The Economic Policy Institute estimates that nearly 13 million Americans have likely lost their employer-sponsored health insurance so far.
NPR
May 8, 2020
A survey by the Economic Policy Institute found that for every 100 workers who filed for unemployment insurance, 37 additional workers tried to apply but could not connect with the unemployment benefits system to make a claim.
Houston Chronicle
May 8, 2020
“At the low end, the jobs losses in April will most certainly have cancelled out all of the gains in the recovery from the Great Recession,” Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog post. “At the high end, we will have returned to a level of employment last experienced in the mid-1990s, canceling out all of the gains in employment over the last 25 years.”
USA Today
May 8, 2020
As many as 14 million Americans who could qualify for some type of unemployment compensation are not receiving assistance, according to a survey published April 28 by the Economic Policy Institute.
Freeman South Dakota Freeman
May 8, 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.
Yet she estimates one-third of those laid off left the labor force, pushing the participation rate below 60%, a level that hasn’t been seen in more than 50 years. If those jobless Americans had looked for work, the unemployment rate could soar to upwards of 21%.
USA Today
May 8, 2020
ZARROLI: Yeah. I mean, we are seeing fewer job losses every week. That’s a good sign. Last week, we saw 3.2 million jobs lost, which was about half of what it was at the end of March. But the numbers are still high. I talked with Elise Gould, who is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, which is sort of a left-leaning think tank. She says we’re going to continue to bleed jobs for a while.
ELISE GOULD: I think we are not near the peak yet. I think we are still going to see additional job losses show up in the data for May, for June. Unfortunately, I don’t think this has gotten as bad as it will get yet.
NPR
May 8, 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.
Counterpunch
May 8, 2020
Indeed, the $1,200 checks being distributed (if slowly) can be seen as a sort of basic income, though a real UBI would be regular, rather than a one-off, and would, as sociologist Peter Frase noted in Jacobin, be enough to live on — as a one-time $1,200 check certainly is not. But just giving people money has the benefit, as Barb Jacobson of the Basic Income U.K. network argues, of having funds readily available in a crisis, as well as allowing people to decide what they need and how to spend it. Means testing or other qualified relief systems — like the current unemployment insurance system, for example — is much more cumbersome, meaning that many of the newly laid-off right now are having a hard time accessing benefits or even getting through to the system that allows them to apply. An additional 7.8 to 12.2 million people, the Economic Policy Institute estimates, could have applied for unemployment payments if the system wasn’t such a mess.
Teen Vogue
May 8, 2020
Even more bad news may be coming. Tomorrow, the Labor Department will release the first jobs report tcovering an entire month of shutdowns. If the unemployment rate rises to 16 percent on Friday and historic ratios hold, the gaps for communities of color will be enormous, Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute and the chief economist to the labor secretary during the Obama administration told our colleagues.
- Just how bad it will get: “ … the black unemployment rate, which is typically double that of whites, can be expected to reach nearly 30 percent, Shierholz said; the Hispanic unemployment rate can be expected to hit 20 percent,” per Tracy and Scott.
The Washington Post
May 8, 2020