Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, estimated that at least 33m workers have been harmed directly, after taking account of misclassification, undercounting, those who have dropped out of the labour force and those whose hours and pay were cut after the reimposition of local lockdowns.
Financial Times
October 8, 2020
“Nobody knows exactly how many people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits right now,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department. That is a “reminder that we need to invest heavily in our data infrastructure and technology.”
AP News
October 8, 2020
It’s a lesson that Heidi Schierholz, director of policy at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration, said she thought the country had learned from the Great Recession: A lack of support for state and local governments will put a drag on the economy and slow the recovery.
“Austerity at the state and local level could cost millions of jobs,” Schierholz said. “It’s just massive, and it makes me want to scream, because this is a totally unforced error. We know how this plays out.”
NBC News
October 8, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute said while wages for high-income earners has grown steadily since the 1980s, wages for middle- and low-income workers has flattened, or even declined when adjusted for inflation.
Times Record News
October 8, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, since the era of slavery, the dominant view of black women has been that they should be workers, a view that contributed to their devaluation as mothers with caregiving needs at home.
The Washington Informer
October 8, 2020
Another recent study, using different methods, reported higher numbers for the same period. The analysis released by the Economic Policy Institute last month determined that between April and July 6.2 million people lost employer coverage. The authors didn’t calculate how many found alternative coverage via Medicaid or the ACA, however.
Kaiser Health News
October 8, 2020
If Congress decides to reinstate a federal unemployment benefit bonus — in any amount — it will likely take two to four weeks for payments to flow to states and then recipients, according to the Economic Policy Institute. So far, the proposal has been introduced only in the Senate. Democratic congressional leaders are currently negotiating with the GOP on the particulars of the plan.
CNET
October 8, 2020
“This is incredibly cruel and also just terrible economics,” Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said. Many Americans living through the pandemic without work relied on bolstered unemployment benefits for necessary purchases. The expansion has since dried up, leaving jobless families to stretch their dollar even further.
“It’ll mean more people dropping into poverty and people making terrible choices between rent, medicine, and food on the table,” Shierholz added.
Markets Insider
October 8, 2020
Although definitive data will not be available until 2021, numerous studies have estimated the effect of the 2020 recession on job-based coverage and the uninsured rate. Analyses have been conducted by Avalere Health, the Commonwealth Fund, the Economic Policy Institute, Families USA, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Urban Institute, among others. The Urban Institute even conducted a separate analysis of some of these studies to compare their assumptions and estimates.
HealthAffairs
October 8, 2020