People who live in states that did not expand Medicaid, including Florida, Georgia, and other southern states, are less likely to have affordable care, says Reinert. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the pandemic has widened this access gap: As many as 12 million Americans lost employer-sponsored health insurance between February and August.
National Geographic
January 4, 2021
12 million more Americans may have lost health insurance since February, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute, and a poll done in October by CNN found that 61% of Americans say they don’t want the Supreme Court to overturn the ACA.
CNN International Amanpour
December 24, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute has estimated the rule would let employers take $700 million from tipped workers each year. That’s based on numbers before the industry suffered under the pandemic.
Scripps National News
December 24, 2020
And by increasing the share of nontipped work that can be done by tipped workers who are paid a lower base wage, the Trump administration’s new rule “will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers”—causing employees to lose more than $700 million annually, wrote Heidi Shierholz and David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a progressive think tank whose research foregrounds the interests of low-income workers.
Common Dreams
December 24, 2020
But Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a Labor Department economist during the Obama administration, told the Wall Street Journal that the rule does not address wage inequality, and instead could shift work to servers that would traditionally not fall to them.”If the administration wanted to raise pay for back-of-the-house workers, they could have supported a minimum-wage increase,” Shierholz said.
FOX 2 Detroit
December 24, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute last week published five charts showing some impacts of the Pandemic Recession, including these two:
Daily Kos
December 24, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and a Labor Department economist during the Obama administration, told the Wall Street Journal that the move will “allow employers to shift work from non-tipped to tipped workers.”
Shierholz also argues that the rule does not address wage inequality, adding that if the Trump administration wanted to raise pay for back-of-the-house workers, “they could have supported a minimum wage increase.”
Fox News
December 24, 2020
But cutting this protection for workers has the potential to severely limit a tipped workers’ wage, according to Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who previously served as Obama’s chief economist in his Labor Department. In an EPI release, she said that this “immense loophole” for employers could cost $700 million in servers’ wages annually—and that’s a pre-COVID-19 figure, which stands to be higher now.
Fast Company
December 24, 2020
Damage to public payrolls will ripple through a community, said economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. “You start laying off firefighters and teachers and they spend less and that hurts your local businesses.”
Atlanta Journal Constitution
December 24, 2020
Legally, employers are free to court other candidates, said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“For the vast majority of workers, there is no legal right of recall, if the employer starts hiring again,” Shierholz said. “The exception to that is for unionized workers,” who often have specific rules about hiring and recall in their bargaining agreements.
Marketplace
December 24, 2020