“There are a million ways it feels like a game-changer,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It is such a departure in how we deal with relief. We have not done things this way before, and we have suffered because of it.”
According to Shierholz, whereas the relief bills that addressed the Great Recession more than a decade ago included cost-cutting and austerity, with some of the budget cuts falling on states and local governments, the new relief bill avoids some of those mistakes.
“So then state and local governments became these little anti-stimulus machines because they are making cuts all over the place, and those cuts in the aftermath of the Great Recession delayed the recovery by four years,” she said. “We are going to get relief now while the labor market is still weak, and we are setting the economy up for as fast as a bounce-back as possible when the virus is under control.”
Washington Post
March 15, 2021
A logical first step is recognizing OPT for what it is: a guest worker program that DHS is poorly equipped to run. Shifting oversight from DHS to the Labor Department should be an obvious baseline, according to Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute and Ronil Hira of Howard University. Even if its administration of the H-1B program has been flawed, the department’s central work is the protection of labor standards.
Bloomberg
March 12, 2021
During the Great Recession, the uninsured rate among the nonelderly swelled to 18.2 percent, its highest level in decades.7 In 2010, 60 million people reported they had been uninsured at some point during the past year.8 Early in the pandemic, many experts feared that the high levels of job loss could result in a similar spike in uninsurance. The Economic Policy Institute, for example, estimated in May 2020 that more than 16 million workers had lost employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) due to job loss, and the Urban Institute projected that as many as 5 million to 9.5 million workers could become uninsured in its May 2020 analysis.9
Center for American Progress
March 12, 2021
“If we think about in the last year, there probably would have been reasonable job growth as there had been in the months leading up to the pandemic recession,” Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said.
Business Insider
March 12, 2021
Some older workers didn’t have a choice. They worked in jobs that weren’t considered essential and did not offer the option to work from home, so they were effectively out of a job. And if these older workers do plan to begin seeking employment at some point, it could take them twice as long to get hired again than younger workers and they will likely take a hit in pay, according to Monique Morrissey at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, as reported by Next Avenue.
GoBankingRates
March 12, 2021
In 2017, economists from the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego published a study on the impact of the H-1B program on jobs and wages over an eight-year period ending in 2001. They found that in the absence of immigration, wages for American computer scientists would have been 2.6 percent to 5.1 percent higher. The biggest winners, during that period, of course, were tech companies that raked in “substantially higher profits due to immigration.” Most recently, the Economic Policy Institute reported in 2020 that 60 percent of H-1B positions certified by DOL are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the underlying occupations. Again, the real winners are the employers of underpaid foreign workers.
Newsweek
March 12, 2021
The social divide between those who have the opportunity to work from home and those who don’t is particularly stark when the data is broken down by race and ethnicity. According to the CDC, people of color are “disproportionately represented in essential work settings.” The Economic Policy Institute reported in June that Black workers in particular are more likely to work frontline jobs in public transportation, the postal service, health care and other sectors.
PBS
March 12, 2021
According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of December 2020, 25.7 million workers in the US remain officially unemployed, otherwise out of work due to the pandemic, or have experienced a reduction in work hours or pay. The National Restaurant Association estimated that the pandemic cost the food industry $240 billion in 2020—driving businesses to make big changes to stay relevant.
QSR Magazine
March 12, 2021
“Workers are going to have less retirement security in the future,” Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, told me recently. “Unless something changes, there’s going to be a lot more hardship soon.”
MarketWatch
March 12, 2021
The tactics are “so typical that it’s truly sad,” said Celine McNicholas, general counsel at the Economic Policy Institute and a former special counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees private-sector union elections.
“It isn’t just Amazon ― this is the standard playbook,” McNicholas explained. Employers collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars on outside firms “because unions do improve workers’ lives,” she said. “These firms feed off that.”
The Huffington Post
March 12, 2021