How successfully would Biden’s proposals for public investment stanch these wounds? University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin has produced a report for the Sierra Club that estimates the total number of jobs that would be created by Biden’s pledges to increase spending on infrastructure, clean energy, and caregiving, and arrives at the figure of 11.6 million jobs per year. (That figure includes the 1.4 million manufacturing jobs he estimates will be created yearly by the increased spending on those three initiatives.) Of those, 5.2 million would result from the boost to spending on infrastructure, 4.1 million from the boost to clean energy, and 2.3 million from the boost to the caregiving sector. Economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute has estimated a comparable number of jobs to those that Pollin projects would be created in caregiving each year—from 1.8 million to 2.4 million.
The American Prospect
September 16, 2020
“Because of the pandemic, we are going to be struggling again to get back towards full employment,” said Elise Gould of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Policymakers should take heed of the policies that had gotten us to where we were in 2019 — albeit more slowly than we should have — to get us back on that road to full employment”
NPR
September 16, 2020
“Now, because of the pandemic, we will once again be trying to recover lost ground for years to come,” said Elise Gould, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Policymakers should take heed of the policies that worked to help produce positive outcomes in 2019 and help get us back on the road to full employment sooner rather than later.”
LA Times
September 16, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute analyzed unemployment figures and concluded that white workers are getting hired back for jobs at twice the rate of black workers.
Rising Up with Sonali
September 16, 2020
The pandemic already has cost New Jersey 56,900 jobs in state and local government, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group. That’s an 11% decline, behind only Wisconsin, New York, Virginia and McConnell’s Kentucky in the percentage of public sector jobs lost.
NJ.com
September 16, 2020
“If this applies to a reasonable share of their low-wage workers, then that’s really putting their minimum wage at a decent level, and that’s a nice thing to see,” said Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute and formerly the chief economist at the Labor Department in the Obama administration.
CBS
September 16, 2020
“It doesn’t change the overall picture — we had a tight labor market that was pulling people in and reducing poverty,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. But it underscores that “there was still a lot of room for improvement.”
New York Times
September 16, 2020
In a response to Harris and Krueger, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) wrote a paper noting that Uber drivers cannot keep their apps open and reject rides without being penalized by Uber for having a low acceptance rate. It also noted that Uber operates a “guaranteed earnings” program that keeps track of work time and basically functions like a minimum wage. “We disagree with the proposal to deny minimum-wage and overtime protections to Uber drivers and see no need for a third employment status,” the paper concluded.
Medium
September 16, 2020
The trend is mirrored nationwide. Manufacturing across the U.S. is still down 720,000 workers from February despite gaining 29,000 jobs in August, with the pandemic more than wiping out the overall modest gains of 500,000 from Trump’s first three years in office — about the same pace of growth as under President Barack Obama. It was not an improvement over prior years — nor did it manage to restore more than a fraction of the jobs lost in the previous decade, according to an August analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
September 16, 2020
Census officials noted the response rate to its annual survey was just 73% in March because of the health crisis, compared to about 83% in prior months and a year earlier. Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, says the low rate raises “significant concerns about data quality.”
USA Today
September 16, 2020