“The next package should [include] $500 billion in aid to state and local governments, protect workers’ paychecks, include worker safety and health protections, and invest in our democracy,” wrote Shierholz.
Shierholz suggested that the federal government use one solution to help solve both the crisis of unemployment and that of the spreading pandemic by establishing a large-scale contact-tracing program to detect how the coronavirus is being transmitted and to whom:
We must also make significant investments in testing and contract tracing because, absent a vaccine or effective treatment for the virus, there is no way we will be able to reopen the economy successfully without an effective system of testing and contact tracing in place. It is likely that with 200,000 contact tracers, we could establish an effective tracing program. The federal government hires half a million temporary workers every ten years to conduct the decennial census—we could and should do large-scale hiring of public workers for contact tracing. That is one investment that would help not just in controlling the virus and allowing us to reopen earlier, but would also help the workers who would get those jobs, and their families, and therefore help the broader economy.
Without adjusting the unemployment numbers for seasonal changes as the Labor Department did, Shierholz wrote, nearly 28 million Americans, or one in six workers, applied for unemployment benefits in the last six weeks. Even with these lower numbers, she said, the unemployment rate is still “over five times the worst period of the Great Recession.”
EPI also reported Thursday that an estimated 12.7 million Americans have already lost their employer-based health insurance as a result of the pandemic.