked in the Reagan administration.
A new report by the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office (GAO) shows why Biden was right to fire Robb—and to do so quickly. The GAO found that Robb was dismantling the agency from the inside. He reduced staff size, destroyed employee morale, and failed to spend the money appropriated by Congress. This all occurred while Robb was pursuing an anti-worker, pro-corporate agenda.
The Nation
April 9, 2021
In all, those long-term unemployed represented 24% of the 9.9 million total jobless workers last month, according to the bureau. (The data are without seasonal adjustments.)
“I think that number is pretty breathtaking, that nearly a quarter of unemployed workers have been unemployed for over a year,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017.
“It really shows that even as the economy is recovering, you have a lot of the same people who have been unemployed throughout this whole damn thing,” she added.
CNBC
April 9, 2021
Biden said he wants Congress to pass a federal minimum wage increase, but there’s no deal in sight. Experts say people such as Romero often must make difficult decisions to sustain themselves.
“It’s not a question of being smart or being thoughtful or planning for the future. You are forced to make a series of bad decisions when life doesn’t work, and it can’t work with wages that low,” says Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank based in Washington that researches economic policies for working people.
USA Today
April 9, 2021
For all of the good jobs news recently, there are still nearly 10 million people who are out of work, and more than 4 million of them have been unemployed for six months or longer.
“So we still have a very long way to go until we get a full recovery,” said Elise Gould with the Economic Policy Institute. She said the industries that have the furthest to go are the ones you’d expect: “leisure and hospitality, accommodations, food services, restaurants” and the public sector, especially in education.
Marketplace
April 9, 2021
“March was definitely a bright spot. The increase of more than 900,000 jobs is definitely a promising start to the recovery,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told Insider. “It’s good, but let’s make sure we can hold onto it.”
Business Insider
April 9, 2021
Liberal groups say those steps represent a big change from prior Democratic administrations. Under Obama, for instance, two of the most prominent think-tanks on the left — the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute — felt almost entirely shut out of policymaking.
Now, by contrast, CEPR and EPI have former employees — Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey — occupying two of the three positions on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Janelle Jones, a former EPI economic analyst, is now chief economist at the Labor Department.
Washington Post
April 9, 2021
That’s no surprise to Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. When the economy tumbles, the job market tends to be worse for young people, she says.
The reality is that there may be plenty of cheaper-to-hire college graduates, but in an economy still recovering from major layoffs, there are also plenty more experienced workers desperate for jobs.
“They’ll choose, all else equal, people with more experience,” Gould says about employers. “So young workers are left out in the cold and many are going to have a hard time starting their career.”
NPR
April 9, 2021
Features Q&A with Lynn Rhinehart.
Law360
April 2, 2021
But while some sectors are back to their
pre-pandemic employment levels, the overall US economy still has 8.4 million fewer jobs than it did before Covid-19 related
job losses started a year ago.
“Even at this pace, it could take more than a year to dig out of the total jobs shortfall,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “However, today’s number is certainly a promising sign for the recovery.
CNN Business
April 2, 2021
Outsourcing firms dominated the list of the top companies receiving new H-1B visas last year, according to a new report.
“Instead of being used to fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. labor standards, the latest data show that the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have an outsourcing business model,” said the report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
…
According to the institute’s report, more than half the top 30 companies receiving new H-1B visas in 2020 were outsourcers. “Those 17 outsourcing firms alone were issued 20,000 H-1B visas, nearly one-quarter of the total 85,000 annual limit,” said the report by the institute’s director of immigration law and policy research Daniel Costa and Howard University professor Ron Hira, who studies the H-1B.
The Mercury News
April 2, 2021
By early 2020, women were a majority of the workforce. But a year into the pandemic, much of those gains have been erased. Almost a million mothers left the workforce last year, and economists are sounding the alarm.
“What we have seen in this downturn has been unprecedented,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsy
April 2, 2021
The U.S. added 916,000 jobs in March, surpassing most economists’ forecast and signaling a strengthening economy, as businesses eased restrictions helped by the vaccine rollout, warmer weather and a decline in coronavirus infections. President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion American Rescue Package, which allocated $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of households, also helped to inject more life into the economy.
It’s the strongest job growth the country has seen since the initial recovery faded last summer, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “Even with these gains, the labor market is still down 8.4 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. In addition, thousands of jobs would have been added each month over the last year without the pandemic recession.”
…
“However, today’s number is certainly a promising sign for the recovery, especially as vaccinations increase and vital provisions in the American Rescue Plan have continued to ramp up since the March reference period to today’s data,” Gould added. “The benefits of the ARP will continue to be captured in coming months.”
MarketWatch
April 2, 2021
Features Elise Gould at 3:25.
“Bloomberg: Balance of Power” focuses on the intersection of politics and global business. Guests: U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Center for American Restoration President Russ Vought, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (Source: Bloomberg)
Bloomberg
April 2, 2021
Data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that people of color make up the majority of essential workers in food and agriculture and in industrial, commercial, residential facilities, and services. At the same time, Black workers have also been disproportionately impacted by pandemic-related job losses.
“When you think about lower-paid workers, we’re not just talking about income disparities and power,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI, previously told Yahoo Finance. “You’re also talking about race.”
Yahoo Finance
April 2, 2021
As of last August, an estimated 12.7 million Americans had lost their health insurance during the pandemic, according to the last report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. Half that number was the spouses and children who were getting health insurance through their partners’ and parents’ employers.
The Huffington Post
April 2, 2021
All that held particularly true in 2011 since the economy, slowly emerging from the Great Recession, was far from full employment. As Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, testified at the time in favor of EPA’s air toxins rules: “There is no better time than now, from a job-creation perspective, to move forward with these rules.”
Bloomberg
April 2, 2021
Even before the pandemic, the job market for young people wasn’t stellar. According to data analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate in spring 2019 for people ages 16-24 was triple the rate of people over the age of 25.
The pandemic only made things worse. Roughly one-fourth of young people were unemployed during the height of the pandemic recession in late spring 2020, compared to around one-tenth of older workers.
Young Black, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islander workers had higher unemployment rates than their white peers.
Cincinnati Enquirer
April 2, 2021
As of last August, an estimated 12.7 million Americans had lost their health insurance during the pandemic, according to the last report from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. Half that number was the spouses and children who were getting health insurance through their partners’ and parents’ employers.
…
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that a previous version of this benefit proposed by House Democrats earlier this year, which would have covered only 85% of premiums through COBRA, would reach an additional 2.2 million Americans, 600,000 of whom would have been uninsured without the provision. Because this proposal covers 100% of the premiums, its reach is expected to be more than that, Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said in an email.
Huffpost
April 2, 2021
The average cost of infant care in Ohio is $9,697 per year — or about $800 per month — according to the Economic Policy Institute, an independent think tank. Rockport, which was owned by a church, cared for children as young as 6 weeks old all the way up to 6-year-old first graders. It took in only privately funded children. Full-time fees per month ran about $1,068 for a 6-week-old, which made it “not the most expensive center in the area, but not the cheapest, either,” Ms. Norris added, meaning the center wasn’t in a financially vulnerable position at the start of last year.
The New York Times
April 2, 2021
For decades, workforce leaders, labor unions and politicians have bemoaned the loss of American factories and manufacturing jobs to lower-cost overseas markets such as China, Malaysia, Mexico and Brazil. “Buy USA” became and has remained a rally cry for those determined to revive American manufacturing and bring back the 5 million-plus jobs and 91,000 plants that have migrated offshore since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Forbes
April 2, 2021
Companies have the cash to grow, but with wealth and income skewed to the top, “there’s not enough customers to buy the new output,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
April 2, 2021
According to one analysis of work schedules between 2017 and 2018 by the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute, only around 20% of Black workers are able to work remotely, as compared to 30% of white employees and 37% of Asian employees.
Yahoo Finance
April 2, 2021
One is Heidi Shierholz, who served as chief economist to Obama’s secretary of Labor. “If my 2010 self could see just how different we’re handling this recovery than we handled that one — when we were just pulling our hair out, because Congress was turning towards austerity when the unemployment rate was literally over 9% — it was just an outrageous approach to the recovery at that time.”
Shierholz, who is now director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, noted that decade saw an “incredibly weak and slow” economic recovery, which she attributed to Congress not providing the kind of fiscal relief that would have boosted aggregate demand to get the economy going, “and we are not making that mistake this time.”
Business Insider
April 2, 2021
Features Q&A with Lynn Rhinehart.
Law360
April 2, 2021