The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analyzed data from the last two quarters of 2020 to see how unemployment rates differed by race and ethnicity around the nation.
“While unemployment rates fell for all groups over the third and fourth quarters, Hispanic unemployment remained 60% higher than white unemployment, while Black unemployment rose from 60% higher to 90% higher,” EPI wrote.
In fact, EPI found that in the third quarter of 2020, “there were no states where Black and white workers were equally likely to be unemployed.” Although the unemployment rate for both Black and white Americans is lower than the rates seen last spring, the Black unemployment rate was 4.3 percentage points higher than the white unemployment rate in February 2021.
Business Insider
March 26, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens adds, “I think her deficit concerns actually help her in building support for the [American Rescue Plan] proposal,” he says. “Nobody thinks she’s always soft on deficits.”
The Nation
March 26, 2021
“Increases in the minimum wage don’t generally have an effect on jobs,” David Cooper, senior analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, told the American Independent Foundation. “The overwhelming consensus [in] economic research] is that if there is an effect on employment, it’s so small that we have a really hard time measuring it.”
The American Independent
March 26, 2021
“The risk is all on the employer or the pension fund. The pension fund or the employer has to figure out how many years on average the people in the pension fund are going to live and has to tie the benefits to projected earnings,” said Monique Morrissey, an economist at Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
March 26, 2021
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute on farm labor enforcement trends over the past 20 years found that more than 70% of federal labor standards investigations of farms conducted by the department’s Wage and Hour Division detected violations — “things like wage theft and inadequate housing, as well as other violations of laws designed to protect farmworkers.”
In addition, about 11% of WHD agricultural investigations found violations of H-2A regulations.
Agri-Pulse
March 26, 2021
Features interview with Heidi Shierholz.
Washington Post
March 26, 2021
Panelist Rob Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has been pounding the table on this issue for a few years now. He sees this as a headwind for manufacturing, a sector that is famous for hiring blue-collar workers and paying good wages, giving them a chance to enter in and stay in the middle class. In 2019, he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times highlighting how Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Trump actually saw eye-to-eye on how an overvalued dollar was a major stumbling block for American manufacturing labor.
“The simplest way to make the dollar less attractive is to impose a tax on foreign purchases of US assets,” Scott said. “You can tax new purchases of US assets, so this is not a tax on US investors. We have lost 5 million manufacturing jobs over the last 20 years, which has led to the devastation of the industrial heartlands in the upper northeast and Midwest and Southeast. And it has been especially harmful for non-college educated workers.”
Coalition for a Prosperous America
March 26, 2021
At the same time, the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, called on the administration to continue the duties. It hosted a call with representatives of United Steelworkers union and said that the duties helped boost output and create thousands of jobs. The industry is concentrated in politically sensitive swing states including Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.
Bloomberg
March 26, 2021
The average wage grew so much, and so fast, because millions of the lowest paid workers lost their jobs.
A report analyzing the data, from the Economic Policy Institute, provides insight into a labor market with growing inequality among the highest and lowest paid workers, at a time of high union support and low union membership.
“All of the job losses are happening in the bottom half of the wage distribution,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the paper examining this phenomenon. “And the top half is actually seeing some wage gains.”
KTVU-TV
March 26, 2021
However, the damage was mostly felt at the lower end of the labor market, as 80% of 9.6 million net jobs lost were occupied by workers in the bottom quartile of wage earners, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
Los Angeles Times
March 26, 2021