“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 16, 2020
Historically, Erie has had a difficult time with poverty within the city. In fact, statewide, this theory rings true as well. Information from the Economic Policy Institute shows that PA is one of only two states in the country that has seen a rise in minority unemployment rates since the recession over a decade ago.
Erie News Now
June 16, 2020
Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, states, “People are having to choose between their economic security and their health security.”
Sojourners
June 16, 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.
The American Prospect
June 16, 2020
Researchers noted that a national study by the Economic Policy Institute found about 30 percent of the reduction in the gap between the median hourly wages of men and women since 1979 was due to the decline in men’s inflation-adjusted wages.
Wisconsin Public Radio
June 16, 2020
The political struggle in corona times is particularly fierce in Costa’s field, immigration. Trump’s first decisive measures against the spread of the coronavirus were an entry ban from China and later from Europe. It gradually became more difficult to enter the US from all over the world, for whatever reason. “The whole immigration system has come to a standstill,” said Costa. “The consulates no longer handle visa applications, except for temporary agricultural workers.”
Trouw
June 16, 2020
Featuring interview with Elise Gould.
CNBC
June 16, 2020
Economic Policy Institute’s Valerie Wilson examines steps needed to address economic inequality in the United States. She speaks on “Bloomberg Markets: European Close.”
Bloomberg TV
June 16, 2020
Importantly however, these individuals were in many ways already excluded from the dynamic growth that characterized the months—and years—preceding this latest crisis, magnifying systemic racial, ethnic, gender, and geographic injustice and inequity. The Economic Policy Institute studied wages and inequality over the past two decades and found constant and—and in some cases worsening—wage gaps by gender and race. The black–white gap was significantly larger in 2019 (14.9%) than it was in 2000 (10.2%).
Atlantic Council
June 12, 2020