Pay gaps may be even wider for people of color: for example, a 2019 analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that, after controlling for age, gender, education and region, Black workers were paid 16.2% less than White workers.
HR Dive
September 18, 2020
As for health coverage, about 12-million people have lost coverage since March, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
WFTV
September 18, 2020
The inequity between households of color and their counterparts during the coronavirus pandemic is staggering—and it’s in part due to centuries of systemic racism that disadvantage these Americans at nearly every aspect of their bigger financial picture.
This is best illustrated by the racial wealth gap. For example, Black Americans receive lower earnings than their white counterparts; Black workers made 14.9% less than their white counterparts in 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) wage report. The report also found that Black and Latino workers are paid less at almost every education level, compared to their white counterparts.
Forbes
September 18, 2020
That $17 trillion in 401(k) and IRA accounts is distributed unevenly, though, and isn’t doing enough to stave off a retirement crisis. In 2016 the average American family’s retirement savings was $120,809, but the median family’s savings was a paltry $7,800, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Families in the 90th percentile had $320,000 set aside. In other words, most of those trillions are held by people with the wherewithal and savvy to take advantage of the tax code even as nearly half of families have no retirement savings accounts. Social Security, a safety net for them, might have to slash promised benefits starting in 2035 or even sooner according to its actuaries.
Wall Street Journal
September 18, 2020
“Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona all stand out as states that are seeing particularly high unemployment right now,” said Julia Wolfe, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Hill
September 17, 2020
The Labor Department says retail workers made up about half of those leaving their jobs voluntarily in July. They may have health concerns because of COVID-19, according to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
“There may be people who are voluntarily quitting, because it’s just not safe for them to have a job right now,” she said.
Marketplace
September 17, 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 17, 2020
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we started to see glimpses of Keynes’s imagined world at midcentury, around the time the journalist Tom Wolfe documented a proliferation of American subcultures dedicated to leisure—surfing, stock-car racing, dropping acid—that Wolfe called “a happiness explosion.” That boom was short-lived, however, because the working-class prosperity that supported it went kaput. Looking at trends in U.S. work hours from 1979, when the rise in income inequality began, to 2007, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute recorded an increase of nearly 11 percent—“the equivalent of every worker working 4.5 additional weeks per year.”
The New Republic
September 17, 2020
So what actually makes workplaces better for employees, particularly women workers and workers of color who experience racism and sexism on the job? The time-tested, if perhaps unexciting, answer is unions. As the Urban Institute noted last year, unions help close pay disparities between white workers and black workers; according to the Economic Policy Institute, they similarly reduce the pay gap between men and women. (At least one new study also suggests that unions additionally lower prejudice among white workers.) Like anything else, unions aren’t a magic fix for every conceivable workplace ill (and they’re sadly too few and far between after years of attacks from the right), but compared to tinkering with the demographics of the C-suite, unions win every time when it comes to improving working conditions for the majority of employees in a given workplace.
The New Republic
September 17, 2020
Costa, D., and P. Martin. 2020, March 24. “Coronavirus and Farmworkers: Farm Employment, Safety Issues, and the H-2A Guestworker Program.” Economic Policy Institute. Available online: https://www.epi.org/publication/coronavirus-and-farmworkers-h-2a/.
Agriculture and Applied Economics Association
September 17, 2020