As bad as the national figures are, the situation in individual states is even worse. An interactive map on the Economic Policy Institute’s website shows more than one-third of workers in Georgia (39%), Kentucky (38%), and Hawaii (35%) have filed for jobless benefits. Just behind are Washington (31%), Louisiana, Nevada and Rhode Island (30% each), Michigan (29%), and Pennsylvania (28%).
People's Weekly World
May 29, 2020
Alongside these job losses, the Economic Policy Institute calculates at least 16.2 million people lost employer-provided health insurance along with their jobs. Additionally, the unprecedented length of joblessness throws a wrench in momentum made by workers and their unions for better wages.
Courthouse News Service
May 29, 2020
Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute says that’s sapping confidence, too.
“That means that they are trying to subsist on much lower income. They’re going to have to cut their spending and it will make the recession worse,” Shierholz said.
Marketplace
May 29, 2020
That extra cash is important, and not just because I need it to live. Unemployment benefits on average have fallen far below the already low wages that most jobs typically pay, especially in cities where basic necessities like housing have become cost-prohibitive for working-class Americans. The extra $600 helps bridge that gap, and, according to a recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, cutting that extra $600 now would have devastating macroeconomic consequences, as less money is circulating through an already tenuous economy.
But even with those caveats, the fact that compensation from a social safety net program is surpassing wages in the richest country in the world is an embarrassment. It’s no secret that wages have been stagnant for decades, while the vast majority of income growth has gone to the richest Americans. According to a 2018 Pew Research study, the real average wage for American workers has the same purchasing power as it did in the late 1970s. That same year, however, the Economic Policy Institute found that wages for the top 1% of income earners went up by 151% since 1979. This disparity in wage growth isn’t a coincidence—that’s around the same time President Ronald Reagan’s administration began to undermine the power of organized labor.
Barron’s
May 29, 2020
But in fact, that study – authored by New York University economist Edward N. Wolff and published by the progressive-leaning Economic Policy Institute – appeared in 2002. Wolff’s study projected how Americans aged 47 to 64 in the year 1999 would fare as they shifted into retirement.
Forbes
May 29, 2020
Erik Hurst, deputy director of the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute joined us.
NPR
May 29, 2020
There’s an old saying: “How’re you gonna keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen (fill in the blank).” And it’s true. According to researchers, a third to two-thirds of all American workers — that would be between 50-100 million of us — work for poverty wages. According to a 2017 study by the Economic Policy Institute, fully 11.5 percent of US workers or one in nine of all workers, were earning less than a poverty-level income before the current wave of layoffs and shutdowns. And it should also be pointed out that the minimum wage of $7.25 that is what so many US workers earn (that’s gross pay before deductions for income tax, state and local taxes and Social Security, not take-home pay) is the same as it was in 2009, while inflation has reduced its buying power by 19 percent. That is to say, workers today earning the same minimum wage that a worker was earning 11 years ago, would have to be making $8.63 just to be in the same economic situation the worker in 2009 was.
Counterpunch
May 29, 2020
While white Americans make up the majority of essential workers nationally, people of color are heavily overrepresented, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
Overall, people of color –blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and others who identify as non-white — make up 43% of all essential workers in the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis of data released last week by the Economic Policy Institute.
ABC News
May 29, 2020
“That’s a high number, and that’s good,” said the Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, of the workers’ optimism about returning to their jobs. “But I think we absolutely have to think of that as an upper-bound on how many will be called back.”
“And what we don’t know is how much lower than that … will it ultimately be. The concern is that it’s going to be a lot lower.”
Politico
May 29, 2020
“Job losses are more likely to be in sectors in which women are more prevalent, but even in male-dominated sectors, it appears women are losing their jobs disproportionately more,” said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.
CBS News
May 29, 2020