The U.S. economy has recovered somewhat from a nadir in March and April, but the COVID-19 recession resulted in ripples of furloughs and job losses across myriad industries. Millions of Americans were quickly unemployed. Estimates on how many people lost job-based health insurance vary, but one of the newest studies, from the Economic Policy Institute, estimates about 12 million Americans have lost coverage since February.
Healthcare Dive
September 15, 2020
Investment bank UBS predicted an increase of 860,000 unemployment claims, Goldman Sachs said 2.25 million new claims, and Bank of America forecast 3 million. In a blog item for the Economic Policy Institute, Sojourner and Goldsmith-Pinkham projected 3.394 million.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
September 15, 2020
Three states — California, Massachusetts and Washington — as well as Washington D.C., have a minimum wage greater than $12.50, according to the non-partisan, nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
FOX 10 News
September 15, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., and the chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Obama administration, stressed the positive outcomes of a wage increase to low-wage workers.
“CBO finds that the overwhelming share of low-wage workers would benefit from a $15 minimum wage and that as a group, low-wage workers would be unambiguously better off,” she said. She also argued that the CBO’s findings on job losses were overstated.
“Policymakers must be skeptical of their assessment of the employment impact,” she said, “given that other careful reviews of the minimum-wage literature have shown that the average study finds small to no employment effects of minimum-wage increases” in states and localities that have boosted their rates.
Society for Human Resource Management
September 15, 2020
It was no accident that the Fair Work Center commissioned RAND to look at the impact of inequality. Although a number of organizations conduct rigorous research on the topic, some of them—such as the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress—are identified as liberal. RAND is generally viewed as being among “the least partisan” shops out there, taken seriously “by the right and the left,” Hanauer notes.
The approach that Price and Edwards took marks a breakthrough. The Economic Policy Institute has created a tool that shows that had U.S. workers’ wages over the past three decades kept up with increases in productivity, as they did in the three decades following World War II, someone making around $50,000 today would instead be making more than $70,000. But until now, nobody has teased out the bottom-line effects to individuals and their families of how economic growth is being shared across the income spectrum, thereby turning what can be an abstract concept into something much more tangible.
Fast Company
September 15, 2020
While the discussion would have been important in more typical times, the COVID-19 pandemic arguably has made it even more important. As researchers at organizations like the Economic Policy Institute have outlined, Black workers make up a disproportionate number of essential workers, putting them at greater risk of contracting the virus (and as a result, dying from it).
Alliance for American Manufacturing
September 15, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, spoke to USA Today, and shared some professional insight on the matter. “All of this confusion just makes for more administrative burdens at a time when people are going longer without benefits, living standards are declining and poverty is rising after millions lost their jobs through no fault of their own from the pandemic,” Shierholz said. It is currently unknown how unemployment recipients would pay the money back if formally expected to.
Pop Culture
September 15, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, upward of six million workers have lost employer-provided health insurance since the pandemic began. Since most workers have families, the total number of people who’ve lost coverage likely exceeds double that, or more than 12 million.
The American Prospect
September 15, 2020
“The same children whose educations were most disrupted and learning interrupted from March to June are now least likely to have the face-to-face interactions and personalized supports they need to regain lost ground,” said economist Emma García, who co-wrote a report released last week on COVID-19-related inequities for the Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles Times
September 15, 2020