Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, said the upswing was likely due to most states lifting stay-at-home orders.
“While these are welcome gains (as long as the health consequences aren’t offsetting), jobs losses since February still total 19.6 million, and are currently 13% below its February level,” she wrote. (Parentheses in original.)
She cautioned that the “economic pain will be long-standing” without further relief to workers, families and state and local governments.
“Even with the mild improvement in May, the unemployment rate of all groups is still higher than the highest level the overall unemployment rate hit at the height of the Great Recession, when it reached 10.0% in 2009,” Gould said.
Courthouse News Service
June 5, 2020
According to a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report, “The share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.”
90.3 WPLN News
June 5, 2020
The exact number is likely a little harder to get at. The Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz calculated that 37.2 million workers are either actually on unemployment benefits or applied very recently. That figure is based on the number of people DOL reported who are seeking another week of claims (and thus made it through the first round of processing) and also counts workers seeking aid under the temporary Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which includes people not typically eligible for unemployment benefits, like gig workers. “Together, that is close to one in four people in the U.S. workforce,” Shierholz writes.
Politico
June 5, 2020
A report by the Economic Policy Institute noted that black workers are also more likely to be on the front lines of the economy, working essential jobs.
Yahoo Finance
June 5, 2020
Current CDC recommendations to decrease the risks of contracting coronavirus are to stay home and practice social distancing. However, not everyone has the privilege to abide by those guidelines. A report by the Economic Policy Institute based on federal labor data shows Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to be able to work from home.
Beyond Type 1
June 5, 2020
While Rothstein’s book is described as a “forgotten history” of how the U.S. government segregated America. The author is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute as well as a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
WWD
June 5, 2020
Investopedia
June 5, 2020
TODAY’S EDUCATION JOB LOSSES ECLIPSE THOSE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION, Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute concluded in a new blog post that lays out some troubling numbers for schools.
— “More K–12 public education jobs were lost in April than in all of the Great Recession,” she wrote. “And that’s before any austerity measures from lost state and local revenue have been put in place.”
— Half of the job losses in K–12 public education between March and April were among special education teachers, tutors and teaching assistants, Gould said. Other significant job losses occurred among counselors, nurses, janitors, and other building maintenance workers.
— Looking ahead: “April’s job losses are huge in and of themselves, but it’s an even bigger problem that additional public education job losses have probably already occurred — we will find out more details when the May jobs data comes out this Friday,” Gould wrote.
Politico
June 5, 2020
“The pandemic and related job losses have been especially devastating for black households,” the Economic Policy Institute said in a recent report. “They 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.”
“It certainly is the case that we were finally seeing the recovery from the Great Recession hit more and more people,” says Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. “Historically disadvantaged groups were finally beginning to see lower unemployment rates.”
USA Today
June 5, 2020
If there isn’t more federal aid in the coming weeks and months, the United States could be headed for a prolonged depression due to the COVID-19 crisis. Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, says almost all the forecasts for the next 18 months show unemployment would remain over 10% by the end of 2021.
KIRO Radio
June 5, 2020