Heidi Shierholz, who was chief economist at the Labor Department in the Obama administration, says the new seasonal adjustment formula should fix that distortion, though she would have preferred that government statisticians also went back and recalculated past reports.
“It is great they’re making improvements in the seasonal adjustment,” Shierholz said. “But the big thing they didn’t do that I wished they had done is fix the earlier numbers.”
NPR
September 8, 2020
“Economists use seasonal adjustments to smooth out seasonal patterns to get a better read of the underlying trends in the labor market,” said Heidi Shierholz, who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration.
“Every year in January, 100,000 extra people apply for unemployment insurance claims, because they lost temporary holiday jobs,” Shierholz said. “You wouldn’t want economists to say, ‘Ah, things in the economy are really deteriorating’ when they’re not, it was just a normal seasonal pattern.”
Marketplace
September 8, 2020
In the future, Shierholz said she hopes the federal government takes more responsibility for administering unemployment benefits in times of crisis. The patchwork of statewide rules and standards creates an inequality problem: not including the $600 bonus from the stimulus package, unemployed workers in Massachusetts can get access to as much as $1,220 per week for 26 weeks, while Georgians can get just $365 per week for 12 weeks.
Business Insider
September 8, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, Economic Policy Institute senior economist and former chief economist at the Department of Labor, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers to break down a new EPI report on the outlook for unions amid COVID-19.
Yahoo Finance
September 8, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, just 67% of nonunion private-sector workers had access to health care benefits in 2019, compared to 94% of union members. The union difference is real.
Tennessee Lookout
September 8, 2020
The evidence that automation has been displacing human labor is fairly thin. A 2017 NBER paper by Acemoglu and Restrepo found that industries and areas that added more robots saw lower employment and lower wages. But a careful analysis by economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute found that the story wasn’t so clear. Acemoglu and Restrepo focused only on one very narrow form of automation — industrial robots. Mishel and Bivens, looking at the same data, found that overall investment in information technology was positively correlated with employment.
Bloomberg
September 8, 2020
The federal government’s all-but-total abandonment of antitrust enforcement has contributed to Labor’s declining influence and to the inequality gap. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation since 1978 has risen more than 1,000 percent, compared to only 11.9 for average workers. The typical CEO now makes 278 times more than his or her average employee. Wealth is being accumulated at the very top, while the middle class is essentially stagnant.
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
September 8, 2020
A report by the Economic Policy Institute also cites how unionized workers have been able to secure enhanced safety measures, additional premium pay, paid sick time and a say in the terms of furloughs or work-share arrangements to save jobs during the pandemic.
NJ.com
September 8, 2020
“As in the Great Recession, the pursuit of austerity will stifle a quick and full recovery,” Elise Gould, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote on Friday.
Gould added that schools around the country are likely in need of more, not less, staff in the coming months, as they try to reopen with the added challenges posed by the coronavirus.
Route Fifty
September 8, 2020
“Slowing job growth is a disaster when you are 11.8 million jobs in the hole,” Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department, posted on Twitter Friday. “This is not the V-shaped recovery that could get us out of this crisis in a reasonable timeframe.”
Politico
September 8, 2020