The Economic Policy Institute agrees. “Occupational segregation is particularly devastating for black women, who face a history of deep-seated racial and gender discrimination,” senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a February 2019 blog on the nonprofit think tank’s website titled, “Stark black–white divide in wages is widening further.”
Gould notes the wage disparity between Black and white people is the narrowest at the bottom of the scale where the minimum wage “keeps the lowest-wage black workers from even lower wages.” Even if Black people pursue education to close the wage gap, Gould says that racial wealth gaps “have been almost entirely unmoved.
Colorado Springs Independent
July 20, 2020
Richard Rothstein: author, “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
NPR
July 20, 2020
The push for stimulus checks amid a $1 trillion cap is a “real problem,” Josh Bivens, research director of the Economic Policy Institute, told Newsweek, “because they’re quite expensive.” Given the money checks eat up, he said it’s possible “higher priority” items, such as extending the unemployment expansion, could get “crowded out.”
Newsweek
July 20, 2020
Researchers say there is only one plausible explanation for this persistent disparity. “It’s racial discrimination,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “We see [the disparity] at different age cohorts, we see it all across the country, we see it at every level of education.”
ProPublica
July 20, 2020
According to an analysis done by researchers from the Economic Policy Institute using federal Department of Labor data, about 9 percent of North Carolina’s labor force were receiving unemployment insurance by the end of June, about 432,351 individuals. More than a quarter million (253,496) had also applied for or received pandemic unemployment assistance of $600/ month from the federal government.
North Carolina Health News
July 20, 2020
State and local governments have shed more than 1.5 million jobs since February, and the Economic Policy Institute projects those numbers could rise steeply without more federal aid, taking a toll on women and Black public sector workers. Many states have announced planned cuts to education, health care, public safety, and other programs as they grapple with balancing their budgets and hundreds of cities have halted infrastructure projects.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
July 20, 2020
“2.4 million workers applied for the unemployment insurance benefits nationwide last week, and here’s the thing, that is the 17th week in a row that unemployment claims have been more than twice the wrost week of the great recession,” said Heidi Sheirholz of the Economic Policy Institute.
WNEM-TV (Michigan)
July 20, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, rising rates of unemployment during the pandemic have hurt Black Americans more than any other group. This is a health equity problem because, as the Kaiser Family Foundation reports, 49% of people receive health insurance through their work. Unemployment means a loss of health insurance coverage, which is now the case for 18% of Americans.
Chicago Sun Times
July 20, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said in an interview that the added unemployment payments have helped stave off even worse economic impacts of the coronavirus, which has already led to tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs. Ending it now would not only cause “massive human suffering” for the workers who will have that vital source of income shut off, Shierholz noted, but could also have the added consequence of causing 5.1 million more jobs to be lost.
The American Independent
July 20, 2020
In a post on the Economic Policy Institute’s website, EPI Research Director Josh Bivens explained that the incentive effect of the extra unemployment payment is “truly trivial” because the economy is constrained by a lack of demand and “new job openings are all but guaranteed to be fewer than jobless potential workers” over the next few months.
Media Matters for America
July 20, 2020