Media clips

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• If schools open this fall, what will be different because of the coronavirus?

  MarketWatch reported, “As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the economy and sets mass layoffs in motion, an estimated 3.5 million U.S. workers were “at high risk” of losing health insurance through their jobs in the last two weeks, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.”

  April 29, 2020
• Immigration suspension: All hat and no cattle?

  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
• America’s real coronavirus job losses could be worse than we thought. Nearly 14 million people haven’t been able to apply to unemployment since the pandemic began.

  But that figure is an undercount: Up to 13.9 million more Americans could not file for the benefits, according to a new survey from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

  “We’re missing data on millions more people who have lost their job and have unsuccessful with unable to apply or haven’t applied yet,” Elise Gould, an EPI economist, told Business Insider.

  Policymakers have “made great headway” in expanding unemployment benefits during the crisis, Gould said, but the assistance is not coming quickly enough since state unemployment offices are overwhelmed with applications.

  More importantly, Gould said, there’s too little funding at the state and local level.

  “That has been under-appreciated and will continue to cause problems that would be avoidable,” Gould said.

  For every 10 jobless Americans who applied for unemployment insurance, four tried to but “could not get through the system to make a claim,” the EPI found. “Two additional people did not try to apply because it was too difficult to do so.”

  Since March 15,  “an additional 8.9 [million to] 13.9 million people could have filed for benefits had the process been easier,” wrote EPI economists Ben Zipperer and Gould. That means about half of potential unemployment recipients are not getting aid.

  “We want to do whatever we can to help state and localities get through that period – and not clamp down on the recovery,” Gould said.

  Business Insider April 29, 2020
• A Time for Reform: Philanthropy and the Push for Better State Policymaking

  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
• What Happens When PPP Runs Out Again? 1 Realistic PossibilityWith 1.7 million small businesses waiting for PPP funding and a Round 2 that’s quickly running out, here’s what’s next.

  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
• COVID-19: Political Consequences and Considerations with Dr. Greg Anderson

  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
• Millions of Americans lose health insurance due to massive coronavirus layoffs

  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
• Trader Joe’s and other US firms suppress unionization efforts during pandemic

  “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 state we’re in: will the pandemic revolutionise the role of government?

  “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
• April 29
  April 29, 2020