Of course, it is not just healthcare workers who are on the front lines of the crisis – grocery store workers, domestic workers, delivery people and transit workers are all still working outside their homes, and many are women and people of colour, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive-leaning US think tank.
“Some of the front line workers are going to be disproportionately Black and brown people – people working in grocery stores, transportation, public transit, lots of different sectors – and they’re continuing to work,” Gould told Al Jazeera. “At the same time, we know that Hispanic workers and Black workers are much less likely to be able to telework, so that tells you about the kind of jobs that they have and their ability to weather this storm from a health security standpoint or a financial security standpoint.”
And while unemployment has soared across the United States in every demographic, “initial data suggests that women are more likely to lose their job at this time, and that’s somewhat due to the types of jobs that are being lost,” which include jobs in the service and care sectors, Gould said.
Al Jazeera News
April 20, 2020
In her role as senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Heidi Shierholz spends her days immersed in data. She’s continually referencing charts and models of employment levels, productivity, and wage stagnation. Her job is to absorb the relevant data from those dry reports and synthesize them into economic stories that speak to the average American, in an effort to reduce inequality and improve the lives of workers. She’s very good at her job.
But Shierholz could never have imagined the data from the economic downturn accompanying the coronavirus pandemic, and that data is affecting her in a visceral way. On this week’s episode of “Pitchfork Economics,” she confesses to hosts Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein, “Yesterday morning was the first time in my career that I saw a data release that just made me start shaking.”
Business Insider
April 20, 2020
This week on CounterSpin: Dozens of groups and state and local officials have just sent an open letter to Congress: The $150 billion designated for state, local and tribal governments as relief from the Covid-19 crisis is nowhere near what those governments will need—and not just that, but forcing them to cut budgets just as they need to be spending more is going to drive a cycle that only hurts more those already hurting. We’ll talk about what could be done instead with Naomi Walker, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network, working out of the Economic Policy Institute—who spearheaded the letter.
CounterSpin Naomi Walker Interview
FAIR
April 20, 2020
According to the Economic Policy Institute, only 16% of Latino workers reported being able to work remotely.
The Guardian
April 20, 2020
Travel restrictions and reduction in officials processing visas could reduce the number of farmworkers by as many as 60,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
WABE
April 20, 2020
The Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that 9.2 million U.S. residents were at high risk of having lost coverage during the past four weeks. The consulting firm Health Management Associates forecasts that perhaps 12 million to 35 million people will lose job-based insurance because of the pandemic, on top of the 27.5 million who were uninsured before the virus arrived.
The Washington Post
April 20, 2020
Ten years ago, Ron Hira in his Economic Policy Institute article, wrote that the H-1B visa and its L-1 cousin were “out of control.” Hira, a respected Howard University public policy professor, wrote that both of these visa programs need “immediate and substantial overhaul.” The original goals of the H-1B and L visa were to admit foreign nationals who complement the U.S. workforce. Instead, wrote Hira, “Loopholes in both programs have made it too easy to bring in cheaper foreign workers, with ordinary skills, who directly substitute for, rather than complement, workers already in the country. They are clearly displacing and denying opportunities to U.S. workers.”
Norfolk Daily News
April 20, 2020
“What we are going through is traumatic on every level,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “We will minimize that trauma by following what public health experts want us to do.”
The variability falls in line with calculations from both George Mason University and the Economic Policy Institute that show how economic turmoil and recovery vary state to state and county to county. Local economies with higher numbers of digital jobs are less rattled than parts of the country with bustling service and hospitality industries.
Courthouse News Service
April 20, 2020
“We will keep fighting to help every aspect of the gaming industry as Congress and the administration consider additional economic relief measures,” the AGA said. It is thought that around 200,000 casino workers in Vegas have been affected by the city’s shutdown so far. According to data collected by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate in Nevada could rise to around the 20 percent mark as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
Card Player
April 20, 2020
“For awhile, we are going to be in territory that was just unthinkable,” Heidi Shierholz,a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Business Insider. In comparison to the Great Recession, the current situation is a much more rapid deterioration, she said.
For example, the worst weekly jobless claims report during the Great Recession showed fewer than 1 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance — now, the US is seeing sustained weeks of millions of claims. “We’re just in this extraordinary space,” Shierholz said.
Business Insider
April 20, 2020