But who’s going to pay for these increased expenses? American parents with children under the age of five are already forking over a total of $42 billion for early child care and education, such as preschool programs, according to progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute.
NBC News
May 18, 2020
“Every job should be a safe job, no one should be risking their lives, and one of the biggest problems with trying to incentivize people to work in unsafe conditions is that it is inevitably condescending,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs and labor counsel at the Economic Policy Institute.
VOX
May 18, 2020
Employees working in “must-show” fields, a phrase used in a March 2020 report by Time Magazine, largely are not able to work from home in the pandemic. These workers are also less likely to have access to benefits including paid sick leave, Time noted. There are also demographic disparities, according to a report from the progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute, which found that just 16% of Hispanic or Latino workers in the U.S. were able to work from home, compared to 30% of white workers and 37% of Asian workers.
HR Dive
May 18, 2020
El inform dela Oficina de Estadísticas Laborales, conocido como JOLTS, apunta que la demanda de trabajadores se ha contraído a un ritmo mensual récord en marzo (813,000 ofertas de empleo retiradas). Las contrataciones también han caído y lo único que sube, como se ha visto en las cifras de desempleo es la destrucción de puestos de trabajo. En el Economic Policy Institute califican a estos datos de “catastróficos”.
La Opinion
May 18, 2020
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, noted for comparison that in April 2009, the worst month of the previous economic collapse, layoffs totaled 2.7 million.
“Layoffs in March were more than four times larger than the worst month in the Great Recession,” she said.
Courthouse News Service
May 18, 2020
Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, noted that 24 million American have filed new claims for unemployment benefits since the end of March, tweeting that Friday’s data “only shows the beginning of the devastation.”
“The human suffering and lost productive potential represented by these numbers is immeasurable,” she continued.
The Hill
May 18, 2020
D.C.’s Economic Policy Institute reported that one in six workers, or about 36.5 million Americans, have filed for Unemployment Insurance since the COVID-19 pandemic began. From March 28 to April 28, “for every 10 people who said they successfully filed for unemployment benefits, three to four additional people tried to apply but could not get through the system to make a claim.”
The Cheyenne Post
May 18, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a report last week that purports to show that “H-1B employers undercut local wages.” Employers use the H-1B program to hire temporary foreign workers in specialty occupations. EPI writes, “By setting two of the four wage levels below the median—and thereby not requiring that firms pay market wages to H-1B workers—the DOL [Department of Labor] has in effect made wage arbitrage a feature of the H-1B program.” This post explains why this is mistaken.
[critique of report]
CATO Institute
May 18, 2020
Nearly 1.5 million people have been infected with COVID-19 in the U.S., leading to more than 87,000 deaths. In addition, an estimated 16.2 million workers have lost employer-provided health insurance, according to the Economic Policy Institute. To help address that problem, the HEROES Act would create a two-month open enrollment period through the Affordable Care Act’s federal exchange so people who are unemployed — for any reason — can purchase health insurance coverage.
News Wise
May 18, 2020
In a discussion with Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, Vox explains the closure of businesses does not inevitably mean soaring unemployment. There are a variety of policies we could implement to weather the crisis.
Shierholz explains that up until the Great Depression, you were pretty much on your own if you lost your job or couldn’t find employment. This changed during the 1930s. With help from the federal government, states held back a portion of every worker’s paycheck to contribute to an unemployment fund. These funds were available for workers to tap into if they were temporarily laid off or lost their jobs.
Shierholz goes on to detail how our unemployment system works, provided there are not too many people who lose employment at the same time, the very situation we currently face. When businesses closed down, millions of workers were laid off in just a few weeks, faster than any time in our history. Across the country, unemployment offices have been unable to handle the influx of new requests.
Nonprofit Quarterly
May 18, 2020