The Economic Policy Institute estimates 12.7 million Americans have lost their health insurance since the COVID-19 crisis began. Of the 1.6 million jobs lost in Florida over that span, 687,286 were jobs that provided health coverage, according to EPI data, some 43 percent of the total.
TC Palm
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
“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
“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
But he tossed all that aside. Trump’s massive corporate tax cuts were a boon to the rich and did little for workers. He badly undermined worker protections and tried to roll back the Affordable Care Act’s protections for millions. Trump and Republicans are still trying to destroy those protections amid a pandemic.
The Washington Post
May 6, 2020
By the numbers: States have processed unemployment claims for roughly one in five working Americans — some 30.3 million people — in just 6 weeks.
- And yet the Economic Policy Institute estimates as many as 13.9 million more Americans out of work since mid-March have been unable to get unemployment benefits because “long-neglected state [unemployment] systems are unable to handle the volume of applications.”
Axios
May 6, 2020
Life in the U.S. today can feel dark. Sure, we can’t predict the future, but the country has found itself in a similar position before. And, while history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, there are things we could learn from the trials of the nation, just under a century ago, when tens of millions were out of work.
To unpack these questions and more, we spoke with Elise Gould, senior economist from the Economic Policy Institute, and Rebecca Dixon, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.
NPR
May 6, 2020
With stay-in-place laws and mandatory closing of most businesses, unemployment has skyrocketed. Before the pandemic it was at 3.5 percent in December 20, as of April 2020, the Economic Policy Institute has estimated that unemployment rate to be at 18.3 percent. Many economists using April’s Labor Department data predict that the unemployment rate could reach 25 percent this summer if the existing practices remain in force. That level would match the peak of the Great Depression in 1933. However, then it took three years not six months to reach that level.
Daily Kos
May 6, 2020
In this video, we explain how and why the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands chose a different path. With the help of economist Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, we explore whether the US can still avoid millions more job losses.
VOX
May 6, 2020