These prospective departures threaten a relatively new feature of government: diversity. In Virginia, the public payroll — state and local — is nearly 58% female, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. One in five employees is Black; one in 10, Hispanic or Asian.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
June 25, 2021
Black households had $8,762 in cash or equivalent liquid assets, compared with $49,529 for white households in 2016, an Economic Policy Institute analysis of government data found.
Axios
June 25, 2021
“I think that there were many low-wage jobs that were lost and many people may not have wanted to have the job before and are now trying to see their options,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute who cautioned that while the coronavirus has highlighted just how precarious worker protections can be when it comes to health and child care, she doesn’t expect these conditions to change drastically in a post-pandemic economy unless major policy changes are enacted.
PBS Newshour
June 25, 2021
Demonstrators carried signs reading “We Can’t Wait for Jobs” and “We Can’t Wait for Citizenship” at the rally organized by the Center for Popular Democracy, Unemployed Action, Make the Road, and other national groups that are calling on lawmakers “to act quickly and boldly to enact transformative changes for an equitable economy,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which released a report on the need to overhaul the unemployment system to coincide with the day of action.
Common Dreams
June 25, 2021
As documented by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for recent graduates ages 16-24 increased by 16%, going from from 8.4 percent to 24.4 in the year between spring 2019 and 2020. These numbers are even greater for Black people, which is why Polly Irungu, founder of Black Women Photographers, stepped in.
Essence
June 25, 2021
With this significant expansion, “what we’ve done in this recession is very different” than in the past, said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist for Obama administration’s labor department and now director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Now, “even though the labor market is improving, there’s still a long way to go,” she said. Shierholz said cutting benefits will disproportionately harm Black and Latino workers, who have higher rates of unemployment. She said there is “no economy-wide labor shortage.” While there is some evidence of a shortage in leisure and hospitality, it is “isolated” and has not extended to other sectors, she said. “The very, very low-wage jobs are the ones where there are lots of openings now,” Shierholz said.
The Baltimore Sun
June 25, 2021
According to a 2019 estimate by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), U.S. employers spend nearly $340 million per year on union avoidance services. The EPI also found that by the early 2000s, about 75% of all employers facing union elections involving 50 or more voters retained a union avoidance consultant.
Salon.com
June 25, 2021
The NRF’s survey found retail chains fired an average of 559 employees for stealing in 2019, and prosecuted an average of 156, while research by the Economic Policy Institute found employers are rarely prosecuted and underfunded labor regulators often lack the ability to enforce wage laws.
Business Insider
June 25, 2021
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they were moving on to better jobs — wages across industries haven’t meaningfully risen, meaning workers who quit aren’t, as a whole, making more money, Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Vox: “Really key wage measures are just not showing strong growth.”
Money isn’t the only factor, either. Some retail workers are leaving their jobs for roles that may have better conditions — for example, jobs in construction or warehouses where they may not have to deal with difficult customers. But some say it will take more than the fluctuations of a post-pandemic job market to really give workers meaningful power, in retail or elsewhere. Unless the surge in quitting leads to greater unionization and policy shifts like a higher minimum wage, Shierholz said, “it’s not going to be a lasting change.”
VOX
June 25, 2021