And coverage for COVID-19 health issues also doesn’t provide any assistance for those who have lost work and now have to pay for family doctor appointments, medications and other care that are unrelated to the outbreak. With at least 8.7 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits during the last two weeks, an estimated 3.5 million of those have likely lost their employer-provided health insurance, the Economic Policy Institute reported last week.
The Herald
April 8, 2020
Many of the problems can be traced to poor staffing, budget cuts, and antiquated technology dating back several decades ago, according to Heidi Shierholz, a labor expert and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
“These programs have been drastically underfunded for decades,” Schierholz told Business Insider. “We haven’t made the investments that we would need to be agile and effective enough to absorb what we’re seeing.”
April 8, 2020
Private arbitration has become an increasingly popular mechanism for companies looking to settle disputes out of court. One 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that more than half of all nonunion private-sector employers require workers to resolve conflicts through the process, double the rate from the early 2000s. Among large companies, with at least 1,000 employees, that share jumps to roughly two-thirds.
April 8, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan D.C. think tank, estimated in an April 2 report that the 3.5 million Americans likely lost their coverage with their jobs in the last two weeks, including abut 420,000 Californians.
Fresno Bee
April 8, 2020
(Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of a blog post on the Economic Policy Institute’s website. For the full article, please click here.)
In the last two weeks, nearly 10 million people applied for unemployment insurance. …
April 8, 2020
“We should be willing to do something we wouldn’t ordinarily do to keep people on the payroll,” said Josh Bivens, research director for the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning research group.
Bivens added that while he found some of the 2008 bailout objectionable because aid was flowing to the banks that had been “complicit” in causing the crisis, “that is not the case here. None of these companies caused the pandemic.”
April 8, 2020
Still, the pandemic is having its adverse impacts on tourism, small businesses and the hospitality industry. The Economic Policy Institute estimate Arizona could lose close to 396,000 jobs and see its unemployment rate go to 15.6 percent by July because of the impact of the virus.
Rose Law Group
April 8, 2020
“As long as we do the policy right, we should get a pretty strong recovery,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Labor Department. “When the lockdown is over, I think we’ll get a pretty decent bounce back.”
Shierholz does not expect a “transformative” change to service sector jobs.
Florida Relators
April 8, 2020
With a record number of new claims filed in the week ending March 21 and even higher numbers the following week, we should be prepared for the unemployment rate to rise. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that Oklahoma will lose more than 200,000 jobs by July – that’s 15.7 percent of our total private-sector employment. Many of those jobs lost will be in the service and hospitality industries, and these workers will not be able to quickly find new jobs.
April 8, 2020