Nationally, 3,878,000 Americans were considered long-term unemployed (having gone six months without work while looking for work) as of December. That number accounts for fully a third of all unemployed Americans, and the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould tells Bloomberg the percentage is “going to be continuing to rise.” Speaking to the New York Times, Rubeela Farooqi, the chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, says that we should expect to “see layoffs mounting” over the next few months. In the weeks ending January 9 and January 16, more than 900,000 people filed new claims for state unemployment benefits. But the unemployment rate doesn’t paint the full picture. It doesn’t count those who’ve dropped out of the job market or who are underemployed and living below the poverty line. Many of those counted as employees in the food and beverage industry are, in reality, working much less and making too little.
New York Magazine
January 28, 2021
Richard Rothstein: THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Wednesday, January 27, 2021 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM PDT
Richard Rothstein is the author of THE COLOR OF LAW: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. A Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute, and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In addition to his recent book, The Color of Law, he is the author of many other articles and books on race and education, which can be found at his web page at the Economic Policy Institute.
Archinect
January 28, 2021
Analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a $15 minimum wage would raise the wages of nearly 32 million workers in the U.S. A report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that the wage raise could lift 1.3 million people out of poverty.
Truthout
January 28, 2021
Supporters say the measure would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including roughly a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
January 28, 2021
Stovall’s work points to another failure to reevaluate Beltway assumptions: Even if the USDA were only meant to address rural issues, that doesn’t exclude the interests of people of color. Along with the rest of the country, rural areas are becoming increasingly diverse, with about 20 percent of residents being people of color. More specifically, animal slaughtering and poultry processing workers are nearly twice as likely to be nonwhite as workers in other industries, and more than twice as likely to be foreign born, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The working conditions at meatpacking plants are chronically neglected—undoubtedly a result of those demographics—and the Covid-19 pandemic has made them even worse. While the Trump administration is largely to blame for the failure to protect meat processing workers, it’s not a stretch to say Vilsack opened the door for him. As Tom Philpott pointed out in Mother Jones, Vilsack’s partial privatization of poultry processing oversight set the stage for the Trump administration to allow plants to operate processing lines at 175 birds per minute, up from 140. One analysis by the Food and Environment Reporting Network found that 40 percent of plants operating at the higher rate had Covid-19 outbreaks, compared to 14 percent of overall plants.
The Nation
January 28, 2021
Raising the minimum wage is also expected to increase income for nearly 32 million Americans, with larger effects for Black, Latino and female workers, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
January 28, 2021
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require remediation. It’s author, Richard Rothstein, is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Carolina Panorama
January 28, 2021
Analysis by the Economic Policy Institute suggests this legislation would increase wages for nearly 32 million Americans, including about a third of all Black workers and a quarter of all Latino workers. But, franchise owners are concerned.
Fox Business
January 28, 2021
1 – Zipperer, Ben, and Josh Bivens. “9.2 Million Workers Likely Lost Their Employer-Provided Health Insurance in the Past Four Weeks.” Economic Policy Institute, 16 Apr. 2020
PR Newswire
January 28, 2021