The Labor Department says retail workers made up about half of those leaving their jobs voluntarily in July. They may have health concerns because of COVID-19, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“There may be people who are voluntarily quitting, because it’s just not safe for them to have a job right now,” she said.
Marketplace
September 17, 2020
It is no wonder, then, that there is a national teacher shortage. In 2017, the Learning Policy Institute reported that two-thirds of teachers who left the profession did so for reasons other than retirement. From 2008-2016, there was an almost 38 percent drop in applicants to teacher prep programs. The Economic Policy Institute reported in 2019 that schools were having a harder time filling teaching vacancies. Additionally, “about 30 percent of college graduates who became teachers were not in the profession five years later.”
But the research indicates that teachers stay in their classrooms when they feel a sense of autonomy and administrative support. The Economic Policy Institute report cited testing and accountability measures and lack of administrative support as the first two reasons why teachers leave the profession. Test scores obscure important contexts: the relative ability of the cohort that year; how well its members get along; and the economic or cultural factors that contributed to the test score. Anyone who’s taken a test knows, too, that often, a test merely tells you how good a test-taker someone is, not their content knowledge or habits of mind.
San Diego Reader
September 17, 2020
As many as 6 million Americans may have lost their insurance as the coronavirus shuttered businesses and swelled the jobless ranks this year, the Economic Policy Institute estimated.
Bloomberg Government
September 17, 2020
CHATTERJEE: Wilson heads the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute. She says Black, Latino and Native workers were more likely to have jobs that were lost during the pandemic or jobs that did not allow them to work from the safety of their homes, therefore putting them more at risk of getting infected. Wilson says people in these communities are also less likely to have savings, making it harder for them to weather times of economic downturn. And she worries that the pandemic has worsened these disparities.
NPR
September 17, 2020
Many disadvantaged students don’t even have the means to study online. In 2019, the Associated Press found that 17% of U.S. students do not have access to computers at home and 18% do not have home access to broadband internet. The Economic Policy Institute calls this a “widespread digital divide based on family income.” This divide is likely to widen as schools transition to online learning in the fall.
Mom
September 17, 2020
Proper or not in a business context, MA now constitutes a vast privatized judiciary that “has largely displaced the civil justice system for most of the major transactions of ordinary people,” in the words of a 2015 briefing paper by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The College Fix
September 17, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 465,000 workers in Connecticut would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage to $15, nearly 60 percent of which are women. The demographic affected by minimum wage also skews significantly older, with only 12 percent of those workers aged 19 or younger expected to be impacted. cq
Yale Daily News
September 17, 2020
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that public school teachers were paid about 20% less in weekly wages than college-educated peers in 2019.
The report’s authors, Sylvia Allegretto and Lawrence Mishel, call this the “teacher wage penalty” — and it’s actually gotten better since 2018. The 19.2% rate in 2019 was down from 22% in 2018.
Business Insider
September 17, 2020
Four years later, it’s clear that Trump’s trade policies have failed U.S. workers. Instead of more good jobs, his ever-escalating trade wars have led to higher costs, lost markets, and more plant closures. Economic Policy Institute research shows that nearly 1,800 U.S. factories disappeared between 2016 and 2018.
USA Today
September 17, 2020