Travel restrictions and reduction in officials processing visas could reduce the number of farmworkers by as many as 60,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
WABE
April 20, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that 9.2 million U.S. residents were at high risk of having lost coverage during the past four weeks. The consulting firm Health Management Associates forecasts that perhaps 12 million to 35 million people will lose job-based insurance because of the pandemic, on top of the 27.5 million who were uninsured before the virus arrived.
The Washington Post
April 20, 2020
Ten years ago, Ron Hira in his Economic Policy Institute article, wrote that the H-1B visa and its L-1 cousin were “out of control.” Hira, a respected Howard University public policy professor, wrote that both of these visa programs need “immediate and substantial overhaul.” The original goals of the H-1B and L visa were to admit foreign nationals who complement the U.S. workforce. Instead, wrote Hira, “Loopholes in both programs have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers, with ordinary skills, who directly substitute for, rather than complement, workers already in the country. They are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to U.S. workers.”
Norfolk Daily News
April 20, 2020
“What we are going through is traumatic on every level,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “We will minimize that trauma by following what public health experts want us to do.”
The variability falls in line with calculations from both George Mason University and the Economic Policy Institute that show how economic turmoil and recovery vary state to state and county to county. Local economies with higher numbers of digital jobs are less rattled than parts of the country with bustling service and hospitality industries.
Courthouse News Service
April 20, 2020
“We will keep fighting to help every aspect of the gaming industry as Congress and the administration consider additional economic relief measures,” the AGA said. It is thought that around 200,000 casino workers in Vegas have been affected by the city’s shutdown so far. According to data collected by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate in Nevada could rise to around the 20 percent mark as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
Card Player
April 20, 2020
“For awhile, we are going to be in territory that was just unthinkable,” Heidi Shierholz,a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider. In comparison to the Great Recession, the current situation is a much more rapid deterioration, she said.
For example, the worst weekly jobless claims report during the Great Recession showed fewer than 1 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance — now, the US is seeing sustained weeks of millions of claims. “We’re just in this extraordinary space,” Shierholz said.
Business Insider
April 20, 2020
High rates of homelessness, housing insecurity and food insecurity impact the extent to which people can safely engage in social distancing measures. At the same time, a disproportionately high share of black and Hispanic workers are in jobs where they cannot telecommute, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.
“You layer those other social barriers on top of health care, it really sets up folks to be at a disadvantage,” Cooper said.
The Hill
April 20, 2020
The rideshare company posted statistics from the Economic Policy Institute that shows the higher rate of exposure Black people have to contracting COVID-19 due to health disparities and holding lower-wage jobs that are deemed essential than other racial groups across the United States. The stats found that only 20 percent of Black workers were eligible to work from home, compared with 30 percent of white people.
The Grio
April 20, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute is urging Congress to allocate another $500 billion in federal aid to state and local governments, on top of the $150 billion already outlined in the CARES Act.
NJ Biz
April 20, 2020
The Washington Post published a story saying that millions of students are at risk of severe learning loss during the coronavirus pandemic and discussing some of the unprecedented steps to help them catch up. This post is a follow-up of sorts, looking at exactly why achievement gaps will “explode,” according to the scholar and author Richard Rothstein.
Rothstein is a distinguished fellow of the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute and a senior fellow emeritus at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and of the Haas Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is the award-winning “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How our Government Segregated America.”
The Washington Post
April 20, 2020