The housing conditions for black Americans also leave them more exposed to contracting coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Only 54.5% of African-American households live in single-family homes, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, compared with 74.5% of white households.
MarketWatch
June 4, 2020
“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
Black workers are facing greater health and economic difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study done by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss how the coronavirus has disproportionately affected black communities and people of color.
“What we’re seeing is that there are underlying health and economic conditions that have magnified the problems for African American workers and their families in this country,” she said.
“Black workers are often, when they’re compared to white workers, are least able to weather the storm because they don’t have the same kind of safety net that some other workers have. They’ve suffered higher unemployment rates for a lot longer.”
Yahoo Finance
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
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
More than half of African American adults are now jobless, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
San Antonio Express-News
June 4, 2020
When the Economic Policy Institute looked at the effects of the Great Recession of 2008, it found that between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of black households plummeted down 53%. For white households, on the other hand, the median net worth only declined by 17%.
Forbes
June 4, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, suggested that more government aid will be necessary to keep consumers and businesses afloat so that many laid-off workers will have jobs to return to.
“Those jobs are not going to come back if the federal government doesn’t do the things it needs to do to stimulate the economy, so that the demand and confidence is going to be there, so that those businesses will need to call workers back,” Shierholz said.
AP News
June 4, 2020