Media clips
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But decreasing those benefits could cost the country even more jobs on top of the historic 20 million jobs that have already been wiped away by the coronavirus pandemic, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think-tank based in Washington, D.C., said.
MarketWatch June 17, 2020 -
On this edition of Your Call, Richard Rothstein discusses The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which details how laws and policy decisions promoted the very discriminatory patterns that continue today.
Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America
KALW June 17, 2020 -
June 17, 2020
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The federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25. It was last increased in 2009 and, according to the Economic Policy Institute, since the minimum wage was first established in 1938, Congress has never let it go unchanged for so long. However, the battle to raise that amount has picked up significant steam in recent years. Per the FightFor15.org website, the group’s organized operations began in 2012 when two hundred fast-food workers walked off the job to demand $15/hr and union rights in New York City, and it is now “a global movement in over 300 cities on six continents.” In July of 2019, the House voted to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025. Per the New York Times, the raging coronavirus pandemic has led to a recent wave of worker activism, as employees at Instacart, Amazon and Whole Foods have gone on strike and demanded increased protections. Kroger, Starbucks, Walmart and Amazon had been paying hourly bonuses for workers during the height of the pandemic, but those four companies have ended those incentive programs in recent weeks. Hourly wages at Walmart start at $11 an hour.
Forbes June 17, 2020 -
The Economic Policy Institute and Center for Economic and Policy Research argued it could result in job loss and wage reduction. Economists Peter Petri and Michael Plummer said the deal would benefit the poorest countries participating in the deal, with the implication being that it wouldn’t benefit the wealthier nations.
UT Daily Bacon June 17, 2020 -
On March 19, shortly before shelter-at-home orders were issued, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that only 16 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of black people nationally could work from home, compared with about 30 percent of whites and 37 percent of Asians. A week later, when only 4,700 New York City residents had tested positive for the virus and 121 had died, Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report on the city’s frontline workers that showed that about 75 percent were people of color, 60 percent were women, and more than 50 percent foreign born. His recommendations included providing child care to all frontline workers, making hotels available to minimize risk to family members, and ensuring everyone could access health care. The proposals, mostly ignored by the city, received little attention, except in a few reports after Stringer’s mother died from the coronavirus. As of early June, about one in every 400 New York City residents have died from Covid-19, and more than 120,000 people in the United States are infected.
The Nation June 17, 2020 -
The Class of 2020 is graduating into a stubbornly persistent gender pay gap: A survey by the Economic Policy Institute found that, right out of college, women make about $3 less per hour than men. Part of the reason for this is the kinds of jobs women pursue. Fields that have historically dominated by men simply pay better than female-dominated ones, even when they require the same level of education, training and skill. But the pandemic is shining the spotlight on the importance of so-called “women’s work.” A recent New York Times analysis of census data found that one in three jobs held by women has been designated as “essential.”
NBC News June 17, 2020 -
“This has been driven by pretty intentional policy decisions, and the root of all those policy decisions has been an attempt to tilt the playing field away from typical workers and towards employers and capital owners in the labor market,” Josh Bivens, an economist at the labor-union-affiliated Economic Policy Institute, told me. “Ten years ago, if you would ask people about inequality, even people who call themselves liberal Democrats, they would have been genuinely concerned about it and genuinely thought it was a bad thing. But there’s this predominant view that it was a sad accident of apolitical market forces or technological developments.”
The Atlantic June 17, 2020 -
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, says back-to-work incentives could be effective if they’re implemented as a supplement, rather than a replacement to enhanced unemployment insurance (UI).
“If you’re worried about the incentive effect of UI benefits being higher than going wages, the way to solve this is to let people keep a big chunk of their UI benefit even as they go back to work (or you could also do things like universal hazard pay to boost going wages),” Bivens writes in an email to Forbes Advisor.
Expanding unemployment insurance to people who are working might seem counterproductive, but Bivens argues that phasing payments out over time would be better than cutting the benefits cold turkey. Keeping the benefits, Bivens says, would provide as much as a boost in spending in the coming months as possible—which he says the economy “really needs.”
Forbes June 17, 2020 -
- The median White worker made 28% more than the typical Black worker, which demonstrates the persistent earnings gap. (4th quarter, 2019 – Census Bureau, Economic Policy Institute, Fortune, Black Enterprise, and Al Día News)
Chapelboro June 17, 2020