Data from Oxfam America and the Economic Policy Institute suggests that strongly advocating for a living wage, which researchers have pointed out would substantially reduce racial inequality, could propel a high turnout among working class populations that are electorally significant but often underrepresented at the polls.
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.
Historically speaking, young workers have always faced major disadvantages when launching their careers during weaker economies, but according to the Economic Policy Institute, “they have been even more negatively affected by the current recession.”
• Lily Garcia, former head of the National Education Association whose mother is from Panama. She serves on the president’s advisory commission on educational excellence for Hispanics and is a board member of the Economic Policy Institute.
A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank, estimated that around 6.2 million workers lost access to health insurance they got through their employers as a result of being let go since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. That figure takes into account workers who were originally laid off but have since found new employment.
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the left-leaning think tank the Economic Policy Institute, said Trump’s orders focused on federal workers not because he had it out for them especially, but because “he could accomplish those attacks through the stroke of a pen.”
But you are not broken, and you are certainly not alone. Even before the pandemic ended ten years of uninterrupted economic growth, roughly half of college grads (ages 21-27) were unemployed or worked in jobs that don’t require a degree. Within this cohort, Black grads have higher rates of joblessness and 40% are underemployed, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. And with each passing year, underemployment gets harder and harder to escape.
An analysis by Daniel Costa, an immigration policy expert at the Economic Policy Institute, found that the survey has produced more robust wage increases than the Labor Department’s wage index would have. Costa said fieldworkers’ wages rose an average of 3.6% each year between 2010 and 2019 based on the survey; under the index proposed in the new rule, they would have risen at an annual rate of 2.3%.
“More than one million veterans –13.2% of all veterans – work for state and local governments and could be severely impacted by the Senate’s failure to provide timely federal aid,” reported John Schmitt and Naomi Walker of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “Because state and local governments are extremely restricted in how they can borrow, congressional authorization for state and local fiscal support is vital to prevent deep cuts in health care and education.”
As of October, nearly 26 million Americans were either out of the workforce or not working as many hours as they would like, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and formerly the chief economist at the Department of Labor in the Obama administration. Although unemployment has fallen from 14.7% in April to 6.9%, roughly 15% of the country’s workforce remains either jobless or underemployed.