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 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
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