State attorney general takes action to protect workers against COVID-19: A snapshot of state and local enforcement actions across the country
Series: The New Labor Law Enforcers
State attorneys general, district attorneys, and localities like cities are increasingly key players in protecting workers’ rights. This new series by Terri Gerstein provides snapshots of enforcement and other actions to protect workers’ rights by these new and emerging labor law enforcers at the state and local level. Gerstein is an EPI senior fellow and director of the state and local enforcement project at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program, who has chronicled the growing influence of these new enforcers.
Recent cases brought by state and local enforcers address a host of violations: a lack of COVID-19 workplace safety at Amazon; failure to pay freelance workers on time or at all; terminating fast food workers without just cause (now illegal in New York City); misclassifying construction workers as independent contractors instead of as employees; and the consistent lack of justice for victims of wage theft.
Here’s a snapshot of some enforcement actions across the country at the end of 2021:
What to watch on jobs day: A strong finish to 2021, but Omicron’s impact looms
In an unprecedented change, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) the same week as the monthly employment situation report. Given this new release schedule, I’m going to talk about what we learned from this week’s JOLTS report, which provides data for the full month of November (or the end of November, depending on the specific measure) as a preview for the jobs day release on Friday, because the reference week for Friday’s numbers is shortly after at December 5-11. This means that the rapid Omicron variant surge in the United States will not affect the trends released on Friday, as job growth is expected to approach 7 million for 2021 as a whole.
The JOLTS report for November continued to show high levels of churn in the labor market and strong net job growth. Job openings ticked down a bit, while hires ticked up and quits hit another series high. The media has focused on the high quits rate, but what’s often missing from that coverage is that workers who are quitting their jobs aren’t dropping out of the labor force, they are quitting to take other jobs. Hiring continues to outpace the number of quits, and the labor force continues to claw its way back after a huge drop in the spring of 2020. While the majority of job losses added to the ranks of the unemployed (+17.4 million), the labor force fell by nearly 8 million workers in March and April 2020 and has regained about 70% of those losses since then, including an increase of 1.8 million over the last nine months, when the quits rate has been so high.
More worker power is the only sure path to safe work and pandemic recovery
Trapped at work during an intense storm that generated multiple tornadoes, six Amazon workers in Illinois and eight workers at a Kentucky candle factory died tragic, preventable deaths at the end of 2021. Their deaths brought brief visibility and attention to the reality that unless workers have a union, many lack the power to refuse unsafe work even in the face of extreme hazards.
As we enter year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, there likewise remains no refuge from the ever-present hazard of coronavirus exposure for millions of front-line workers whose jobs often require in-person work, long hours in unventilated spaces, frequent contact with co-workers or the public, and no guarantee of paid leave or health insurance.
Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: Quits hit new high, but hiring was even higher in November
Below, EPI economists offer their initial insights on today’s release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for November.
From EPI senior economist, Elise Gould (@eliselgould):
Read the full Twitter thread here.
Job openings fell between October and November 2021 by over a half million (-529k) to 10.6 million. The job openings rate fell to 6.6%, the lowest it’s been since June (but still historically high). The largest decrease in openings was in accommodation and food services (-261k). pic.twitter.com/3JdnM7uQBx
— Elise Gould (@eliselgould) January 4, 2022
Hires are on an upswing as quits continue to rise. Workers appear confident to quit their jobs in search of better ones.
To be clear: these trends predate the rise in Omicron. pic.twitter.com/dI5AhGA8Tp
— Elise Gould (@eliselgould) January 4, 2022
States are sitting on American Rescue Plan funds that could help against the Omicron variant
The Omicron variant of COVID is surging throughout the world, including in the United States, which is still being hit hard by the Delta variant, too. New cases in the United States are up more than 20% from two weeks prior.
There is strong evidence that financial challenges for low-wage workers are both reducing vaccination rates and hindering the success of COVID mitigation strategies. With soaring budget surpluses and plenty of unspent American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding available, states should invest in paid sick and family leave, financial support to low-wage workers, and active vaccination efforts to protect lives and public health.
An economic recovery for whom?: Black women’s employment gaps show important differences in recovery rates
Public discussions about the U.S. economic recovery fail to adequately portray the vastly uneven recovery that has been occurring since pandemic shutdowns began. Black women, who are pushed to the periphery of policymaking priorities, are among those whose experiences are most obscured by headline statistics.
The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) of Black women in their prime working years (ages 25 to 54) in the past year is still 3.4 percentage points below their rate one year before the pandemic began, compared with 2.3 percentage points for all other women and 1.9 percentage points for white women. There are currently roughly 257,700 fewer employed prime-age Black women than a year before the pandemic. If Black women’s EPOP remained at their pre-pandemic level, there would over 312,500 more employed Black women due to population growth. Furthermore, the employment gap varies significantly across the country’s nine Census divisions. Black women in the Mountain, New England, and East North Central divisions suffer the biggest gaps in their employment ratios, ranging from an astonishing 10.7 percentage points in the Mountain division to 4.9 percentage points in the East North Central division.
EPI’s top charts of 2021
The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic exposed a range of stark inequalities in American society. Besides highlighting these inequalities, EPI’s research over the past year has identified the clear fingerprints of intentional policy decisions in driving the inequalities.
Building a better and fairer economy in the pandemic’s wake will require a fundamental reorientation of economic policy along many dimensions. While 2021 has seen a decent start in some of this reorientation, much more remains to be done. Here are the charts that we selected as our top ones of 2021.
OSHA vaccine-or-test mandate is smart public policy
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has proposed an emergency temporary standard (ETS) for employers to cope with the health dangers posed by COVID-19. The centerpiece of the ETS is a vaccine-or-test mandate for employees working at firms with over 100 employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. The mandate is good public policy: it will reduce deaths and hospitalizations, and it will also increase economic growth and reduce the main inflationary pressures facing the U.S. economy.
The proposed ETS has spurred a large legal battle and its eventual fate is uncertain, even though exemptions for religious and health reasons are possible, and a version of these standards is already in effect for federal government employees, government contractors, and health care workers. In early November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed the ETS pending judicial review. However, over this past weekend, the stay was removed by the court with current jurisdiction over the case (the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit).
The lifting of the ETS stay is welcome news. The vaccine-or-test mandate is a key plank in an effective public health response to the continuing havoc wreaked by COVID-19. For example, a recent paper examining the introduction of vaccine mandates at the provincial level in Canada, France, and Germany found “that the announcement of a mandate is associated with a rapid and significant surge in new vaccinations (more than 60% increase in weekly first doses)…” Higher vaccination rates will contribute meaningfully to reducing deaths and hospitalizations from COVID-19.
Top five EPI blog posts of 2021
In 2021, many readers were looking to make sense of worries around potential labor shortages, despite little evidence that shortages in leisure and hospitality that popped up would spill over into the rest of the economy.
Aside from interest in labor shortages, what also got the attention of our readers was a post on how to fix the H-1B visa program, an important program that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers.
In addition, we saw a focus on the importance of state-level policy change amid federal inaction on a number of issues. Some states raised their own minimum wage above the federal level, included undocumented immigrants in critical pandemic aid, and extended unemployment benefits to school workers during the summer.
Here’s a countdown of the five most-read EPI blog posts in 2021.
Top EPI reports of 2021 focused on economic injustice and its remedies
As the nation pivoted to recovery, readers sought information on ways to remedy the economic injustices laid bare by the pandemic. Given the heavy burden borne by low-wage front-line workers, it is no surprise that raising wages, boosting worker power, and scrutinizing excessive compensation of people at the top were highest on the reading list. Here’s a countdown of EPI’s most-read reports in 2021.