“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
“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
Last week, an average of one million Americans lost their jobs every day. While nations around the globe have been ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, and have issued shutdown orders to contain the spread, none have seen comparable rates of unemployment.
Time
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.
April 24, 2020
There are other avenues to protect small businesses and their employees in this time of crisis, and these mechanisms would reach more people and help more communities. For example, as the Economic Policy Institute notes: A paycheck guarantee program would be far simpler to administer and would more effectively stabilize employment and business in this moment.
NC Policy Watch
April 24, 2020
“Latinos are more likely to work in ‘essential’ jobs and according to the Economic Policy Institute only 1 in 6 Latinos has the ability to telecommute,” he wrote. “What does this mean? Latinos are expected to leave home, expose themselves and then return home to air pollution.”
Denverite
April 24, 2020
For context, that would put U.S. unemployment approximately in line with levels not seen since the Great Depression. The non-partisan Economic Policy Institute is estimating that the current unemployment rate is approximately 18.3 percent.
Urban Milwaukee
April 24, 2020
“What we’re seeing across the country is an immense amount of frustration,” said Julia Wolfe, a state economic analyst at the DC-based Economic Policy Institute, whose research shows the unemployment backlog is not only putting individuals’ in financial jeopardy but could slow the economic recovery.
“If throughout this entire time people are losing their income, they’re not going to be able to spend, and then we’re going to see a decrease in demand [for goods]. And so not only is it bad for individuals, but really for the entire economy,” warned Wolfe.
Boston 25 News
April 24, 2020
“For comparison, 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,” Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says.
The Fiscal Times
April 24, 2020
Women make up a majority of workers in some industries that have been hit hardest, such as health care, where many jobs outside hospitals have been lost, and hotels and restaurants. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, calculates that 56% of the layoffs have involved women.
Associated Press
April 24, 2020