“Many commentators are reporting the cumulative number of initial regular state UI claims over the last 10 weeks as a measure of how many people have applied for UI in this pandemic,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department.
“We should abandon that approach because it ignores PUA, and is thus an understatement on that front, but may overstate things in other ways,” added Shierholz, now a policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Reuters
June 4, 2020
The month of April brought devastating job losses. Week after week, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits broke records. By month’s end, thirty million people—about 18 percent of the workforce—were jobless. That did not count anyone who worked on a freelance basis, who would not be eligible to file, or anyone undocumented who didn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black workers saw greater losses in employment than white workers did—more than one in six Black workers lost their jobs between February and April, per a recent report—and, as of April, under half the Black population was employed. The hardest-hit group was Black women: between February and April, 18.8 percent lost their jobs.
Columbia Journalism Review
June 4, 2020
More than half of African American adults are now jobless, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
San Antonio Express-News
June 4, 2020
Those disparities exist because of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.
“Racial inequality has become so normalized in this society,” she said. “It’s what we expect to see. That’s the way it’s been for so long.”
CNN
June 4, 2020
“This idea that we’re all in this together is sort of a false statement to make,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. “Black workers are the least likely to be able to work from home.”
On average, black households had $8,762 in cash or equivalent liquid assets compared with $49,529 for white households, according to government data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. Black households with a high school degree or less had, on average, only $5,289 in liquid assets.
The Washington Post
June 4, 2020
“The pandemic and related job losses have been especially devastating for black households,” the Economic Policy Institute said in a recent report. “They 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.”
“It certainly is the case that we were finally seeing the recovery from the Great Recession hit more and more people,” says Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “Historically disadvantaged groups were finally beginning to see lower unemployment rates.”
USA Today
June 4, 2020
We’ll have gained more, in fact, than if 2.5 percent of U.S GDP were invested in the energy transition during the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, which ended abruptly in March. Back then, building out clean energy infrastructure would have meant pulling workers from one line of work to another, or “job shifting,” says Josh Bivens, director of research for the Economic Policy Institute. And that would have been fine, “but you’d only be solving the one problem,” which is climate change. “Now you’d solve that problem and create a bunch of jobs for people who actually need them because they’re unemployed.”
And don’t fear debt or deficits, Bivens says. Even in a strong economy, government borrowing “puts upward pressure on interest rates,” which makes private investment more expensive, crowding out investors who would build inefficient office parks or back conventional energy production. “And that’s actually the whole point,” Bivens says. “One reason why the climate situation is so grim is that we’re bequeathing into the future this conventional capital stock” – coal plants, drafty buildings, oil production – “that is way too dirty. We want to crowd that out with green capital, and that’s exactly what deficit-financed green public investments would do.”
Capital and Main
June 4, 2020
I wanted this post to center on black voices, so all the authors are Black. However, if you’re gonna read two things by white people, I’d suggest reading The Making of Ferguson, a report by Richard Rothstein for The Economic Policy Institute, which is incredibly thorough as it sets up the historical and cultural forces that made Ferguson such a ripe epicenter for this current conflict. I also found Why It’s Impossible To Indict A Cop very educational.
Autostraddle
June 4, 2020
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 1.877 million people filed new claims for state jobless benefits in the week ending May 30. But another three million-plus newly jobless workers were forced to seek only new federal jobless benefits available from the $2.2 trillion stimulus law Congress passed in March, Economic Policy Institute Policy Director Heidi Shierholz pointed out.
People's Weekly World
June 4, 2020