The real number of Americans out of work would total roughly 19 million, accounting for the number of officially unemployed, plus workers on temporary layoff, those who dropped out of the work force, and people who didn’t respond to the survey the jobs report is based on, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
“If all these workers were taken into account, the unemployment rate would have been 11.2% in November,” Shierholz
wrote on Twitter.
CNN Business
December 7, 2020
Post-college, it’s difficult for workers of color to financially catch up. As the Economic Policy Institute wrote in its latest wages report, “average wages grew faster among white and Hispanic workers than among [Black] workers for all education groups from 2000 to 2019.”
Business Insider
December 7, 2020
Most financial fragility is caused by low pay, not the frequency with which low wages are paid. According to the Economic Policy Institute, wages have stagnating over the last 40 years (disclosure: I sit on the board of EPI). “From the end of World War II through the late 1970s, the U.S. economy generated rapid wage growth that was widely shared,” the institute reports. Since 1979 average wage growth has slowed sharply, with the biggest declines in wage growth at the bottom and the middle.
Forbes
December 7, 2020
Even before the pandemic, access to affordable, high-quality child care was shifting from an issue regarded as a personal and family responsibility to a matter of public concern, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That’s partly because middle-class families were feeling the pinch as average annual costs for child care soared to roughly double the cost of in-state tuition at a public university.
The pandemic has exposed many fault lines in American society, and one of the most prominent has been the role of child care in keeping the economy moving. With schools and child-care centers closed and demands on working parents — mostly mothers — mounting, millions of women have left the workforce. Women’s labor-force participation rate in April fell to 54.7%, a level not seen since the late 1980s.
MarketWatch
December 7, 2020
The chief concern — echoed by city officials across North America, Europe and Asia — is the supposed impact on the affordability of local housing. “A reasonable reading of the available evidence suggests that the costs imposed on renters’ budgets by Airbnb expansion substantially exceed the benefits to travellers,” concluded a 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington based think-tank. It drew on studies conducted in cities such as Boston and New York that found parallels between growing Airbnb activity and increased rent for locals.
Financial Times
December 7, 2020
How trickle-down economics works…for the one-percent. In the last 40 years, wages for the bottom 90% grew by an incremental 26%, while income for the top 0.1 percent shot up 345%…
Counterpunch
December 7, 2020
Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, disagreed. Teachers not only ensure that children don’t fall further behind in their education, she said, but are also critical to the work force at large.
“When you talk about disproportionate impact and you’re concerned about people getting back into the labor force, many are mothers, and they will have a harder time if their children don’t have a reliable place to go,” she said. “And if you think generally about people who have jobs where they can’t telework, they are disproportionately Black and brown. They’ll have more of a challenge when child care is an issue.”
New York Times
December 7, 2020
The housing disparities are especially pronounced along racial lines. Minority populations have always dealt with racism in the financial markets and redlining practices that keep communities segregated and unequal. But the pandemic is also exposing other racial inequities that make it even harder for minorities to become homeowners. For instance, while 30% of white workers can do their jobs remotely—and are thus more able to move to a city with a lower cost of living—only 20% of Black workers can do the same, according to a March study from the Economic Policy Institute.
Time Magazine
December 7, 2020
“Whatever lame-duck agreement may happen, we already know that it won’t be nearly enough, so it’s still essential for the Democrats to sweep in Georgia for the kind of stimulus package that economists have a large consensus as being needed, can also be potentially passed,” Heidi Schierholz, the director of the Economic Policy Institute, told AlterNet.
AlterNet
December 7, 2020