“Policymakers have a lot of influence over how much people follow these measures that will not only save lives but will help our economic situation,” said Heidi Shierholz, policy director of the Economic Policy Institute and former Labor Department economist.
Shierholz warned that President Trump was “undermining” his administration’s efforts to encourage social distancing. “I don’t see how that won’t mean more lives will be lost and our economic situation will end up worse,” she noted.
KOMO News
April 21, 2020
The closures also threw 22 million people out of jobs so far, shooting the U.S. jobless rate up over 10 percent, the Economic Policy Institute calculates. That hit led to the $1,200 electronic payments from the Treasury to most – but not all – adults in the U.S. and $500 per child. It also led to expansion of jobless benefits by $600 for each person who gets them, but state jobless benefit systems have crashed under the workload.
Common Dreams
April 21, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, 90 percent of the highest-earning private-sector workers are more likely to work from home and have access to paid sick leave, but seven in ten low-wage workers do not get paid sick leave. Nearly one-quarter of all workers-including two of three food service and one in three retail workers-receive no paid sick leave whatsoever. Only 25 percent of private-sector workers receive at least ten paid sick days annually after twenty years’ service.
Public
April 21, 2020
● Between 1978 and 2017, according to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent, while the typical worker’s compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent.
World Socialist Web Site
April 21, 2020
Lawrence Mishel, a well-known labor economist, has been a critic of centrist Democrats for decades. “My adult lifetime has covered the Carter, Clinton and Obama years, and labor policy has never been a priority,” Mishel, the former president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. In the 2016 primary, he voted for Bernie Sanders. This year he supported Elizabeth Warren. (So did I.)
But when Mishel saw Joe Biden’s labor policy, he was thrilled. “I think that if you had asked me in 2016 whether we would ever see an agenda like this, this is beyond my hopes,” he said.
Biden’s proposals go far beyond his call for a $15 federal minimum wage — a demand some saw as radical when Sanders pushed it four years ago. While it’s illegal for companies to fire employees for trying to organize a union, the penalties are toothless. Biden proposes to make those penalties bite and to hold executives personally liable. He would follow California in cracking down on companies like Uber that misclassify full-time workers as independent contractors who aren’t entitled to benefits. He’d extend federal labor protections to farmworkers and domestic workers.
Mishel said that no Democratic nominee in his lifetime has presented “as robust and fleshed out a policy suite on labor standards and unions.”
The New York Times
April 21, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute also published an article discussing the “work from home” divide that differs significantly by race and ethnicity, noting that black and Hispanic workers are far less likely to be able to telework. And despite the allowance for its essential nature in the midst of a pandemic, Chime Solutions has risen to the occasion.
Charlotte Inno
April 21, 2020
Josh Bivens, director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, said in a statement endorsing the Paycheck Security Act that “workers and their families are paying the price for going into the current crisis with a weak social insurance system and public safety net.”
“Given this pre-existing weakness, transformative responses to this economic crisis have to be put together on the fly,” Bivens said, “and the Paycheck Security Act is a bold solution to provide needed relief during the lockdown period of the crisis and would put us in much better position to mount a rapid recovery once the public health all-clear was sounded.”
Common Dreams
April 21, 2020
According to recent estimates by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate may hit nearly 16% by July – higher than at any point since the Great Depression. Over the past month, more than 570,000 people in Massachusetts have filed unemployment claims, according to the April 16 U.S. Department of Labor report. With the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases surpassing 37,000 (as of April 19, with fatalities now exceeding 1,700) as the pandemic surges, it appears non-essential businesses will remain closed through mid-May at a minimum.
The Real Reporter
April 21, 2020
The McKinsey report also shows the impact of COVID-19 on Black communities will likely extend beyond high rates of mortality to high rates of unemployment and bankruptcy, as another 39% of Black workers are in jobs that are vulnerable to furloughs, layoffs, or being rendered unproductive during periods of high physical distancing (5 points higher than Whites and 7 points higher than Asian Americans). The Center for American Progress has a brief on occupational segregation with data showing that African Americans are overrepresented in many low-wage jobs vulnerable to layoffs during the pandemic, that Black households have less liquidity to respond to an emergency, and that Black workers are less likely to be able to telework (see also this Economic Policy Institute post estimating that only 19.7% of Black workers can telework).
Houston Style Magazine
April 21, 2020
Senior Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Elise Gould recently wrote of how just 30% of US minimum-wage workers have the ability to accrue paid sick days. A large number of these are in the food industry, and have direct and frequent contact with the public.
Citizen Truth
April 21, 2020