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
Lynn Rhinehart, senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and former general counsel of the AFL-CIO, discusses the latest news as Amazon workers vote on whether or not to unionize in Bessemer, Alabama, and how it may impact Amazon workers nationwide.
WNYC Brian Lehrer Show
March 8, 2021
Raising the minimum wage is not a “far left” or “liberal” issue. It is a moral issue that would, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, lift pay for up to 33 million low-wage workers— including nearly 40% of all African-American workers.
CNN
March 8, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said the bill’s passage can’t come soon enough.
“It is clear that policymakers need to step up right now to provide relief, and the $1.9 trillion relief and recovery bill is at the scale of the problem and is essential for a robust and equitable recovery,” she wrote.
She also called for more aid to local and state governments. Biden’s American Rescue Plan includes about $350 billion in emergency funding for those entities.
“Given that state and local governments face many new expenses in figuring out how to open schools safely, it is imperative that additional aid be provided to state and local governments so that new costs won’t squeeze out necessary hiring,” Gould wrote. “Policymakers must not shortchange aid to state and local governments, which is essential to a robust recovery.”
Courthouse News
March 8, 2021
In a meticulous analysis for the respected Economic Policy Institute, Monique Morrissey debunked the Yankee Institute report, revealing it was based on a cherry-picked sample of workers, used nonstandard control variables, and inflated the cost of retiree benefits in the public sector, while minimizing their cost in the private sector. Morrissey concluded that Connecticut public sector workers without college degrees are compensated somewhat more than those in the private sector, while those with college and graduate degrees are compensated somewhat less than in the private sector, even when factoring in more generous public sector benefits. In short, Morrissey writes, “taxpayers are getting a bargain!”
Connecticut Examiner
March 8, 2021