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
“The millions who will remain jobless after the extra $600 is cut off will have no choice but to drastically cut their spending, causing a sharp decline in their living standards,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the progressive-leaning Economic Policy Institute think-tank wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Al Jazeera
July 20, 2020
The J-1 program, supposedly a cultural exchange experience for students, is similarly exploitative, according to a report last year from the Economic Policy Institute. The skilled workers of the H-1B program are paid more than H-2A, H-2B and J-1 workers, but they still get less than the local median wage for their occupations.
Truthout
July 20, 2020
Minority workers make up more than half of the “essential workers” who supply their fellow Americans with goods and services essential to their well-being. They are 53% of the people working in industrial, commercial, residential facilities and services, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and 50% of workers in food and agriculture.
Arizona Republic
July 20, 2020
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