While it’s impossible to ignore the vast disparity between what top execs are paid compared with the average employee — as much as 278 times more, according to a 2019 Economic Policy Institute report — Hollywood business manager Evan Bell cautions against assuming that the huge gulf means top execs won’t be hurt financially by forgoing salaries. “Some CEOs have lifestyles where they might have a lot of assets, but they need their cash flow,” he says. “It’s not only optics to everyone, but to some people it is.”
The Hollywood Reporter
May 7, 2020
Dr. Chris Beyrer, professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, added that “occupational exposure” is expected to present higher risks for African Americans and Latinos as states move ahead with reopening. Only 16 percent of Latinos and 20 percent of African Americans are able to work from home, compared with 30 percent of white Americans, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute.
Politico
May 7, 2020
As in the UK and elsewhere, home health aides are financially forgotten – and heavily exposed to Covid-19. They make less than retail workers on average, says the BLS, as do drivers for services like Uber, according to Economic Policy Institute estimates. Bus drivers and postal workers get closer to the national average. Journalists, loan officers and morticians are among the luckier ones with above-average pay.
Reuters
May 7, 2020
What HIV teaches us is that social discrimination and the vectors by which disease spreads are inextricable. While slogans like “coronavirus doesn’t discriminate” serve an important awareness-raising function, coronavirus discriminates inasmuch as the society it operates within does. As a result, the largely black and brown corps of hourly service workers who, according to the Economic Policy Institute, are far more likely to be paid poverty-level wages than their white counterparts and therefore cannot afford to take time off, are disproportionately likely to come into contact with the virus. Additionally, that same class of individual is least likely to be able to afford the costs for treatment in the US for-profit healthcare system if and when they fall ill. And all the while, the risk of mass infection grows daily in the detention camps along the southern border that house the migrants Trump blames for the crisis.
Africa's Country
May 7, 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.
USA Today
May 7, 2020
Patton is not alone. According to the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 13 million workers nationwide have likely lost employer-provided health insurance since the pandemic began. The group says 195,000 Tennesseans have likely lost their insurance.
WSMV News 4
May 7, 2020
My friends are not alone. An Economic Policy Institute study finds that for every 10 people who have successfully applied for unemployment benefits during this crisis, another three or four couldn’t get through the overloaded systems, and two more didn’t even apply because the systems are so hard to navigate. Indeed, in some states the system may be difficult by design, as The New York Times reports.
Tax Policy Center
May 7, 2020
But that clearly hasn’t happened. While the Senate delayed its return until the first week of May, the program that was supposed to act as a safety net in the meantime was failing the millions of desperate Americans who—almost two months out from the beginning of the pandemic—are still not getting any relief. According to a Pew Research Center report, only 29 percent of unemployed Americans received benefits in March. And the official unemployment numbers themselves aren’t even capturing the whole picture: An Economic Policy Institute report recently found that for every ten people who successfully filed an unemployment claim between mid-March to mid-April, five to six either tried to apply and didn’t get through, or didn’t even bother because it was so difficult to do so.
VICE
May 7, 2020
“If our policies do not adequately address these racial gaps and disparities in income, prosperity, employment and wages, we will see the same trends that we have seen historically,” observed Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic and Ethnic Studies program at the Economic Policy Institute.
AP News
May 7, 2020