“It’s clear that the pace of recovery is not even for all groups,” Valerie Wilson — the director of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity, and the economy — told Business Insider.
Business Insider
June 12, 2020
Curt isn’t alone in his age cohort when it comes to lacking the ability to work from home if he chooses. According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, only 6.7 percent of workers ages 15-24 are able to telework. It’s not necessarily surprising, given the type of jobs teenagers and people in their early 20s often land. It’s dangerous for them and their families because they risk getting infected and then infecting older members of their households.
Examining the data on who can and can’t work from home paints a clear picture of who’s taking on risk and who isn’t. According to EPI, 80 percent of black workers and 84 percent of Hispanic workers can’t work from home, and high-wage workers are six times likelier to be able to work from home than low-wage workers. And those low-wage jobs often translate to fewer benefits. Recent research for the Center for Employment Equity out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that low-wage workers in Massachusetts have less safety gear, paid sick leave, and health insurance, and they report being less able to meet basic needs, like affording food. The patterns are consistently worse for black and Hispanic workers.
“It magnifies the inequality and disparities we had before, economic and racial inequalities,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She warned of a “divided world” of haves and have-nots, where people who keep their jobs and work from home are better able to respond.
VOX
June 12, 2020
Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington points to the proliferation of viral videos on social media highlighting racial inequities — a factor brought to the foreground amid a wave of social unrest sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“Even though those aren’t explicitly economic issues, I think there’s something about seeing the blatant racism and inequality that continues to persist in this country that serves to elevate people’s consciousness about race, and racial inequality in a number of different aspects,” Wilson said.
Bloomberg
June 12, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) on Wednesday published the conclusions of a bipartisan panel of economists, warning that some 5.3 million more jobs would be lost by the end of 2021 if the federal government does not provide a significant amount of federal aid to state and local governments facing major budget shortfalls because of the coronavirus pandemic. The analysis said that the level of aid should total more than $1 trillion to avoid significant job losses.
“While empirical estimates of the shortfall should guide policymakers’ thinking, they can (and actually should) avoid putting a firm sticker price on state and local aid by tying this aid to economic conditions,” EPI analysts Josh Bivens and David Cooper wrote. “If the economy recovers faster than the forecasts driving the $1 trillion estimated shortfall indicate will happen, then less aid would be needed. If instead recovery lagged, more would be needed.”
Newsweek
June 12, 2020
Some have argued those generous benefits will keep people from seeking new jobs. But extending the $600 unemployment benefit would mean that Americans would have more money to spend in stores, and that could ultimately lead to lower unemployment, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank based in Washington, D.C., said.
“It’s not true that there’s a pool of jobs out there that people would fill if they weren’t receiving unemployment benefits,” she said.
MarketWatch
June 12, 2020
A panel assembled last week by the Economic Policy Institute urged Congress to pass at least $1 trillion more in economic stimulus or risk 5.3 million jobs. The panel urged lawmakers to provide aid to state and local governments, which are facing massive budget deficits as a result of lost revenue resulting from the pandemic.
International Business Times
June 12, 2020
Economic Policy Institute: More than five million workers could lose their jobs by end of next year without further aid to state and local governments.
Politico
June 12, 2020
There has been a constant debate between lawmakers and the IT industry about the salaries offered to H-1B visa holders. The Economic Policy Institute has published a report highlighting H-1B visa workers are paid below local wages.
Tech Gig
June 12, 2020
“It’s important that individual employers have a reckoning as it relates to pay and equality by race, ethnicity and gender, but it’s going to require broader and more systemic changes to really bring it down,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
CNBC
June 12, 2020