“Letting this extra $600 in unemployment insurance benefit expire at the end of July would by itself cause more job loss than was seen in either of the recessions of the early 1990s or early 2000s,” writes Josh Bivens, director of research for the Economic Policy Institute. Going forward, Bivens predicts that extending the $600 unemployment benefits through the middle of next year would provide an average GDP quarterly boost of 3.7% and employment of 5.1 million workers.
CNBC
June 29, 2020
“It is just deeply disturbing,” Heidi Shierholz, chief economist at the Department of Labor during the Obama administration, said of the unemployment figures. “I do think that people are getting hired back, but we are continuing to see an absolute hemorrhaging of jobs. Just record levels of people.”
Washington Post
June 29, 2020
Deeper dive: The film’s blistering depiction of growing up in inner-city Los Angeles raises questions about the impacts of growing up in economically challenged areas, which the Economic Policy Institute has examined.
Connecticut Post
June 29, 2020
Additionally, more than two-thirds of Americans in the U.S. workforce do not hold a college degree, a 2016 report from the Economic Policy Institute shows.
Fox Business
June 29, 2020
Sixty-four percent of Americans believe legal immigrants currently in the country are mostly filling jobs that U.S. citizens do not want, according to a recent Pew Research study. Also, as the progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute points out, a fundamental flaw of the H-1B program is that it allows U.S. employers to legally underpay workers relative to U.S. workers in similar occupations in the same region.
Yahoo Finance
June 29, 2020
Research by Daniel Costa, of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and Howard University political science professor Ron Hira, found that 60% of H-1B workers receive lower-than-average wages for their job and region. Google, Facebook and Apple “take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” Costa and Hira said in an Economic Policy Institute paper.
The Mercury News
June 29, 2020
Heidi Shierholz is director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor.
94.1 KPFA
June 29, 2020
All of that money is set to disappear when those benefits expire next month, according to Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute. “That’s going to be a really sharp blow to personal income when that happens,” he said. After that, he continued, there’s another economic blow on the way.
Marketplace
June 29, 2020
At least one survey from the Economic Policy Institute found that millions of Americans gave up trying to seek benefits or didn’t even attempt to due to states’ overwhelmed and antiquated unemployment systems.
The Denver Channel
June 29, 2020
And they are doing this difficult work for low pay. Average pay for farmworkers in 2019 was $13.99 per hour – 60% of what U.S. production and nonsupervisory workers outside of agriculture averaged, according to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. For the rising share who come to the U.S. on a guest-worker basis, the federally set minimum ranges by state from $11.71 to $15.83 an hour, after a proposed reduction was averted this spring.
Christian Science Monitor
June 29, 2020