Even more concerning: The number of people who have been unemployed for 27 months or longer continues to grow. It grew by 385,000 in November to nearly 4 million people, more than a third of the total number of people without a job.
That figure is expected to hit 40 percent soon, mimicking the Great Recession, during which time the share of long-term unemployed remained at around 40 percent for three years, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
“The days of imagining a V-shaped recovery are over,” Gould said. “The easy gains we saw this summer of people on temporary layoffs getting rehired—that’s over. We are going to have to work hard to claw back all those jobs.”
The 19th
December 7, 2020
Given the various ways in which the crisis has widened existing socioeconomic disparities and how these disparities impacted educational outcomes, educational inequities are growing. According to studies by the Economic Policy Institute, the pandemic has exacerbated well-documented opportunity gaps putting low-income students at a disadvantage. Despite COVID-19’s negative impact on our children, there is a solution to mitigate some of the impact to a degree: social-emotional learning programming.
Worcester Business Journal
December 7, 2020
In June, Josh Bivens and David Cooper at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote that without more federal aid, we’re facing a result like this:
If policymakers do nothing at the federal level to address these shortfalls, the United States could end 2021 with 5.3 million fewer jobs, with losses in every state.
Daily Kos
December 7, 2020
As winter sets in and covid-19 cases surge throughout the US, millions of Americans find themselves unemployed. Extending the unemployment benefits of the kind put in place at the beginning of the pandemic could save over 5 million jobs according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
AS English
December 7, 2020
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