Trump’s commitment to American workers is belied by his lack of support for existing programs that would improve their situation, e.g., opposing increases to the federal minimum wage and a stronger unemployment insurance system. His budget proposals have pushed drastic cuts to the enforcement arms of the Department of Labor that protect the wages, hours, health and safety of U.S. workers. Last summer, the Economic Policy Institute published an analysis by Daniel Costa that found “spending on immigration enforcement in 2018 was an astonishing 11 times greater than spending to enforce labor standards — despite the mandate labor agencies have to protect 146 million workers employed at 10 million workplaces.”
The Hill
April 29, 2020
SPP has been around for a while. It got its start in the early 1990s, drawing on funding from Ford, Annie E. Casey and Mott. As the network steadily grew, it came to fulfill a role in the states similar to that of left-leaning national think tanks like the Economic Policy Institute and CBPP itself. SPP now operates across 40 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. It has attracted funding from places like OSF, RWJF, Kellogg, the Sandler Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the Stoneman Family Foundation and the Spitzer Charitable Trust. Of its original funders, Ford and Annie E. Casey still support SPP.
Inside Philanthropy
April 29, 2020
For myself, as a student of political science and women’s and gender studies, I’ve been startled to see the ways in which inequalities have become more apparent and devastating as the pandemic has progressed. For Dr. Anderson, he was “thinking about the single mother in The Bronx housing projects…whose kid has been out of school, who primarily gets their lunch from the school lunch program, and what are they doing to social distance, what are they doing to pay the bills? They don’t have a white collar job where they’re sitting at home. In some respects social isolation and social distancing and quarantine are, to put it really bluntly, for rich people.” For people like us, the ability to have a discussion of these issues in the abstract highlights a stark privilege afforded to certain parts of society which can wait out the pandemic that is not granted to the vast majority of people. Research done at the Economic Policy Institute shows that Black and hispanic workers in the U.S. are much less likely to be able to work from home due to their work in essential services, leisure and hospitality, giving them less flexibility and putting them at a significantly higher risk of contracting COVID-19. The socio-economic and particularly racialized impacts of the pandemic are being witnessed in cities like Detroit, where systematic marginalization and discrimination leaves African-American communities at a substantially higher risk.
Medium
April 29, 2020
What fully funded means remains a moving target, says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Currently, lawmakers have planned PPP funding to last roughly eight weeks after a company’s loan is received. If, as Gould estimates, businesses with fewer than 500 employees spend about $236 billion a month on payroll, a prolonged interruption could cause that tally to escalate to around $1 trillion in a matter of months. And that’s without accounting for bigger companies’ use of the program.
Inc.
April 29, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that at least 11 million Americans have lost employer-provided health insurance within the past five weeks. And without health insurance, coronavirus treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Josh Bivens is the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, and he joined CBSN to discuss.
CBS News
April 29, 2020
“It’s an absolute disgrace they would take advantage of a pandemic to frustrate workers’ ability to organize and get better representation for themselves so they’re not risking their lives to perform essential services,” said Celine McNicholas, government affairs director at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
According to a December 2019 EPI study, in over 40% of union organizing campaigns an employer violates the law.
“This is an extreme moment we’re in, but unfortunately this is the traditional employer playbook in opposing workers’ efforts to organize and collectively bargain for better pay and better health and safety provisions,” added McNicholas.
The Guardian
April 29, 2020
“The whole pandemic, I think, has laid bare all of the inadequacies of the US social safety net,” John Schmitt, the vice-president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said. “A very basic thing every other advanced economy in the world guarantees workers is at least a minimum amount of paid sick days. The US does not have at the national level any laws like that.
“It’s hard for me to imagine that there won’t be significant support when the dust settles for state, local and federal legislation to address that incredibly longstanding policy failure,” he said.
There are two other areas where Schmitt predicted there would be strong demand for lasting change. One is unemployment insurance, currently a meagre patchwork of different state systems subject to minimum national standards.
The Guardian
April 29, 2020
Another study, from the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI) think tank, suggests that people 65+ are the least able to work remotely. It recently published a report saying that about 36% of employees ages 35 to 44 telework, while only roughly 25% of those 65 and older do. Roughly 32% of those age 45 to 64 work remotely. If those researchers are right, it means much of the experienced workforce is more vulnerable to the coronavirus on the job.
“Although some of these [older] workers are likely to be the ones who have been laid off or furloughed in recent days, many will remain out in the workforce, going to work, risking their own health and the health of their family members,” wrote Elise Gould, an EPI economist.
MarketWatch
April 29, 2020
A separate study from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), another left-leaning think tank, estimated that the figures dramatically undercounted the number of unemployed people because of the various clogs in the system.
The EPI study, based on survey data, found that in addition to those who successfully filed unemployment claims in April, an additional 36 percent couldn’t successfully complete the application and another 20 percent didn’t even try because it was too difficult.
“After accounting for these workers — who applied but could not get through or did not try because of the difficult process — about half of potential UI applicants are actually receiving benefits,” the study’s authors, Ben Zipperer and Elise Gould, wrote.
The Hill
April 29, 2020
Noguera currently serves on the board of the Economic Policy Institute, the National Equity Project, The Nation magazine and City Year Los Angeles.
Daily Trojan
April 29, 2020