A new national survey finds one in five small business owners expect to close if economic conditions don’t improve in the next six months. And a study by the Economic Policy Institute finds some 12 million Americans have lost their employer-based health insurance since the start of the pandemic.
The Economic Policy Institute recently held a bipartisan discussion with economists who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, and all of them endorsed substantial, immediate federal aid to state and city governments. (These governments are drowning in red ink, and are laying off workers and cutting spending, further reducing economic stimulus.)
“Employers subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act [FLSA]” must pay the federal minimum wage. But that law “specifically excludes a variety of specific occupations from the minimum wage, such as newspaper delivery workers, seasonal farm workers, workers in commercial fisheries and canneries, private investigators, and telephone switchboard operators,” as the Economic Policy Institute notes.
American Institute for Economic Research
August 27, 2020
Child care workers are critical to American families, but they remain some of the most undervalued workers. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the median hourly wage for child care workers is $10.31, and more than one-third live in families with income below twice the poverty line and cannot afford child care for their own children. These are disproportionately workers of color, 95.6% of whom are women.
He’s referring to a 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that estimated $15 an hour by 2025 would directly raise wages for 28 million and indirectly for 11 million. Even that study doesn’t say wage scales would go up for “everyone.”
She says her salary, about $60,000, is more than enough for their life in Dallas, where they own a three-bedroom home. A family of four in Dallas County would need $72,000 to attain a modest yet adequate standard of living, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator. Their mortgage payment, including property tax and homeowner’s insurance, is $575. Before they purchased the house for $70,000, they lived with Benjamin’s parents and paid $275 each month to rent a room.
New estimates from the Economic Policy Institute put the number of people who have lost the health insurance they or a family member previously got through their employer at about 12 million. There has been a significant churn in coverage since the spring.
“Because most U.S. workers rely on their employer or a family member’s employer for health insurance, the shock of the coronavirus has cost millions of Americans their jobs and their access to healthcare in the midst of a public health catastrophe,” Josh Bivens, co-author of the study and director of research at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said in a statement announcing the findings.
“Tying health insurance to the labor market is always terribly inefficient and problematic, but becomes particularly so during times of great labor market churn,” said Bivens.
Teacher shortages have always been a crisis due partly to a lack of qualified applicants, low wages and lack of career support, according to a 2019 report by the Economic Policy Institute. “You would think states would panic upon hearing this,” teacher Kelly Treleaven wrote in a New York Times op-ed that cited the report. Instead, “they slash the education budget, which forces districts to cut jobs (increasing class size), put off teacher raises and roll back the quality of teachers’ health care. They ignore teachers’ pleas for buildings without black mold creeping out of ceiling tiles, for sensible gun legislation, and for salaries we can live on without having to pick up two to three additional part-time jobs. So, a lot of good and talented teachers leave.”