“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
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a non-profit think-tank based in Washington, D.C., further determined that April’s slow job growth had little to do with continued unemployment aid, but rather continued health concerns and an “outflow” of workers — primarily women — from employment due to caregiving concerns.
“Millions of Americans continue to cite health concerns as a reason for reluctance to return to work — as further evidence of this, vaccination rates correlate positively with increased employment across states,” wrote Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the EPI in a blog post published Tuesday.
Nextstar Media Wire
May 14, 2021
“Overall, jobless claims are about three times as high as they were pre-Covid, but they’re coming down” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
New York Times
May 14, 2021
Individual states rolling back federal unemployment benefits could have a disproportionate impact on marginalized workers. A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) looked at how much of the UI disbursed in each state was from federal benefits. The EPI report notes that this could impact workers along racial lines, since states where Black Americans make up a larger share of the population tend to have weaker UI benefits.
In South Carolina, for instance, around 76% of total UI came from federal programs in the fourth quarter of 2020. Arkansas and Montana both leaned heavily on federal benefits in disbursement of UI benefits, with federal UI making up 74.7% and 68.7% of their total disbursed benefits, respectively.
“The US economy is still down 8.2 million jobs from what we had prior to the pandemic — and if you account for people newly entering the workforce since then, we are down over 11 million jobs,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at EPI, said in an email to Insider. “So, the economy is simply not at a place where we should be cutting back UI benefits. There are far more people looking for work and unable to find it than there are employers unable to fill vacancies, and pulling back on UI will only slow down the recovery.”
Business Insider
May 14, 2021
“Before long many more workers will come back into job-search as it becomes increasingly safe to pursue these public facing jobs … and as wages rise to compensate for the extra risk of working in face-to-face places during the lingering pandemic,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Reuters
May 14, 2021
As more Americans get vaccinated and restaurants and retail reopen, economists say many are eager to spend, with businesses struggling to keep up with demand, therefore raising prices, though some economists say the big picture is important to consider since the numbers are compared to the same month a year ago.
“If we just go back in time, in April 2020 and think about what was happening in the economy then, that was the worst month of the COVID collapse,” said Josh Bivens, the director of Research at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
May 14, 2021