The Economic Policy Institute disputes the rose-tinted hue that Trump and the White House are giving the unemployment figures.
It noted that the 13.6 million people officially unemployed in August, did not take into account an extra 1.1 million workers who were temporarily unemployed but misclassified as “employed but not at work.”
In addition, there were 4.3 million people out of work because of the virus but who were not counted because they were not actively seeking a job.
This, the EPI says, puts the number of people either officially unemployed or out of work because of COVID-19 closer to 19 million, meaning an unemployment rate of 11.3 percent.
Bearing the brunt of the job losses were women, Latino workers, and low wage sectors of the economy, notably leisure and hospitality.
“Another group that hasn’t got a lot of attention are younger workers,” EPI senior economist Elise Gould told Newsweek.
Newsweek
September 14, 2020
These different paths follow the direction of the two spokes that poke out from the vertical line on the “K.” But the diverging spokes can also be interpreted in other ways that tell a similar story. Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), says the two prongs can also represent: people with high and low wage levels, those that have the ability to work from home and those who don’t, and those who have liquid wealth assets to survive during the recession and those who don’t. “It’s very much a split of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’” she says.
Fast Company
September 14, 2020
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
September 14, 2020
Eroding business regulations and worker protections accompanied the rise of Friedman’s philosophy in the ’70s and ’80s. Many laws passed during those decades chipped away at collective bargaining rights, which undermined pay growth for the middle class, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. But a whole host of analyses have found that inequality has risen over the same period.
Business Insider
September 14, 2020
A report published in August 2020 by the Economic Policy Institute noted that between 2016 to 2018, the latest year of available data, nearly 1,800 manufacturing factories in the US had disappeared. The report notes coronavirus has further hit manufacturing with the loss of 740,000 jobs this year, and trade deficits that drive offshoring, particularly with China and Mexico, have continued to increase under Trump.
The Guardian
September 14, 2020
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 14, 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-authored a report released last week on COVID-19 related inequities for the Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C.
LA Times
September 14, 2020
“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,” says Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
September 14, 2020
“He hasn’t really taken any steps to make any of the real fixes” to the H-1B program, Economic Policy Institute’s Daniel Costa said. “A lot of it has been somewhat symbolic.”
Axios
September 14, 2020
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
September 14, 2020