“Low wages hurt all workers and are particularly harmful to Black workers and other workers of color, especially women of color who make up a disproportionate share of workers who are severely underpaid,” reports an Economic Policy Institute fact sheet on the minimum wage. “This is the result of structural racism and sexism, with an economic system rooted in chattel slavery in which workers of color — and especially women of color — have been and continue to be shunted into the most underpaid jobs.”
A bipartisan coalition in the U.S. Senate just voted to keep it that way.
Salon
March 8, 2021
Many economists have also roundly rejected the idea that the extra unemployment checks discourage people from finding work. Josh Bivens, a research director at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog last year that, “In normal times, economists and policymakers have focused a lot of attention (almost surely too much) on the incentive effects of [unemployment insurance] benefits.” But studies have found that, “The negative economic impacts of these incentive effects have always been exaggerated,” says Bivens, and that they’re negligible, especially under the exigent circumstances caused by the pandemic.
Truthout
March 8, 2021
The Biden proposal will make federal resources available to address both. It has the potential to create millions of new jobs in this country, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Jobs building the material that will make up our infrastructure are the kind that pay a premium wage to workers with less than a four-year degree. They’re precisely the kind the market needs more of right now.
Bay to Bay News
March 8, 2021
We also need to acknowledge the huge impact a minimum wage hike would have on the people who have been most harmed by the pandemic. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recently released an analysis of wages in the past year and found that average, inflation-adjusted wages in the U.S. had actually gone up in 2020. Great news, right? Wrong. The EPI found that average wages had increased because the makeup of the American workforce had changed so drastically — a huge proportion of those who lost their jobs during the pandemic were those making low wages, or around $14 per hour or less. In contrast, people making $25 per hour and above actually saw job gains overall in 2020.
Refinery29
March 8, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute analyzed the report and found that more than 25 million workers have been harmed by the dire state of the economy during the pandemic. The EPI concluded that, “Congress must pass the full $1.9 trillion relief package immediately.”
Rising Up with Sonali
March 8, 2021
Each month, the country has been inching closer to the Great Recession peak when 45% of jobless workers were long-term unemployed. In the last year, the number of people out of work for more than six months quadrupled to 4.1 million people or 41.5% of all unemployed.
The figures are concerning but not surprising given the uneven effects of the pandemic, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. Some of the lowest wage workers, particularly in the hospitality and leisure sector, were among the hardest hit when businesses closed and many of those jobs have yet to return.
The leisure sector accounted for more than one-third of all pandemic job losses. While it showed some of the biggest job gains last month, there is still a large employment deficit and a lot of uncertainty, particularly for those who have been out of work the longest.
“They have no resources to draw on. They don’t have some store of liquid savings they’ve been able to draw on when they’ve lost their jobs. They depend on unemployment insurance, they depend on wages to keep them afloat,” Gould stressed.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
March 8, 2021
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for Black workers went the other way: jumping to 9.9% from 9.2% before. The current rate is “just shy of the high-water mark in the Great Recession,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“Passing large-scale relief measures now is an economic and racial justice imperative,” said Gould.
CNN Business
March 8, 2021
The cruel irony is that even a $15 hourly wage is not a living wage in half of the United States and certainly not in Baltimore. The Economic Policy Institute figures that a family of two adults and two children living in the city would need an annual salary of $77,000 to cover the cost of rent, food, utilities, transportation, child care, health, insurance, taxes and incidentals like clothing. The rent in this model is set at $1,075 a month, but I was hard put to find even a one-bedroom apartment for rent in Baltimore for that price, let alone a two-bedroom.
Baltimore Sun
March 8, 2021
But opportunities are still way down in hard-hit sectors like bars and restaurants; travel and tourism; and beauty and wellness.
Heidi Shierholz, with the Economic Policy Institute, said she’s “actually quite optimistic” for unemployed workers in those fields, “that once the vaccine is widely distributed, we get the virus under control, a lot of those jobs will start coming back pretty quickly.”
But Shierholz expects we’re still in for several months of slow growth before the jobs recovery really gets rolling.
NPR Marketplace
March 8, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, calculated that employers would need to add an additional 2.4 million jobs to cover those that would have been gained if COVID-19 never derailed the economy.
“Getting back to pre-recession levels would not come close to filling in the total jobs gap,” she wrote.
The Hill
March 8, 2021