Media clips
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The fault lines of inequality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have also thrown the pre-emption issue into starker relief. A 2020 report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute notes that legislative moves are “disproportionately harming the same communities that have been pre-empted from taking local action, limiting their ability to effectively combat the public health crisis.”
The report, which focuses on the South, characterizes pre-emption as “embedded in a racist history.” Pre-emptive laws “are passed by majority-white legislatures and tend to create barriers to economic security in cities whose residents are majority people of color.”
MarketWatch July 9, 2021 -
Noncompete agreements prevent workers from going to a competitor or starting a competing business within a certain period after leaving their previous job. Between 36 million and 60 million private-sector workers were subject to noncompete agreements in 2019, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.
“The only economic leverage that non-unionized workers have is the implicit threat that they could quit and go somewhere else,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Money. “Noncompete agreements reduce wages. Your employer doesn’t have to pay you bigger wages if they know that you don’t have outside options.”
Limiting noncompete agreements or making them unenforceable — as Biden’s order sets out to do — may not be enough, according to Shierholz. Banning them instead would give workers more leverage, she said.
Yahoo Finance July 9, 2021 -
“There are many people who lost their jobs early on in the recession who’ve been unemployed ever since,” according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Obama administration.
The increase in yearlong unemployment comes as the U.S. added 850,000 jobs in June, the most since August 2020.
But the jump makes sense given the contours of the Covid labor market, Shierholz said.
Layoffs, which began en masse in March and April 2020, were still about 20% higher than pre-pandemic levels over the following two months, she said.
(Layoffs are a different metric than net jobs gained or lost, and are reported separately from the monthly jobs figures.)
A jump in 52-week unemployment therefore reflects the elevated layoffs a year ago. The numbers will likely soon decline, since layoffs had normalized by July, she said.
“As the overall unemployment rate comes down, I expect the long-term unemployment rate will come down,” according to Shierholz.
Those out of work for an extended duration are likely among the hardest-hit industries, like leisure and hospitality, Shierholz said.
CNBC July 9, 2021 -
The U.S. added 850,000 jobs in June, “far surpassing expectations” and putting the country on pace to reach pre-pandemic levels of health by “the end of 2022,” per The Wall Street Journal and the Economic Policy Institute. Average growth over the last three months came in at 567,000, and unemployment changed little, up to 5.9 percent from 5.8 percent.
The Week July 6, 2021 -
But, as Heidi Shierholz, a former Obama administration economist and now director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed out on Twitter, wages for workers in leisure and hospitality “plummeted” last year during the recession, so even with the strong wage growth in those sectors this year, wages are not that much higher than if the pandemic had never happened.
“Over the last three months, leisure & hospitality has added 977,000 jobs—well over half of the 1.7 million total jobs added over that period,” Shierholz wrote. She added that these numbers “are just not signaling a big labor shortage.”
Insider July 6, 2021 -
Government followed behind leisure and hospitality with 188,000 jobs added last month. Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote on Twitter specifically about state and local government job gains, which added 193,000 jobs together.
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Shierholz wrote it is “crucial” that these governments “use their ARP funds to refill those jobs” because there are still around 1 million fewer state and local government jobs in June than before the pandemic.
Business Insider July 6, 2021 -
“It’s been a dozen years since Congress raised the national minimum wage, so the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. economy have seen an 18% pay cut as the cost of living went up over that time period,” Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Finance. “Congressional inaction is why places like Delaware, Florida, and more than two dozen other states have increased their minimum wage in the last several years.”
Yahoo Finance July 6, 2021 -
“Unemployment insurance is not going to solve care problems. It’s not going to solve health concerns,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist and director of policy for the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, D.C. “Cutting [unemployment insurance] is not going to have a huge effect on the labor shortages.”
Pittsburgh Post Gazette July 6, 2021 -
“Many people who lost jobs at the start of the pandemic have been unemployed ever since. As jobs come back they will get work but there is still a big jobs deficit,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-learning Economic Policy Institute, in a Twitter thread.
The Hill July 6, 2021 -
Dr Valerie Wilson, the director of Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy (Pree), warned against treating any one month’s report with too much importance, “The caveat is that subsequent revisions or updates to the numbers could always change what that story is. We always know more in retrospect than we do in any at any single point.”
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These differences, of course, have been entrenched throughout US history. In particular, Wilson is concerned with “occupational segregation”, which has historically meant that Black and brown workers are disproportionately represented in some industries and not others.
“For example, we know that women – women of color in particular – are more likely to be in low-wage service and those industries are hit extremely hard during a recession,” she said.
Industries, such as leisure and hospitality, continue to falter in regaining their pre-pandemic rates of unemployment.
The Guardian July 6, 2021