And Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said that was problematic before, but with the pandemic, “it’s really shown us that there are gaps in our regular unemployment system that you can drive a truck through. We do have the ability to close them, like the existence of this program shows us that we can do it.”
Marketplace
January 22, 2021
“Sharon brings tremendous expertise, knowledge, and integrity to this important work,” said Thea Lee, president of the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. “OIRA has the potential to be a roadblock or an essential partner in ensuring that appropriate regulatory policy fairly balances diverse viewpoints and interests. Sharon is the right candidate for this critical position at this moment in history.”
Bloomberg
January 22, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has only accelerated this questioning—a return to an understanding of work as a site of struggle, not liberation. It has also introduced a new kind of laborer: the “essential worker,” tying together workers who typically are not seen as having a shared fate, from grocery store cashiers to nurses, food app delivery drivers to teachers. Workers in meatpacking plants, in Amazon warehouses, in critical infrastructure have been recognized as fundamental in maintaining society as we know it, even as their labor is demeaned and their lives endangered. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates that there are more than 55 million workers across 12 industries who now share this label: 70 percent didn’t have a college degree; one in eight were covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In frontline essential work, the Center for Economic and Policy Research found, women and people of color are overrepresented (disaggregated data on women of color was not presented). They also found that one-third of essential workers live in low-income families.
The New Republic
January 22, 2021
“The top 1 percent of households claimed about 83 percent of the benefits of that tax law. There are very few African Americans in the top 1 percent,” said Valerie Wilson, director of Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy. “When we look at the economic well being of African Americans, we have to look not just at absolute progress, but at relative progress, and there has been absolutely no gains on that front.”
Washington Post
January 22, 2021
New York Times
January 22, 2021
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, praised Biden’s plan shortly after it was unveiled last week.
“Most importantly, this package is at the scale of the problems it is aiming to solve. To support the spending and investment needed to fully repair the labor market, we estimated in early December that roughly $3 trillion was needed. Less than one-third of this amount was included in the end-of-year recovery package, and the Biden administration’s proposal fills in the remaining amount,” Bivens said in a statement.
Newsweek
January 22, 2021
Sources
Economic Policy Institute, “Minimum Wage Tracker,” Jan. 7, 2021
Politifact
January 22, 2021
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, argued that the CBO’s estimated job losses from enacting a $15 minimum wage are “overstated.”
“The crucial fact is that an employment decline as a result of a minimum wage increase doesn’t necessarily mean any worker is actually worse off,” she wrote in a July 2019 report. “For a wide variety of reasons, a sizable share of low-wage workers routinely cycle in and out of employment; each quarter, more than 20% of the lowest-wage workers leave or start a job.”
MarketWatch
January 22, 2021
New York Times
January 22, 2021