But the Bipartisan Policy Center’s work revealed that African Americans were more likely to lose employment as a result of the crisis — in fact, according to the Economic Policy Institute, black women suffered the largest job losses of any group. And sadly, there is much evidence to show that the traditional American antipathy toward generous social welfare benefits is rooted not in our can-do, self-help beliefs, but in our attitudes toward race.
Washington Post
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
“Research has shown that historically higher unemployment rates, lower wages, higher poverty rates, and lower liquid savings make job losses even more devastating for African-American workers and their families,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in an analysis on June 5.
Courthouse News Service
June 12, 2020
He then claims that students with and without degrees are making “identical” wages. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, college graduates earned 56 percent more than high school graduates in 2015. Moreover, college graduates earn about one million dollars more over their lifetimes than high school graduates. Even accounting for student loan debt, that is a significant difference.
The Laconia Daily Sun
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
Economic Policy Institute Senior Economic Analyst David Cooper joins Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman to discuss its recent analysis that finds 5.3 million workers could lose their jobs by the end of 2021, if Congress withholds federal aid to state and local governments.
Yahoo Finance
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
“Too many students in low-income and rural communities don’t have internet access: 35% of low-income households with school-aged children don’t have high-speed internet; for moderate-income families it is 17%, and only 6% for middle-class and affluent families,” according to an April 14 Economic Policy Institute report. “When measured by race and ethnicity, the gap is greater for African American and Hispanic families.”
Click Orlando
June 12, 2020
The protesters march in a state where African Americans make up nearly 5% of the population, but 18% of the state inmate population. They march in a state where the most recent five-year census survey shows the poverty level of African Americans is more than twice that of whites, where the median household income of African Americans is two-thirds that of whites — a gap that has barely budged in the last 50 years. They march in a state where white homeownership is nearly double that of blacks. The un- and underemployment rates fell across the board last year and gaps among blacks and whites narrowed significantly, but still persist, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis provided by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy.
Colorado Sun
June 12, 2020
The police and courts benefit the rich. For example, a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that in the ten most populous states, an estimated 2.4 million people lose a combined $8 billion in income every year to different forms of wage theft by their employers. That’s nearly half as much as all other property theft combined, according to FBI stats from 2018.
Socialist Alternative Minnesota
June 12, 2020