As the virus has raged longer than first expected, some companies are concluding that they just don’t need as many workers as they did in February, said Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the Labor Department. “These are more of a normal recession layoff. It definitely has a more permanent feel to it,” said Shierholz, now with the Economic Policy Institute.
The Washington Post
July 13, 2020
About half of workers in non-child care occupations receive health insurance from their job, but only 15 percent of child care workers do, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). EPI also found that one in seven child care workers live in families with income below the official poverty line.
Truthout
July 13, 2020
These essential roles tend to attract people who have been systemically disadvantaged from an academic perspective—those who haven’t had the opportunity or privilege to attend a higher institution, or who immigrated here to America. According to the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 70 percent of essential workers do not have a college degree. Thirty percent of essential workers have some college or a high school diploma. One in 10 have less than a high school diploma.
Well and Good
July 13, 2020
A March report from the Economic Policy Institute found that only a third of American workers could telework—an option that provides the best opportunity for personal safety. But for Latinx and Black workers, this rate was even lower: less than one in five had that option.
The Root
July 13, 2020
“To mitigate the economic harm to workers, Congress should extend the across-the-board $600 increase in weekly unemployment benefits well past its expiration at the end of July,” Julia Wolfe, economic analyst at the think-tank Economic Policy Institute wrote in a note.
Al Jazeera
July 13, 2020
Those losses are expected to hit women and Black workers the hardest, according to David Cooper and Julia Wolfe, analysts at the Economic Policy Institute. “Failing to provide aid to state and local governments would be not only an act of needless self-sabotage, it would also exacerbate racial and gender disparities,” they wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Courthouse News Service
July 13, 2020
At its peak in 1968, “federal minimum wage was equal to about half of a typical middle-class worker’s wage,” says David Cooper, senior economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute. “Today, it equals about 30 percent of a typical middle-class worker’s wage. When someone earns federal minimum wage today, they are much further from the middle class than their counterparts a generation ago.”
Parade Magazine
July 13, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, on Friday called on lawmakers to extend the $600 weekly unemployment booster that has been in effect since the pandemic took its first toll on the economy. It is scheduled to expire at the end of this month. As part of their argument, the institute ranked the states by the percentage of their total workforce that applied for unemployment. Oregon was fifth worst in the country with 17 percent, behind only Hawaii, Nevada, New York and Washington, DC.
The Oregonian
July 13, 2020
A forthcoming report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think-tank, scrutinises how much bosses at the 350 biggest American firms by revenue…
The Economist
July 13, 2020
Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at EPI, said that CEOs have also had a lot of control over their pay by how they select the committee that sets their pay and the practices of these committees.
Meanwhile, worker pay has stagnated. According to the EPI, the hourly compensation of the majority of American workers has not risen in line with productivity since 1973.
Marketplace
July 13, 2020