A COVID-19 delay might be a lucky break for U.S. workers. The Economic Policy Institute is apprehensive that the U.S. International Trade Commission’s projections about higher U.S. wages and increased employment may be based, much like NAFTA, on “questionable assumptions.” Specifically, EPI doubts whether U.S. wages will rise as a direct result of improved labor rights enforcement in Mexico, a conclusion that the ITE model doesn’t validate.
Jacksonville Journal-Courier
June 12, 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.
NBC 26
June 12, 2020
The need for Biden to push a more progressive policy agenda should now be apparent to former skeptics in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, suggested Sanders. The public health and economic crisis caused by the outbreak has so far pushed more than 16 million Americans off their employer-sponsored health insurance, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and has caused an explosion in demand at food banks across the U.S. as many unemployed people began struggling to afford basic necessities after missing just one or two paychecks.
Salon
June 12, 2020
Washington – If Connecticut does not receive more stimulus money from the federal government, nearly 60,000 jobs in the state could be lost, hampering an economic recovery, an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute says.
The Connecticut Mirror
June 12, 2020
Moreover, black people are less able than their white counterparts to engage in the social distancing that makes it possible to avoid contracting COVID-19 in the first place. Low-income people, who are disproportionately people of color, are the “essential workers” who are keeping our cities functioning and our country running. On this point, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report in March that stated that “only 9.2% of workers in the lowest quartile of the wage distribution can telework, compared with 61.5% of workers in the highest quartile.” It also noted that “less than 1 in 5 black workers and roughly 1 in 6 Hispanic workers are able to work from home.” Low-income people are the janitors. They are the farm laborers. They are stocking the shelves at the grocery stores. They are cooking food in restaurants. (This, of course, is if they were able to keep their jobs, as Hispanic and black Americans were more likely to be laid off or furloughed during the pandemic than white Americans.) Low-income people also cannot social distance because they are less likely to have a car. To go somewhere, they have to take buses. They have to take trains. This also heightens their risk of exposure.
Time
June 12, 2020
This decidedly dismal rebuke to past dreams of progress was bad enough—but it turned out that even that assessment wasn’t dismal enough. By 2016, research by economists Kerwin K. Charles (then at the University of Chicago; now at Yale) and Patrick Bayer (Duke) and by Valerie Wilson (the Economic Policy Institute) and William M. Rodgers III (then at EPI, now at Rutgers), indicated that the black-white income gap had widened since 2000. Indeed, Charles and Bayer concluded that the gap had been widening since 1980; as a result, the median black-white earning gap stood—in 2016!—where it was all the way back in 1950, when the southern Jim Crow regime still affixed “White” and “Colored” signs above drinking fountains.
The New Republic
June 12, 2020
“Racism generates exclusion, discrimination, oppression, exploitation in a number of ways,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. “It’s not just physical violence.”
The Root
June 12, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute notes that corporate CEOs enjoyed record earning last year. Their average annual earnings were $17.2 million each, far exceeding any amount imaginable for a minimum wage worker. Professor Ellora Delenoncourt, an incoming economist at the University of California- Berkeley, also noted in the Wall Street Journal that blacks “headed into the crisis extremely vulnerable. Then jobs also left them more exposed to the coronavirus. Black and Latino workers have the lowest working-from-home rates and are more likely to work in industries considered essential. Inequality is a co-morbidity in the Covid-19 pandemic,” she concluded.
The Register-Herald
June 12, 2020
“Research has shown that historically higher unemployment rates, lower wages, higher poverty rates, and lower liquid savings make job losses even more devastating for African-American workers and their families,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis on June 5.
Courthouse News Service
June 12, 2020