With almost 12 million jobs yet to be recovered, the economy still faces a huge shortfall, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “For every 18 workers who were officially counted as unemployed, there were only available jobs for 10 of them. That means, no matter what they did, there were no jobs for 5.4 million unemployed workers.”
“The Biden administration will be facing a mounting, not waning, crisis,” Gould said of the task ahead for President-elect Joe Biden.
NBC News
November 13, 2020
A 2019 study by the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute concluded that manufacturing sector growth creates a multitude of secondary jobs in other sectors. Adding 100 manufacturing jobs to a community generates enough economic activity to create 289 additional jobs in other sectors, such as retail, food service, construction, logistics support and other “Main Street” businesses. By comparison, 100 new healthcare, hospitality or retail jobs yield only 69, 53 or 47 downstream jobs, respectively.
Penn Live
November 13, 2020
We cannot say, however, that all the Biden voters voted for him because he ran as a challenger to the neoliberal economics and politics running the country since Reagan. There were probably not too many votes cast against Trump because he was on the wrong side of a wealth divide, a winner bunkered in with other winners looking at the losers bunkered in the cold outside. Or too many who voted for him because of the lousy way he treated those who worked on his real estate fiascoes, or because they wanted to end “the Trump administration’s consistent attack on workplace democracy—the ability of working people to elect representation in the workplace.” (McNicholas and Poydock, Report: Economic Policy Institute, Oct. 21, 2020)
Counterpunch
November 13, 2020
The Trump administration also recently started requiring companies hiring H-1B visa holders to pay them more as a way to encourage domestic hiring instead. And some research has found that the program can push down wages for all workers. According to a recent study by the union-backed Economic Policy Institute, employers underpaid H-1B visa holders. Among the top employers using the program are Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Apple and Facebook. EPI found all of them legally paid many of their H1-B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they filled.
Marketplace
November 13, 2020
The help provided by the government’s initial $2.2 trillion stimulus package is long gone, and the Republican-controlled Senate has consistently failed to produce another relief effort. Meanwhile, at least 6.2 million people lost their employer-sponsored health insurance via the pandemic, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and millions more did not have company health plans to begin with.
LA Progressive
November 13, 2020
“An administration without Congress can’t do much,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. She was the Labor Department’s economist in the Obama administration. “I have dim hopes for a basic recovery package,” she said. “I don’t have any hope for progressive priorities, like a really big investment in the care economy.”
Wall Street Journal
November 13, 2020
Over the last 30 years, more and more employers have been shifting from pensions plans to defined-contribution plans, as a cost-saving measure. According to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, the switch has hurt the retirement savings of Black and Latinx workers in particular.4 Pension plans are somewhat equally held across racial groups with 24% of White, 20% of Black and 9% of Latinx workers having defined-benefit plans. However, access to 401(k) plans is much less equitably distributed, with 49% of White workers having defined-contribution plans compared to 32% of Black and 20% of Latinx workers.13
Investopedia
November 13, 2020
Treasury secretary would give Yellen a large platform for pushing progress, the opportunity to name a diverse team of economic advisors, and a chance to weigh in on wider changes to the government’s hiring culture. Opoku-Agyeman says she would be excited to see Black economists such as Lisa D. Cook, an economics professor at Michigan State; William E. Spriggs, chief economist to the AFL-CIO; or Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy included in discussions on how to alleviate economic and racial pain in the US.
Quartz
November 13, 2020