Media clips
-
Outsourcing firms dominated the list of the top companies receiving new H-1B visas last year, according to a new report.
“Instead of being used to fill genuine labor shortages in skilled occupations without negatively impacting U.S. labor standards, the latest data show that the H-1B’s biggest users are companies that have an outsourcing business model,” said the report by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
…
According to the institute’s report, more than half the top 30 companies receiving new H-1B visas in 2020 were outsourcers. “Those 17 outsourcing firms alone were issued 20,000 H-1B visas, nearly one-quarter of the total 85,000 annual limit,” said the report by the institute’s director of immigration law and policy research Daniel Costa and Howard University professor Ron Hira, who studies the H-1B.
The Mercury News April 2, 2021 -
“If my 2010 self could see just how different we’re handling this recovery than we handled that one — when we were just pulling our hair out, because Congress was turning towards austerity when the unemployment rate was literally over 9% — it was just an outrageous approach to the recovery at that time,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist to Obama’s secretary of Labor, told Insider. “And so this is just incredibly different.”
Business Insider April 2, 2021 -
By early 2020, women were a majority of the workforce. But a year into the pandemic, much of those gains have been erased. Almost a million mothers left the workforce last year, and economists are sounding the alarm.
“What we have seen in this downturn has been unprecedented,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Newsy April 2, 2021 -
“It is a bipartisan failure of public policy dating back at least two or three decades,” said Robert E. Scott, a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., a think tank that seeks to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.
Amid the various policies, the United States has seen a net loss of manufacturing plants every year from 1998 through 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau data included in an August report that Scott authored. Overall, the report notes, the United States has had a net loss of more than 91,000 manufacturing plants and nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs since 1997.
Manufacturing is still a major U.S. sector, employing 12 million people, but Scott argues it could be stronger and add a significant number of jobs if the country reforms its trade policy, curbs dollar overvaluation and invests in infrastructure and clean energy.
Allentown Morning Call April 2, 2021 -
The U.S. added 916,000 jobs in March, surpassing most economists’ forecast and signaling a strengthening economy, as businesses eased restrictions helped by the vaccine rollout, warmer weather and a decline in coronavirus infections. President Joe Biden’s $1.9-trillion American Rescue Package, which allocated $1,400 stimulus checks to millions of households, also helped to inject more life into the economy.
It’s the strongest job growth the country has seen since the initial recovery faded last summer, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “Even with these gains, the labor market is still down 8.4 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. In addition, thousands of jobs would have been added each month over the last year without the pandemic recession.”
…
“However, today’s number is certainly a promising sign for the recovery, especially as vaccinations increase and vital provisions in the American Rescue Plan have continued to ramp up since the March reference period to today’s data,” Gould added. “The benefits of the ARP will continue to be captured in coming months.”
MarketWatch April 2, 2021 -
Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization, said lower- and middle-income families alike were vulnerable to major economic instability after losses of income.
“It’s incredibly destabilizing in the short run,” she said. “People just simply don’t have the savings to be able to weather job losses or to cut back on hours or furloughs to be able to continue paying their bills,” she said.
Losing a home, facing declines in its credit score or the continued inability to get a job could also affect a family long after the pandemic is over, she said.
NBC News April 2, 2021 -
Nearly one in five Black Pennsylvanians was unemployed as 2020 ended, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning D.C. think tank. That was the highest rate of unemployment for Black people in any U.S. state at the time.
…
Initially, the pandemic actually leveled the playing field, according to Kyle Moore, the economist focusing on race and inequality for EPI who crunched the data. Pre-pandemic unemployment was low on average, but Black workers were still about twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers.
But as jobs plummeted in March and April 2020, that reduced inequality,
“That ratio actually fell to an extent that Black workers were only about 20% more likely to be unemployed than white workers, at least at the beginning,” Moore said.
In other words, when everyone was laid low, things were fairer. Once the slow economic recovery began last year, pre-existing gaps reappeared and began widening.
Now, “unemployment rates for Black workers are falling a lot slower, similar to previous recessions,” Moore said. “That points towards more structural issues with the economy.”
WHYY April 2, 2021 -
April 2, 2021
-
The average cost of infant care in Ohio is $9,697 per year — or about $800 per month — according to the Economic Policy Institute, an independent think tank. Rockport, which was owned by a church, cared for children as young as 6 weeks old all the way up to 6-year-old first graders. It took in only privately funded children. Full-time fees per month ran about $1,068 for a 6-week-old, which made it “not the most expensive center in the area, but not the cheapest, either,” Ms. Norris added, meaning the center wasn’t in a financially vulnerable position at the start of last year.
The New York Times April 1, 2021 -
For decades, workforce leaders, labor unions and politicians have bemoaned the loss of American factories and manufacturing jobs to lower-cost overseas markets such as China, Malaysia, Mexico and Brazil. “Buy USA” became and has remained a rally cry for those determined to revive American manufacturing and bring back the 5 million-plus jobs and 91,000 plants that have migrated offshore since 1997, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Forbes April 1, 2021