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Experts say the government keeps poor data on its large contract workforce, but the Economic Policy Institute estimates that such an order would create direct raises for up to 390,000 workers, with an average annual pay boost of around $3,100. Other workers who were already earning around $15 could also see pay increases as firms adjust their pay scales upward.
Huffpost April 30, 2021 -
Black and Hispanic women disproportionately work in industries—such as leisure and hospitality—that were most negatively affected by the pandemic, said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy.
Since February of last year, participation rates for white women, including mothers, haven’t dropped more than 3.2 percentage points. Rates for women of color—especially Black and Hispanic mothers with children under five—have at times fallen more.
Large numbers of Black and Hispanic women work in essential sectors—most notably healthcare—that have seen increased demand in the past year. But in those industries, according to Dr. Wilson, they tend to hold jobs that offer comparatively low pay and flexibility.
Because many of the child-care options women in those jobs relied on before the pandemic have disappeared, a lack of workplace flexibility has also driven Black and Hispanic mothers out of the labor force, according to Dr. Wilson.
Wall Street Journal April 30, 2021 -
A report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, found that the number of workers who are represented by a union declined by 444,000 from 2019 to 2020.
However, the rate of unionization — the share of workers represented by one — actually increased in 2020, to 12.1% from 11.6%. The report attributes that to the power that unions give their workers, potentially resulting in those unionized workers having more of a say in how their workplaces functioned during the pandemic and its economic impact. And industries that are less unionized — the report cites leisure and hospitality — also saw the most job losses.
On the whole, according to EPI, the unionization rate is highest for Black workers, coming in at 13.9%. Throughout the pandemic, both that rate and the number of Black workers represented by a union increased.
Business Insider April 30, 2021 -
Top Democrats are calling on President Biden to permanently reform unemployment and beef up benefits
“Unemployed workers really had totally different qualities of life, totally different standards of support based solely on where they live,” David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told Insider. “As a consequence of that, the data show that in those states where lawmakers had really weakened their state unemployment insurance systems, federal money made up for a larger and larger share of the support going to unemployed workers.”
The Democratic lawmakers also want UI benefits to be accessible to more workers. They cite the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which expanded eligibility of UI to gig workers and freelancers. According to the letter, over 16 million workers have received PUA benefits during the pandemic. A new EPI report found that, by the end of 2020, “PUA made up the largest share of federal UI assistance … contributing 33% of total UI income.”
Business Insider April 30, 2021 -
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank, looks at the share of unemployment benefits as part of wage and salary income. They found that, prior to 2020, benefits from UI had never gone above 6% of a state’s salary and wage income; in 2020’s second quarter, it was above 20% in four states. EPI’s calculations used wage and salary data while Insider looked at unemployment insurance as a percentage of total personal income.
Importantly, according to the EPI report, the influx of federal UI benefits – both in the form of the additional $600 and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which made more workers eligible for employment benefits – helped fill the holes in states’ unemployment benefits.
“In particular, states with a higher share of Black residents were more reliant on federal assistance to provide UI benefits,” the EPI report says. “But if the pandemic programs fade with no structural reforms, the UI system will revert to being one that sees stingier benefits precisely in those states with higher Black population shares.”
The fact that those holes needed to be filled, and the amount of income that unemployment made up during the pandemic, shows the need for unemployment reform, according to EPI. They argue that reforms could help codify some of the expanded eligibility and equity from beefed-up pandemic-era benefits, and help shore up the system ahead of future downturns.
EPI found that, by the end of 2020, benefits that came from PUA – the program that opened unemployment eligibility to workers who normally wouldn’t be able to access benefits – became the greatest share of federal UI. David Cooper, a senior economic analyst at EPI, said that there were nine states where the money from PUA made up over half of all UI going to workers there.
“I mean, that’s remarkable, that that more than half the assistance provided is going to folks who would not normally qualify for traditional funding,” Cooper said. “That just shows me that our existing eligibility requirements are way out of whack.
The amount of federal money pouring into unemployment – and going to Americans who were out of work during an unprecedented pandemic – helped close gaps in state UI programs and provide direct relief. It also helped to address racial inequities, since, according to EPI, Black workers were more likely to live in states that had weaker UI; on the whole, workers of color, particularly Black workers, were disproportionately impacted by pandemic unemployment.
Business Insider April 30, 2021 -
American workers lost over $1 billion as a result of weak federal labor law that doesn’t make employers pay monetary penalties for illegally retaliating against those who attempt to organize their workplaces, according to a report
released by the progressive Economic Policy Institute.The report published Thursday by Lynn Rhinehart, an EPI senior fellow and Celine McNicholas, the organization’s director of government affairs, said the National Labor Relations Act’s anti-retaliation provisions are so weak that workers who faced illegal retaliation over the last decade could have received over $1.24 billion in damages had the NLRA been stronger.
“Because the anti-retaliation protections and remedies in the NLRA are much weaker than anti-retaliation and whistleblower protections in other labor and employment laws, the NLRA provides no real deterrent to employers retaliating against workers and interfering with their rights,” the report said.
Law360 April 30, 2021 -
Still, crowdfunding is not a sustainable way to keep money coming in and hasn’t made much of a dent on a broad scale in the past year — although it can help some individuals, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
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The government has expanded unemployment benefits, doled out stimulus checks and forgiven some taxes during the pandemic, significant steps that Gould hopes the system will learn from and continue to adopt in certain cases. But, she said, the past year also showed how ill-equipped in some ways our social safety net was to deal with a crisis of this scale — a key example was unemployment systems that were overrun with requests and inaccessible to many people for weeks or months. That delay was devastating to many.
“So many people are living on the edge financially,” Gould said. “Maybe they’re able to make their bills when they have their paycheck, but you lose your paycheck, and maybe you can’t pay your rent this month.”
Washington Post April 30, 2021 -
That’s just one page from the epic tale of American industrial job loss. Nearly 5 million net manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute—roughly one out of every four. Though automation has played a dominant role in those job losses, critics also blame free-trade policies such as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. The decline of American manufacturing jobs has helped shrink the middle class and worsen U.S. income inequality. Political scientists, moreover, have found strong links between the loss of those good jobs and the rise of political extremism in the U.S.
Fortune April 30, 2021 -
Faced with management’s intimidation campaigns, many pro-union workers become wary of expressing their support publicly — and not without reason. Research from the pro-labor think tank Economic Policy Institute shows that workers are fired in 1 out of 5 union election campaigns.
Clearly the election process needs to be fixed. But doing so leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: Why are employers allowed to intervene in union elections at all?
Washington Post April 30, 2021 -
According to an analysis by Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research for the progressive Economic Policy Institute, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would tweak the complicated system for setting minimum pay rates for H-2A workers in ways that will likely lower wages for most of them—a major goal of the agribusiness lobby.
On top of the wage change, the bill would open the H-2A program to more kinds of farms. Currently, the H-2A program only grants seasonal visas; it’s designed to draw in workers to, say, handle a region’s strawberry harvest. It leaves out operations that rely on steady year-round work, like plant nurseries and dairy farms, which now rely heavily on undocumented labor. These interests “have been clamoring for years for Congress to allow them to hire temporary H-2A workers for many of these 419,000 permanent, year-round jobs,” writes Costa.
Mother Jones April 30, 2021