Initial unemployment filings are usually seen as a reliable indicator of how many Americans have lost their jobs in the past week. However, a survey with the Economic Policy Institute suggests that the figures may be underrepresenting the number of job losses, as frustrated Americans have given up trying to apply with government offices bogged down with requests.
WTKR 3 News
May 14, 2020
That’s because some of the hardest hit sectors of the economy are dominated by women, and particularly Latinas. Hospitality, retail and health care have all seen big job losses that have left Latinas vulnerable, says Elise Gould with the Economic Policy Institute.
“The unemployment rate for Hispanic women sits at 20.2%,” Gould said. “That’s 1 in 5 Hispanic women are now unemployed.”
Marketplace
May 14, 2020
“This is worse and weirder than anything I’ve ever seen,” Heidi Shierholz, a director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said. Shierholz served as the chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017 and dealt firsthand with the slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. “We know how to wrap our brains around the bursting of an asset bubble of seven trillion dollars in the housing market, or the end of the dot-com boom,” she said. “But we don’t have practice in dealing with the fallout from this pandemic.” We are beginning to see who will be most affected by the economic downturn. Women are losing jobs at a higher rate, because there are more of them in the service sectors most affected by the virus. The crisis has also been increasing racial economic disparities: black and Latino workers are more likely to work service-industry jobs—in restaurants, bars, hotels—and that sector was the first to shut down, and the least likely to fully reopen in the near term. “We always see this during recessions, but this one is likely to be worse,” Shierholz told me.
The New Yorker
May 14, 2020
States face budget shortfalls as high as 10 percent in fiscal 2020 and 25 percent in fiscal 2021, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Josh Bivens of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute wrote in a Monday blog post that combined state revenue shortfalls could reach $1 trillion by the end of 2021.
Politico
May 14, 2020
“I struggle to even to put into words how large this drop is,” economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, wrote in a commentary. “It’s as if all the gains in employment since 2000 were wiped out … [or] if all the jobs in all the states beginning with the letter ‘M’ simply disappeared in the last month. That’s all the jobs in Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, and Montana combined.”
The Washington Post
May 14, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute data, teachers now receive less money when adjusted for inflation than they received in the ’90s. On top of that, they are now outearned by their similarly educated peers by 18.7%, the largest such gap on record. To make up for this salary stagnation, teachers are going to extreme lengths, including working multiple jobs to get by and even donating plasma to pay their bills. Before this crisis was even on the horizon, teachers all over the country were on strike, not asking for the millions that celebrities suggest they make, but for wages that simply keep up with the cost of living.
Huffington Post
May 14, 2020
The total cost of the insurance premiums and uncompensated care provided under these COBRA plans could easily reach into the billions of dollars. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 12.7 million people have already lost employer-sponsored health insurance during the coronavirus crisis. Health Management Associates projects that this number could ultimately reach as high as 35 million.
Washington Examiner
May 14, 2020
The legislation is endorsed by the National Employment Law Project, Economic Policy Institute, National Women’s Law Center, National Employment Lawyers Association, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro
May 14, 2020
24/7 Wall St., a financial website, created an index of the pandemic’s ongoing impact on each state’s economy. The index is based on the number of COVID-19 cases per 10,000 residents; the share of employment lost in industries deemed high risk by Moody’s Analytics; new unemployment claims since mid-March; and projected unemployment rates by state for July 2020 from the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank.
Inside Sources
May 14, 2020
These are appalling statistics. But beyond the economic pain being felt by furloughed or fired workers, we must again look to secondary externalities. A recent estimate by the Economic Policy Institute suggests the pandemic has cost more than 9 million Americans both their jobs and their health insurance.
Forbes
May 14, 2020