Media clips
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Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs for the Economic Policy Institute, said Biden needs to get the legislation through the Senate to make good on his rhetoric. She said Biden’s encouragement of Amazon workers trying to organize in Bessemer demonstrates the limits of verbal support.
“The classic example of that at this point is, the president comes out with a statement in Bessemer and the union does not prevail in the election,” said McNicholas, a former special counsel for the National Labor Relations Board. “It didn’t create a free and fair election. That would require policy reform.”
The vote broke heavily in the company’s favor. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union has appealed the election to the NLRB, citing unfair labor practices. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.
“Calling on Congress to do its job we all know is insufficient for Congress to do its job,” McNicholas said. “This administration is going to have to take an active role in championing the bill and an active role in looking for legislative mechanisms to actually get it passed, because we will not be able to pass the PRO Act and a host of other critical reforms with the 60-vote threshold.”
Roll Call May 21, 2021 -
But Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist who researches low- and middle-income workers with the Economic Policy Institute, said health concerns and child care responsibilities seem to be the main reasons holding workers back.
In April, she said, at least 25% of U.S. schools weren’t offering in-person learning, forcing many parents to stay home. And health concerns could gain new urgency for some workers now that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most settings.
Shierholz added that unemployment benefits are designed to give workers the time to find jobs that are better suited to their abilities.
“We want people well-matched to their skills and experience,” she said. “That’s what helps the economy run better.”
Associated Press May 21, 2021 -
Two economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute conclude in a new paper that the government is to blame for the fact that pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s.
“Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” write Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively, trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue that a decades-long loss of leverage largely explains the gap between the pay increases that workers would have received had they benefited fully from rising productivity, and the smaller wage and benefit increases that workers actually received, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times.
New York Times May 21, 2021 -
Elise Gould, Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with reporter Chris Bangert-Drowns about why we shouldn’t overreact to disappointing jobs data in April, and how to move the economy forward.
WPFW May 21, 2021 -
Business owners across the U.S. say they can’t find enough workers. Right now, the U.S. unemployment rate stands at about 6 percent and millions of people are actively looking for a job. But some have suggested $300 per week in supplemental unemployment benefits is keeping low-income workers from returning to work. For many people, that’s more than they made while on the clock and it has become a lifeline. To help frame the debate, we ask labor economist Valerie Wilson to unpack what the numbers really tell us, and provide context for what the future of work looks like in high contact industries.
Matter of Fact May 21, 2021 -
Elise Gould with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute said most people aren’t working from home and can’t take kids to the office with them.
“Many women who have a hard time are the ones who have to physically go into work—and that’s the vast majority to this economy,” Gould said. “Even today, 80% of workers are actually going physically to work. So they have no ability to take care of young kids. They can’t go to those jobs.”
Gould said women have borne the brunt of unemployment during the pandemic. That’s largely because they take on disproportionate caregiving responsibility. But she said this was a problem before COVID, too.
Gould said mothers’ labor force participation has been softening for decades. She said the cost-benefit analysis is hard to weigh.
“It’s a false choice that people are making,” Gould said. “They don’t really have a choice between being able to work in the labor market reliably, and get the early care and education that they want for their kids because it is simply out of reach.”
That’s not just the case for low-income families, Gould said. Many moderate income families also struggle. She said the burden is worse for Black and Latina women.
Still, Gould said she’s hopeful those displaced from work due the pandemic can rejoin the workforce soon.
“I’m optimistic. I think that there will be many opportunities as it becomes safe to completely reopen and schools are open and child care centers are reliably open,” Gould said. “I think there will be opportunities that will return to many people who have been sidelined in this economy.”
Gould said without policy change to better support families and child care providers, a “return to normal” will remain out of reach for many.
WGLT May 21, 2021 -
A paper from the Economic Policy Institute finds that the widening gap between what an average worker earns each hour and what they produce has been one of the main drivers of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades.
And that’s no accident. The paper’s authors, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, argue that’s “been generated primarily through intentional policy decisions designed to suppress typical workers’ wage growth, the failure to improve and update existing policies, and the failure to thwart new corporate practices and structures aimed at wage suppression.”
Overly austere economic policies, globalization and less unionization haven’t helped either. The solution is more political than economic.
Bloomberg May 21, 2021 -
Still, the possibility that enhanced unemployment benefits could be a disincentive highlights one of the flaws in the pre-pandemic labor market and the need for changes, said Wilson, who heads the think tank’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
“The fact that someone may make more though unemployment insurance than working would strongly suggest there was a problem there to begin with, that wages are so low in some occupations that it would be more worthwhile not to work than to go to work,” she said.
Boston Globe May 21, 2021 -
“We will have a weird six months ahead,” said Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It will be a real challenge for the administration and the Fed to stay firm on their stance.”
Bloomberg May 21, 2021 -
More and more COVID-19 restrictions are being lifted and consumers are returning to businesses. But many of the unemployed aren’t heading back to work. Some are blaming supplemental unemployment benefits for the worker shortage, but experts say that’s not the only reason. Heidi Shierholz, Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, gives her perspective on the future of our economy.
Matter of Fact May 21, 2021