“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 9, 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 9, 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 9, 2021
Reported in an April 21 New York Times article with the headline: C.E.O. Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic
“Chief executives of big companies now make, on average, 320 times as much as their typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, that ratio was 61 to 1. From 1978 to 2019, compensation grew 14 percent for typical workers. It rose 1,167 percent for C.E.O.s.”
Counterpunch
July 9, 2021
While one-time bonuses might be one way to temporarily address the problem, Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, previously told Insider there could be a more simple, compensation-based solution: Raising wages altogether.
Business Insider
July 9, 2021
Ben Zipperer: The Economic Policy Institute says hiring bonuses in no way substitute for higher wages.
Scripps National News
July 9, 2021
Terri Gerstein is the director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Labor and Worklife Program and a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. Previously, she was the Labor Bureau chief in the New York State Attorney General’s Office and a deputy commissioner in the New York State Department of Labor.
The Nation
July 9, 2021
Payroll growth over the last three months in the US has been ‘huge’, says Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (and former chief economist at the Department of Labor)
The Guardian
July 9, 2021