Teresa Ghilarducci is the Schwartz Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research. She’s the co-author of “Rescuing Retirement” and a member of the board of directors of the Economic Policy Institute.
Bloomberg
October 19, 2020
First, unemployment figures themselves are notorious for lowballing real rates of joblessness, and these problems have been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis. Heidi Shierholz from the Economic Policy Institute argues that the official unemployment number, 13.6 million, is a severe undercount. A very conservative estimate should count at least 21.5 million jobless workers, millions of whom are not considered officially “unemployed” because they are classified as “discouraged” and have dropped out of the labor force. That figure would translate to a more accurate (but still conservative) unemployment rate of 12.5 percent. This does not include another 11.5 million who have had their hours and pay cut as a result of the pandemic.
Jacobin
October 19, 2020
A more recent report from researchers at management consulting firm A.T. Kearney found that Trump’s trade policies — including tariffs on China, Mexico, Canada and the European Union — pushed manufacturing away from China. But it also found those jobs went to other Asian countries like Vietnam that provide services at lower costs, rather than the United States. The Economic Policy Institute has found that Trump failed to reverse years of offshoring with his trade policies.
Bridge Michigan
October 19, 2020
A report published earlier this year by Hira and Daniel Costa, an immigration law expert at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, concluded that major U.S. firms, including Silicon Valley technology giants, “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage.”
Some H-1B workers receive more than the minimums, Hira noted. Hardest hit by the new rules will be firms that pay H-1B employees at or near the minimums, he said. Hira expects the wage change to usher in a higher-skilled H-1B workforce that will complement American workers without pushing compensation down.
East Bay Times
October 19, 2020
While inequity – long rooted in race, segregation and socioeconomics – has plagued education for decades, experts fear the problem has grown worse during the eight months since the pandemic began and shifted learning online.
“These gaps are not new in the U.S. education system,” said Emma Garcia, education economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “This is something we have lived with for a very long time because we failed to fix the system.”
Buffalo News
October 19, 2020
But a new report by the Economic Policy Institute gives us a closer look at just how much of a mess things are for Gen Z in particular. For people between the ages of 16 to 24, unemployment was around 24.4% this past spring, hitting a high of 26.9% in April. As of September, youth unemployment remains elevated far above the rate for the general population. For those between 16 to 19, it was 15.9% last month, and for those between 20 to 24, it was 12.5%. The national unemployment rate in September was 7.9%.
Refinery29
October 19, 2020
“It’s like the Great Recession. Once austerity took hold and we didn’t have stimulus, that set the pain for millennials in deep. Now we’re talking about doing it again to another generation,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
…
There is room for hope. For younger kids, education losses could be reversed. Experts know how to bring kids back from a crisis, said Emma Garcia, an economist who specializes in education at EPI.
“You need flexible solutions, targeted programs,” she said, including extra resources to help with online learning to get through the pandemic and measures to help kids recover once we’re in a new stage. She detailed a raft of other proposals in a paper published last month.
“Otherwise it’s going to be 2030 and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, what happened to those students during the COVID pandemic?’” she said.
The economic effects of the coronavirus economy on young workers could persist for years, EPI’s Gould warned in a report released Wednesday.
Huffpost
October 19, 2020
Critically, this is not a full portrait of the care workforce. Thousands of workers also provide informal care in their homes and to family and friends—known as family, friend, and neighbor care (FFN). Few state or local governments offer any sort of compensation for this work. A 2013 Economic Policy Institute paper concluded that median wages for these workers, worked out in private transactions with parents or guardians, is just $7.53 an hour.
The American Prospect
October 19, 2020
A study published in January by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, found that parents collectively spend over $42bn on early childcare and education. Individually, households shell out between 10 percent and 28.6 percent of their income on childcare – an expense frequently larger than monthly housing expenses.
Al Jazeera
October 19, 2020
Jori Kandra is a research assistant and Julia Wolfe is a state economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
“Three states had more than half a million workers either receiving regular UI benefits or waiting for their claim to be approved: California (3.0 million), New York (0.8 million), and Texas (0.8 million),” according to Kandra and Wolfe. In the Golden State, there are 3,028,324 workers now receiving or who have applied for standard UI (15.5% of the workforce), while 3,693,588 are getting or have applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (18.9% of the labor force).
The Center Square
October 19, 2020