Media clips
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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 17, 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 17, 2021 -
One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.
For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.
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.
Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.
New York Times May 14, 2021 -
Research by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and Howard University professor Ron Hira found the visa program was exploited by outsourcing companies and that “most H-1B employers … are taking advantage of a flawed H-1B prevailing wage rule to underpay their workers … resulting in major savings in labor costs for companies that use the H-1B.”
The institute’s Daniel Costa and Hira found that in 2019, IT staffing and outsourcing companies had applied for large numbers of H-1B workers at the second-lowest wage levels, while Google, Apple, Cisco and Oracle had a mix of higher and lower levels.
The Mercury News May 14, 2021 -
Because of the decline in union membership, “American workers are losing $200 billion a year,” she said, citing unspecified research. “So, this impacts not only the quality of life of the American worker, this impacts the quality of life of all Americans because it impacts our economy.”
“And to the extent that we are interconnected — when our economy does well, when the middle class does well — we all do well, which means unions must do well.”
The task force is aimed at bolstering union membership and worker power, specifically in organizing and bargaining. Harris seemed to be citing research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), which studied the impact of “deunionizing” over the past few decades.
Business Insider May 14, 2021 -
“Customers are coming back faster than restaurants can staff up,” said Josh Bivens, research director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “By raising pay, they are able to get more workers in the door.”
Associated Press May 14, 2021 -
CEOs of 350 large publicly traded companies in 2019 earned an average 320 times more than the typical worker in the same company, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1989, the average ratio was 61-to-1.
Huffpost May 14, 2021 -
A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute noted through March there were an average of 9.8 million unemployed workers compared to 8.1m job openings. Several industries, including the accommodation and food service industries, had more than 1.5 unemployed workers per job opening.
In regards to labor shortage claims, the Economic Policy Institute noted such claims would be short-lived as the accommodation and food service industry added 241,400 jobs in April last year. The leisure and hospitality sectors have experienced the most rapid employment growth over the past month, and economists with the Economic Policy Institute warned of the negative economic consequences of cutting pandemic unemployment insurance benefits.
The Guardian May 14, 2021 -
Liberal economists who were skeptical of the labor shortage narrative have also ceded that some restaurants and hospitality businesses will not be able to keep up with current wage demands.
“Labor shortages—which we would define by a large acceleration of wage growth to a rate that would be hard to sustain over the next year—do seem to have popped up in the leisure and hospitality sector,” wrote Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
The Hill May 14, 2021 -
David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that allowing people a little extra time to find more suitable work would actually benefit the economy in the long run.
“It may be that some job options being presented to them are very low-paying jobs, and if enhanced unemployment benefits are giving workers a little more bargaining power, maybe that’s a good thing,” he said.
“It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to pull back on unemployment benefits simply because restaurant owners are struggling to find staff.”
The Hill May 14, 2021