According to Economic Policy Institute analysis, an estimated 84 percent of Latinx workers and 80 percent of Black workers could not afford to work from home even before the pandemic hit.
Elise Gould from EPI commented, “Workers on the front line are at risk of exposure, not just doctors and nurses, but grocery store workers, home care aides, cooks and delivery drivers.” (Chicago Sun Times, April 9) These essential workers are forced to work for low pay without being provided with personal protective equipment like gloves, face masks and hand sanitizer.
Workers
April 15, 2020
Nearly a third of black women are employed in service jobs compared with just one-fifth of white women, according to Nina Banks, associate professor of economics at Bucknell University. This is due to decades of discrimination, Banks writes for the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit.
Business Insider
April 15, 2020
Claims will only continue to increase. The Washington-based Economic Policy Institute estimated that nearly 780,000 people in Illinois could be out of work by July.
Rockford Register Star
April 15, 2020
Owen Herrnstadt, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, made a similar point in a brief blog post. “If ever there was a time for U.S. policymakers to implement a manufacturing policy across industrial sectors that will protect the public (including workers) and our nation’s economy and security from vulnerable supply chains, it is now,” he wrote.
Politico
April 15, 2020
Experts reason that the disparity is in part due to inequity regarding the types of jobs women of color have been forced to accept. Nina Banks, an economics professor at Bucknell University, wrote for the Economic Policy Institute that almost a third of Black women work in service jobs compared to one-fifth of white women. “Discriminatory public policies have reinforced the view of black women as workers rather than as mothers and contributed to black women’s economic precarity,” Banks wrote. The median annual earnings reported for Black women in 2017 was just more than $36,000, 21% lower than that of white women even though Black women “have a longer history of sustained employment,” Banks said.
Daily Kos
April 15, 2020
The new bill, called the Worker Health Coverage Protection Act, is Democrats’ proposal to fix a growing problem due to the economic fallout from coronavirus: people losing their employer-sponsored health insurance. An April 2 Economic Policy Institute report estimated as many as 3.5 million people could have lost the health insurance they got through their employer in the previous two weeks. The timing is not ideal. The middle of a deadly global pandemic is a particularly bad time to be uninsured; intensive care for coronavirus treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
VOX
April 15, 2020
“It doesn’t work if you bring in the hallelujah chorus,” said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank. Lee served on a short-lived manufacturing council that Trump established early in his presidency.
Associated Press
April 15, 2020
And they may also not understand the odds against them. An Economic Policy Institute report finds that employees win more than one-third of the time in federal courts but only about a fifth of the time with mandatory arbitration. There’s a big disparity in damages awarded, too. The typical mandatory arbitration award ($36,500) is much less than the median award in the federal courts ($176,426).
Who. What. Why
April 15, 2020