In a series of tweets Thursday and a blog post for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), the think tank’s senior economist and director of policy Heidi Shierholz explained the five recent weeks of DOL figures (pdf), shared employment projections for the next year, and—like Levitz—pressured members of Congress to step up the federal response.
EPI projects that by the end of June, net decline in employment could surpass 30 million, and “even under the best-case scenario” the nation’s unemployment rate could remain as high as 8% this time next year.
The CARES Act and a Senate-approved coronavirus bill expected to pass the House Thursday “both had some important provisions, but they are no match for the damage the economy is facing,” wrote Shierholz. “Federal policymakers need to do more.”
“The next relief and recovery package should provide $500 billion in aid to state and local governments, extend unemployment insurance benefits, provide better protections for workers and jobs, and include funding to safeguard our democracy,” she added. “And importantly, federal government relief should be tied to actual economic conditions (and not solely the unemployment rate), so that these provisions do not expire too early, when the economy and the people in it still need them.”
Common Dreams
April 24, 2020
Latinxs have high rates of underlying health conditions that could exacerbate the risks of COVID-19, and public health officials report that they have been exposed to the virus more than the general public. Many Latinx people live in close quarters, making it hard to practice social distancing, and work in jobs considered essential under stay-at-home advisories issued by governors across the country. The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit thinktank, found that only 16.2 percent of Latinxs can work from home, raising their risk of becoming infected on the job.
Boston College
April 24, 2020
Data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show less than 30% of American workers can work from home. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the racial and ethnic breakdown of this data reveals large imbalances, with less than one in five black workers and approximately one in six Hispanic workers able to work from home.
Some states require individuals be referred by a primary care physician in order to be tested – a referral that people of color may be less likely to receive. According to an Economic Policy Institute analysis, only roughly 10% of workers earning $10.48 or less an hour have health insurance.
Daily Bruin
April 24, 2020
“In the last five weeks, more than 24 million workers applied for unemployment insurance benefits. … That means more than one in seven workers applied for [unemployment insurance],” wrote Heidi Shierholz, former Labor Department chief economist under President Obama and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
“All else equal, job losses of this magnitude would translate into an unemployment rate of 18.3%,” she added. “However, the official unemployment rate, when it is released, will likely not reflect all coronavirus-related layoffs. This is due to the fact that jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work.”
CNBC
April 24, 2020
According to a 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute, the top 1 percent of families in the U.S. earned an average of 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent; that ratio increases to 44.4 times in New York and 39.5 times in Florida. As of late 2017, the three richest people in the U.S.—Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway—own the equal amount of wealth as the bottom 160 million people in the country. Bezos’s company, Amazon, earned $11.2 billion in profits in 2018 but didn’t pay a single dollar in federal income tax, and instead received $129 million in tax breaks and credits.19 In January 2017, Oxfam reported that two men in Canada—David Thomson of Thomson Reuters and Galen Weston Sr. of George Weston Limited—had the same amount of wealth as the bottom 30 percent of the country.
Canadian Dimenson
April 24, 2020
Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said the administration’s priorities are also evidence of regulations they’re not pursuing.
“The failure to act at this moment says every bit as much as what they’re doing,” she said.
Los Angeles Times
April 24, 2020
“The workers – that’s us – are the consumers,” said Julie Wolfe, state economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute. “The best thing we can do to jump start the economy on the other side of this is to provide workers with income right now.”
Dayton Daily News
April 24, 2020
Yet this number probably won’t be reflected in the official unemployment rate, according to a blog post by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“This is due to the fact that jobless workers are only counted as unemployed if they are actively seeking work,” Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economist and Director of Policy at EPI wrote. “That means many workers who lose their job as a result of the virus will be counted as dropping out of the labor force instead of as unemployed, because they are unable to search for work due to the lockdown.”
Salon
April 24, 2020
“It’s a problem of our own making,” said Heidi Shierholz, Senior Economic and Director of Policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank focused on improving conditions for low and middle income workers. Shierholz is also a former Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor.
“These systems have been underinvested in for decades,” she said. “It just means that the systems aren’t agile enough to be able to quickly respond to a crisis that’s as dramatic as the one we’re going through right now.”
News 5 Cleveland
April 24, 2020
Those numbers are all seasonally adjusted, which “attempts to measure and remove the influences of predictable seasonal patterns” to show how employment levels change over time. The unadjusted numbers show that more than 24.3 million workers have filed claims the past five weeks. That dwarfs previous five week stretches, according to Heidi Shierholz, who served as chief economist at the Labor Department from 2014-2017 during the Obama administration and is now with the Economic Policy Institute.
“In the period before the coronavirus hit, just over a million workers would apply for UI in a typical five-week span, and in the worst five-week stretch of the Great Recession, it was less than four million,” Shierholz wrote in a blog post. She says more than 1 in 7 workers have lost jobs based on the unadjusted jobless numbers. Shierholz also estimates that about 71% of people who have filed for unemployment between March 14 and April 11 are receiving their benefits.
CBS News
April 24, 2020