It’s strange that this is a controversial thing to say. It’s strange that Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, the largest labor economics organization in America, is giving qualified support to the Fed’s actions, when they quietly eliminated labor protections for the corporate bond purchases and left states and municipalities hanging. After all, this is a fight between labor and capital: the labor of millions of public employees and the capital class rescue that has proceeded without delay.
But that’s not the only perspective out there on the left. In fact, when I wrote Friday about how the Municipal Liquidity Facility or dedicated swap lines could be the savior of state and local governments, I didn’t realize that I had tapped into a mix of activism and wonkery that had been building for the past few weeks. In fact, I was on a call yesterday among supporters of a stronger MLF response moderated by… Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute!
The American Prospect
June 17, 2020
States thus have an incentive to reduce benefits (to avoid high taxes that might drive businesses to less generous states), and employers have an incentive to fight their workers’ claims (to avoid higher premiums in the future). The results have been predictable. States have gutted their systems for administering unemployment insurance, creating delays and obstacles to obtaining coverage and deterring new claims. Although Congress temporarily expanded unemployment insurance in its stimulus legislation, these administrative burdens have significantly blunted the impact of Congress’s action. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that they kept between 8.9 and 13.9 million people from filing for unemployment insurance in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. And as Georgetown University law professor Brian Galle wrote last year in the Arizona State Law Journal, “employers have grown considerably more skilled and aggressive than in the past, resulting in more workers being found ineligible or cut off from benefits before those benefits expire.” Although it is too soon to see concrete evidence, this development is bound to affect workers who claim unemployment during the pandemic.
Democracy Journal
June 17, 2020
Black workers like Finch are much more likely than whites to be in “front-line” jobs — in health care, grocery stores, public transit or transportation. While they make up 12% of the population, African Americans account for 26% of public-transit workers; 19% of child care workers; and 18% of warehouse, trucking and postal workers, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic Policy Research. Overall, about 17% of America’s front-line workforce is black.
CBS News
June 17, 2020
More than half of workers leaving their homes to go to work say they’re concerned about exposing their households to the coronavirus, but just 30% are compensated with hazard pay, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. About 27% of white people, 41% of black people and 34% of Hispanic people working outside the home receive hazard pay.
MarketWatch
June 17, 2020
According to a blog by David Cooper and Julia Wolfe of the Economic Policy Institute, Oregon has the highest rate of workers who are receiving unemployment benefits or waiting on their claim to be approved with 23.8% of the labor market being in that situation as of June 12.
Statesman Journal
June 17, 2020
But Black Lives Matter means more than police killings, brutality, or unequal justice. As the pandemic has highlighted, black households and communities nearly always suffer at higher rates than others. The Economic Policy Institute recently noted that blacks “have historically suffered from higher unemployment rates, lower wages, lower incomes, and much less savings to fall back on, as well as significantly higher poverty rates than their white counterparts.”
Greenfield Recorder
June 17, 2020
Even before the pandemic, restaurant workers were often put in precarious situations by widespread wage theft. A 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that millions of workers lose around a quarter of their earned wages each year due to wage theft. Seventeen percent of low-wage workers are impacted by minimum wage violations, and in the worst states, Pennsylvania and Texas, the average victim is cheated out of more than 30 percent of what they’re owed. A New York Times op-ed stated that 84 percent of all full-service restaurants violated labor standards between 2010 and 2012.
Class action settlements by the U.S. Department of Labor have resulted in billions being paid back to workers, but as another 2017 report by the EPI states, “that’s just a drop in the bucket” compared to what has been taken.
“Restaurant work is overwhelmingly low-wage work, and in the low-wage workforce you have a lot of folks with very little bargaining power,” says David Cooper, the deputy director of EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network and an author of its wage theft studies. “Right now we know that there aren’t restaurant jobs available, that there are a lot of folks in the service industry who are forced out of work, and so there’s a glut of potential workers for employers in those industries. And that means that workers are going to have fewer options and have less of a voice if their employer starts cheating them.”
The Progressive
June 17, 2020
But decreasing those benefits could cost the country even more jobs on top of the historic 20 million jobs that have already been wiped away by the coronavirus pandemic, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank based in Washington, D.C., said.
MarketWatch
June 17, 2020
On this edition of Your Call, Richard Rothstein discusses The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which details how laws and policy decisions promoted the very discriminatory patterns that continue today.
Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America
KALW
June 17, 2020