Media clips

• ‘Should Be Bigger News’: Analysis Finds Nearly One Third of Owed Unemployment Benefits Have Not Been Paid

  Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute noted in a blog post last week that more than one in five U.S. workers are currently either receiving unemployment benefits or waiting for approval. Shierholz said “policymakers need to do more” to provide people with financial relief as the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic continues.

  To that end, Shierholz urged Congress to extend the $600 weekly boost in unemployment benefits provided under the CARES Act, which is set to expire on July 31.

  “We also must provide more funding to state [unemployment insurance] agencies to hire staff to speed up processing and to make improvements to websites and other administrative infrastructure,” wrote Shierholz.

  Common Dreams June 4, 2020
• Jobs regained after coronavirus pandemic won’t make up for massive job losses, economists warn

  Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department, suggested that more government aid will be necessary to keep consumers and businesses afloat so that many laid-off workers will have jobs to return to.

  “Those jobs are not going to come back if the federal government doesn’t do the things it needs to do to stimulate the economy, so that the demand and confidence is going to be there, so that those businesses will need to call workers back,” Shierholz said.

  Fox News June 4, 2020
• Black Americans Bear The Brunt Of The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Economic Impact

  STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Valerie Wilson directs the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute. Valerie points out that black Americans are dying at 2 1/2 times the rate of white Americans. Part of the reason for that, she says, is because of jobs.

  NPR June 4, 2020
• ‘No matter how well you speak, or how educated you are, my blackness will always define me.’ Black graduates on racism in America

  Since black workers are already more likely to be unemployed than white workers, even with the same levels of education, they typically suffer disproportionately during an economic downturn, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center, labor-focused think tank. We’re already seeing evidence of that trend playing out this time around.

  An EPI analysis of government data from February to April found that the black unemployment rate rose from 5.8% to 16.7% during that period, while the white unemployment rate jumped from 3.1% to 14.2%. Economic downturns are a period where the power of employers typically increases, allowing more room for discrimination in hiring, Gould said.

  For young black workers, this dynamic is exacerbated by their thin job history. “If you’re in an economy where employers can choose who they want, they can choose to discriminate, they can choose to have workers who have more experience,” she said.

  MarketWatch June 4, 2020
• ‘The housing emergency most harms people of color:’ Black Americans face an unequal housing market — and coronavirus could make it worse

  The housing conditions for black Americans also leave them more exposed to contracting coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Only 54.5% of African-American households live in single-family homes, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, compared with 74.5% of white households.

  MarketWatch June 4, 2020
• RPT-WRAPUP 1-U.S. new weekly jobless claims seen falling below 2 million

  “Many commentators are reporting the cumulative number of initial regular state UI claims over the last 10 weeks as a measure of how many people have applied for UI in this pandemic,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Labor Department.

  “We should abandon that approach because it ignores PUA, and is thus an understatement on that front, but may overstate things in other ways,” added Shierholz, now a policy director at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

  Reuters June 4, 2020
• Black workers are facing greater health and economic difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic: Economic Policy Institute

  Black workers are facing greater health and economic difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study done by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, joined Yahoo Finance to discuss how the coronavirus has disproportionately affected black communities and people of color.

  “What we’re seeing is that there are underlying health and economic conditions that have magnified the problems for African American workers and their families in this country,” she said.

  “Black workers are often, when they’re compared to white workers, are least able to weather the storm because they don’t have the same kind of safety net that some other workers have. They’ve suffered higher unemployment rates for a lot longer.”

  Yahoo Finance June 4, 2020
• The Story Has Gotten Away from Us

  The month of April brought devastating job losses. Week after week, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits broke records. By month’s end, thirty million people—about 18 percent of the workforce—were jobless. That did not count anyone who worked on a freelance basis, who would not be eligible to file, or anyone undocumented who didn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Black workers saw greater losses in employment than white workers did—more than one in six Black workers lost their jobs between February and April, per a recent report—and, as of April, under half the Black population was employed. The hardest-hit group was Black women: between February and April, 18.8 percent lost their jobs.

  Columbia Journalism Review June 4, 2020
• US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts
  Those disparities exist because of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.

  “Racial inequality has become so normalized in this society,” she said. “It’s what we expect to see. That’s the way it’s been for so long.”
  CNN June 4, 2020
• Black workers overrepresented in essential work during coronavirus pandemic
  • “Given the disproportionate representation of black workers in front-line occupations where they face greater risk of exposure to COVID-19, it is not surprising that illness and deaths are disproportionately found among black workers and their families,” Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, and EPI senior economist Elise Gould write.
  Axios June 4, 2020