“Increasingly, people with a B.A. [degree] are being threatened by these things too,” Angus Deaton said in a May 4 interview by the Economic Policy Institute.
[Includes event live stream and Neil Munro tweet about EPI report.]
Breitbart
May 6, 2020
Lydia Boussour, senior U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, expects the report to show even more job losses — 28 million. She cites an Economic Policy Institute analysis noting that as many as 14 million Americans couldn’t file jobless claims because of swamped phone and computer systems.
The USA Today
May 6, 2020
An estimated 9.2 million workers likely lost health coverage sponsored by employers over the past month as workplaces shuttered due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Spouses and family members are often covered by the same health plan, so millions more people have likely lost health coverage during this unprecedented public health crisis. Thanks to loss of income, even people who retain health insurance independent from employment are having trouble paying for it. As Truthout has reported, researchers estimate that 2 million people living without health insurance will be hospitalized for COVID-19, putting further strain on hospitals that have been overwhelmed by the crisis.
Truthout
May 6, 2020
“Among the top 30 H-1B employers are major US firms, including Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart, Google, Apple and Facebook. All of them take advantage of program rules in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” said the report released by the Economic Policy Institute.
Authored by Daniel Costa and Ron Hira, the report titled “H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels” says 60 per cent of H-1B positions certified by the US Department of Labour (DOL) are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation.
The Tribune India
May 6, 2020
“So if an employer was paying hazard pay and stopped providing it, there’s very little an employee could do,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
stitute.
Grocery store workers didn’t sign up for their jobs thinking they’d be putting themselves in danger. But owners didn’t expect it either.
“You did not picture that you needed to pay your workers hazard pay because it was not on your radar that this could become an extremely dangerous job,” Shierholz said.
Marketplace
May 6, 2020
The teacher shortage is also worse in higher-poverty schools, where there is a shortage of qualified teachers. An Economic Policy Institute report finds 66.2% of teachers in high-poverty schools have an educational background in the subject of their main assignment, compared to 72.5% of those in low-poverty schools.
Education Dive
May 6, 2020
In response to the coronavirus, Congress has passed a series of bills allocating more than $2 trillion to relief and recovery programs. However, these measures have been insufficient in scope and magnitude to address the severity of the economic and public health crisis we are experiencing. Further, lawmakers have failed to include key provisions that would address the needs of working families in this crisis. As a result of these policy missteps, the relief and recovery measures have not done nearly enough to mitigate the level of pain working people are experiencing or to ensure that the economy can get back on track after the shutdown period is over. It is critical that Congress correct its failures in future relief packages. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that without additional relief, the unemployment rate will average 16% in the third quarter of this year. As a point of comparison, the highest the unemployment rate reached in the Great Recession was 10%, and it reached that level for only one month. CBO projects that without additional relief, the unemployment rate will average 10.1% for the entire calendar year 2021.
In These Times
May 6, 2020
Robert Scott, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says the stock market at the moment is being held up by “Frankly, just financial engineering.” He estimates that by the time the government’s rescue packages are all tallied up, they could add up to $5 trillion of zero-interest loans to big business. Hardly the fabled laissez-faire version of capitalism, but of course the companies will take it. (It is, after all, what their political contributions have paid for.) Scott believes that the gravity of America’s crushed economy will eventually pull down the stock market again, but the current measures will have served their purpose: “Insiders are going to sell off their stock and make a killing,” he says, “and long term investors will take the loss.”
In These Times
May 6, 2020
More than 50 percent of Americans receive their health insurance through their employer; a recent analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute forecast that 3.5 million workers had lost their insurance in the last two weeks of March alone.
Fox Business
May 6, 2020