The share of Americans’ total wage and salary income made up of unemployment benefits has reached historically high levels, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Since the 1940s, unemployment assistance has never made up more than 2.5 percent of American income, but that benefit constituted 15 percent of wages and salaries last month.
NBC News
June 30, 2020
Among the states where unemployment benefits will end earlier than July 31 are California and New York, with their labor departments ending their payment cycles on July 25 and July 26, respectively. They also have more workers claiming unemployment than any other states, with more than 3 million in California and 1.8 million in New York, according to an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
CBS Moneywatch
June 30, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning, pro-immigration, Washington, DC, think tank, wrote that hundreds of thousands of workers arrive in the U. S. annually on J-1 visas without adequate protections and thereby put at a disadvantage the countless U.S. workers struggling to find jobs in the same industries. The jobs are often in leisure categories that young Americans would eagerly do on resorts like Martha’s Vineyard Bar Harbor.
The Patriot Post
June 30, 2020
Nearly 11 percent of the workforce is unemployed without a possibility of being called back off furlough. (Economic Policy Institute)
The American Prospect
June 30, 2020
The ongoing economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic will leave over 17 million workers without a job to return to once the outbreak is over, according to a new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, who also predicts without sustained and continued federal action 10 million or more jobs could be lost in the next year.
“Of the 32.5 million workers who are either officially unemployed or otherwise out of work because of the virus, only 14.8 million workers (or 45.6%) can reasonably expect to be called back to a prior job, which means 17.6 million (or 54.4%) cannot,” Shierholz writes.
Common Dreams
June 30, 2020
According to economist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, if state and local government spending “had instead followed the trajectory it established following the recovery from the similarly steep recession of the early 1980s, pre-recession unemployment rates could have been achieved by early 2013 rather than 2017. In short, this austerity delayed recovery by over four years.”
Nonprofit Quarterly
June 30, 2020
That surprised some observers, who thought the Democrat’s support was assured. “I would have expected him to sign the bill with pleasure,” says Dave Cooper with the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank that supports a higher minimum wage. “I was disappointed.”
WAMU
June 30, 2020
In 2019, a Vox headline read, “CEOs made 287 times more money last year than their workers did.” CNBC trumpeted, “CEOs see pay grow 1,000% in the last 40 years, now make 278 times the average worker.” The Guardian reported, “Top US bosses earn 278 times more than their employees.” What groups planted these headlines? The AFL-CIO and its pals at the Economic Policy Institute — an organization funded by labor unions.
Washington Times
June 30, 2020
Black workers typically face nearly double the rate of unemployment compared to white workers, said Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank that aims “to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.” That pattern is “incredibly persistent” in good and bad economic conditions — and across gender, education and geography, Wilson said.
Wisconsin Public Radio
June 30, 2020