“There are now 26.8 million workers—15.8% of the workforce—who are either unemployed, otherwise out of work because of the virus, or have seen a drop in hours or pay because of the pandemic,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote earlier this week. “Further, we started losing jobs again in December.”
The New Yorker
February 1, 2021
NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asks Economic Policy Institute Senior Economist Elise Gould about the pandemic’s economic effects on women and minorities.
NPR Weekend Edition
February 1, 2021
Another report, produced by three economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank and a longtime advocate for increasing the minimum wage, found that there would be “significant and direct effects” on the federal budget by increasing payroll tax revenue by $7 billion to $13.9 billion and reducing expenditures on public assistance programs by $13.4 billion to $31 billion.
“This is a sizable chunk of money, no matter how you look at it,” said David Cooper, who wrote the report with Ben Zipperer and Josh Bivens. They determined that increased revenue would prevent many workers and their families from qualifying for assistance programs, reducing expenses.
New York Times
February 1, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) said the proposed $15 per hour increase would lift the wages of 32 million workers, the majority of whom work in essential and frontline industries. EPI said raising the minimum wage helps narrow the racial and gender gap since 23 percent of workers who would benefit are Black or Latina women.
American Press
January 29, 2021
Este proyecto de ley serviría a más del 20% de la fuerza de la nación, estimó el Instituto de Política Económica (EPI), de los cuales más de la mitad de los que se beneficiarían son adultos en sus mejores años laborales entre las edades de 25 y 54.
Solo Dinero
January 29, 2021
The program, which ties employees and their visas to the employer, is rife with abuse. Wage theft is rampant, forced labor is common, and the contracts employers sign, which guarantee certain hours and living conditions, are rarely honored. On top of that the U.S. Department of Labor rarely enforces regulations, which allows mistreatment to go unchecked. In 2019, the DOL performed just over 1,000 agricultural wage theft investigations, down from 2,431 in 2000, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute. At the same time, the number of workers on H-2A visas has increased 660%, from 30,000 in 2000 to more than 200,000 in 2019.
Facing South
January 29, 2021
The federal minimum wage is worth about 17 percent less than it was in 2009, when it was last raised, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2024 would amount to a raise for approximately 28 million workers, the group said in 2019.
Washington Post
January 29, 2021
Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C., told Marketplace in 2019 that “racial wage-gain disparity” can be attributed to lower educational status, higher unemployment and racial discrimination in hiring among Black people.
“African American workers haven’t benefited as much as they would from a federal minimum wage increase,” Wilson told the outlet, “which would get into those southern states that have about 60% of African American workers, and are much less likely to increase minimum wages.”
Sacramento Bee
January 29, 2021
The figures show there was a lapse in benefits for people who still need them, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. And the total of 2.88 million fewer claims that first week may be an underestimate of the true size of the problem because even individuals claiming benefits could be experiencing delays, according to Stettner.
The Balance
January 29, 2021
As Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist and the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute explained to me, two factors at work in 2020 created this weird disparity. One is what she calls the “pandemic composition effect,” which means that the industries that lost the most jobs last year thanks to the pandemic were industries that tended to have low unionization rates — bars, restaurants, hospitality, etcetera. The second factor was that unionized workers were less likely to lose their jobs than non-union workers in the same industry. Each of those two factors was responsible for about half of the increase in union density. So even as hundreds of thousands of union jobs were lost, union members were less impacted than the economy as a whole, which produced the mathematical trick of an appearance of progress. (It is worth noting, too, that assuming that jobs come back to the same hard-hit industries when the pandemic is over, that will serve to dilute and reduce last year’s union density gains.)
In These Times
January 29, 2021