Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed the U.S. added 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the 1 million gain economists had forecast. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde, Romaine Bostick and Joe Weisenthal on “What’d You Miss?” about the growing pains as the economy rapidly reopens.
Bloomberg TV
May 10, 2021
Valerie Wilson: Child care responsibilities disproportionately fall on women. And so at a time when everyone was home, children and parents, women clearly took on more of those responsibilities, but they took on those responsibilities at the same time that they would usually be working. So there was some difficult tradeoffs.
PBS Newshour
May 10, 2021
The Biden administration plans to name Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade official, to head the Labor Department’s international affairs division, according to people familiar with the appointment.
Ms. Lee, who most recently served as president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that often critiques free trade policies, is slated to become the deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs. In that job, she will oversee the bureau that investigates labor rights, forced labor and child trafficking around the globe.
Wall Street Journal
May 10, 2021
Kyle Moore, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said he’s encouraged by the Fed’s increased focus on unemployment and higher tolerance for inflation. “In the past there have been Fed chairs who have been overly wary of inflation and they’ve often tried to fight it at the expense of employment,” he says. “That has disproportionately fallen on Black workers.”
Quartz
May 7, 2021
“Employers have the ability to set the terms of the contract,” said Elise Gould, senior economist for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
“They’re really holding all the cards. They have all the leverage,” Gould said.
Gould noted that the country was still down 8.4 million jobs in March from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. The economy had been steadily adding jobs before the virus left millions out of work, she said, so theoretically the jobs shortfall is even higher, perhaps as high as 11 million.
Detroit Free Press
May 7, 2021
“We are certainly not seeing rapid wage growth that would really be the red flag of ‘Wow, things are tight. Employers truly on a really widespread basis can’t find the workers that they need,’” Shierholz said.
NPR
May 7, 2021
Frustratingly for those who want to organize, some union-busting activities are legal under current federal labor law; others are forbidden, but the penalties are light enough that many employers decide to do it anyway. The Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2019 that 41.5% of employers in all union election campaigns are charged with violating federal labor laws, and RWDSU believes that’s exactly what Amazon did in Bessemer.
Teen Vogue
May 7, 2021
There’s another mismatch, said Heidi Shierholz at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, between the pay employers are offering and the pay workers are willing to take.
“If an employer posts a job and then they can’t find the workers that they need, that just means there’s a labor shortage of people who will work at that wage,” she said.
In a really tight labor market, as Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell recently pointed out, wages would be rising.
NPR Marketplace
May 7, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, said nearly 3 million more jobs would have been added if the current pre-pandemic pace of job creation had continued uninterrupted. Starting from a February 2020 baseline of roughly 152.5 million jobs, the U.S. would have just over 155.1 million jobs as of last month. The actual total is roughly 144.1 million.
NBC News
May 7, 2021