Economic Policy Institute, Not everybody can work from home, March 19, 2020
Politifact
June 17, 2020
Analysis from the Minneapolis Fed for example shows that African Americans with a BA or higher have similar levels of unemployment to Whites with only some college education (i.e. no degree) and that average annual wages of African American workers with a college degree is lower than their white counterparts. Analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows this is true at various levels of education.
Medium
June 17, 2020
“There are people receiving hazard pay, but it’s nowhere near the extent of risk,” said Lawrence Mishel, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute. “The gaps are even larger for people who have less bargaining power in the labor market which tend to be lower- and middle-wage workers and workers of color — black and Hispanic.”
Seven in 10 black workers who work outside of their home are fearful, but only 4 of 10 have received some form of hazard pay to work during those riskier times.
“It’s those who have the least power in the labor market that face the most risk,” Mishel said, “and aren’t necessarily getting hazard pay.”
Yahoo Finance
June 17, 2020
The statistics are sobering. Black workers are paid less than white workers, even in high-wage positions. Research shows that the black-white wage gap has been widening for decades, even during periods of economic expansion. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the overall average wage for black workers in 2019 was $21.05. For white workers, it was $28.66. As a result, in the U.S., Black households have one-tenth the wealth of a typical white household, according to Federal Reserve data.
USA Today
June 17, 2020
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