“High quits mean workers feel comfortable leaving their jobs in search of better matches,” wrote Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Low layoffs are an obvious good. The economic recovery is gaining momentum.”
Politico
June 11, 2021
From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew 940 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And yet, in 2017, Trump and the Republican Congress cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Rolling Stone
June 11, 2021
Child-care workers have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. But a new report finds that raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour could benefit more than half a million employees.
The progressive Economic Policy Institute estimates that if the federal minimum wage is gradually increased from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025, roughly 560,000 workers in the child-care sector will benefit.
…
“Child-care workers deserve to be paid a wage that better reflects the value of their work and allows them to care for their own families,” says Julia Wolfe, co-author of the report and state economic analyst for EPI. “Low wages for child-care workers reinforce existing racial and gender inequality, since both Black child-care workers and women are particularly likely to see their wages increase with a $15 minimum wage.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
The Economic Policy Institute brought up the point that not everyone can work from home. A person’s job type is one key reason.
“Only 16.2% of Hispanic workers and 19.7% of Black workers can telework,” The Economic Policy Institute reported.
Black Enterprise
June 11, 2021
“This will cut aid to nearly four million impacted workers, despite the absence of compelling evidence that jobless benefits are causing problems in the labor market,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, argued in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“Instead, we have considerable evidence that it is helpful.”
CNBC
June 11, 2021
We start the hour talking with ProPublica’s JESSE EISINGER, an author on “The Secret IRS Files” report, about what they found, how the rich avoid paying their fair share, and what it reveals about inequities in our tax code. Then, we examine the uneven economic recovery and the pandemic’s impact on income inequality and the racial wealth gap. Our guest is VALERIE WILSON from the Economic Policy Institute.
WHYY
June 11, 2021
Walsh can continue his overtures to Republicans to minimize adversarial exchanges, but Democratic members losing patience with GOP opposition to Biden’s jobs and social-policy agenda want the secretary to make a difference in the policy arena—even if that means abandoning the niceties.
“I would hope that the Education and Labor Committee pushes for a proactive agenda that the secretary is committed to and political capital is spent around accomplishing,” said Celine McNicholas, director of government affairs at the Economic Policy Institute. “Because as we emerge from the pandemic, if changes aren’t made to our workplace system of rights, then we know what type of recovery we will have—an unequal recovery where workers will pay a price.”
Bloomberg Law
June 11, 2021
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute highlighted another factor that’s driving wages up: More tipping at restaurants and bars, as customers return.
If that’s a large contributor to wage increases, then pressures should ease once restaurants reach full capacity, according to Josh Bivens, EPI’s director of research.
“So long as the industries that are seeing the really rapid wage growth are also the ones seeing really rapid employment growth, that actually doesn’t strike me as a shortage,” he said. “That strikes me as how economies adjust to a big increase in demand.”
Bloomberg
June 11, 2021
A report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that “nearly all the states cutting UI still have significantly fewer jobs than before the pandemic.” In Texas, for instance, nearly one million workers are “officially unemployed,” meaning that they’re actively looking for work but haven’t had luck yet.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
Broadly, 7.9 million workers said that they were not able to work because their work closed or lost business due to the pandemic. A recent report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found that Black and Hispanic workers were less likely to be able to telework compared to white peers.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
The lower teen unemployment rate is “not unequivocally great news,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
For one thing, the amount of people in this group seeking work actually slipped slightly from April to May. Some job seekers might not be seeing opportunities and leaving the workforce altogether, she said.
MarketWatch
June 11, 2021
U.S. job growth picked up in May — along with worker pay — and the unemployment rate fell, signaling firms are making some progress filling a record number of openings as the economy powers up. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Romaine Bostick, Alix Steel and Joe Weisenthal on “What’d You Miss?” about the U.S. jobs report.
Bloomberg TV
June 11, 2021
Low-wage, low-hour workers were among the hardest hit during the pandemic, as 80% of job losses were among the lowest quarter of wage earners in the US, with leisure and hospitality sector the hardest hit and currently the industry facing the largest job shortfall, with 3.5m fewer jobs in February compared with the same month last year, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Guardian
June 11, 2021
Although the job gains are welcome news for working people, analysis from the Economic Policy Institute shows that even if current monthly employment gains continue, the country won’t return to pre-pandemic levels until well into 2022.
Analyzing the latest numbers, EPI senior economist Elise Gould said that officially the labor market is still down 7.6 million jobs since February 2020 when the coronavirus crisis started. But taking into account the growth in the working-age population since then, the real jobs shortfall is still between 8.6 and 10.7 million.
The jobs recovery remains very uneven by race. For white workers, the official rate is 5.1%, close to the national average. For workers of color, the number of people still out of work is considerably higher: 7.3% for Latinx, 5.5% for Asian Americans, and 9.1% for Black workers. EPI economist Heidi Shierholz said Friday that the numbers show how “our history of and present systemic racism hugely affect the labor market.”
People’s World
June 11, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the data in conjunction with jobs numbers that have already been released for May “are telling a pretty similar story that there’s pick-up in demand and the supply of workers are increasing to meet that demand.
“It’s going to take a little while, but things are moving in the right direction.”
Financial Times
June 11, 2021
Average hourly wages across all industries last month increased by 2 percent, and leisure and hospitality was a leader for wage growth last month. But even the wage increases merely put the sector back to its pre-pandemic trend line rather than in inflation territory suggesting some massive labor shortage crisis, Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, noted on Twitter.
“In leisure and hospitality, earnings have grown enough to suggest a sector-specific shortage, but that may be largely the result of customers — and their tips — returning,” Shierholz tweeted.
Skift
June 11, 2021
“Postal workers look like America, but with a higher proportion of Black workers and veterans,” writes Monique Morrissey, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, in an enlightening report titled “The War Against the Postal Service” released this past December. It notes that postal work pays better than private sector jobs that do not require a college degree. Only 9 percent of postal workers make less than $15 an hour, compared to more than 28 percent in the private sector overall.
The Progressive
June 11, 2021
Instead, tips likely account for the pay increase as restaurants and bars return to pre-Covid customer capacity, according to Josh Bivens, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
“Since December 2020, the rise in tip income, not an increase in base wages, can likely entirely explain the acceleration of wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in restaurants and bars,” he wrote Friday.
CNBC
June 11, 2021
“The labor market is on the right track, but there is still millions of workers yet to be absorbed in the economic recovery,” Economic Policy Institute’s senior economist Elise Gould wrote in a Tuesday blog post.
Al Jazeera
June 11, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the nonprofit think tank Economic Policy Institute, noted the economy is still down 7.6 million jobs since early 2020 and said the real shortfall is more like 8.6 to 10.7 million when taking into account lost growth.
Courthouse News Service
June 11, 2021
“Weekly wages for typical workers in leisure and hospitality translate to annual earnings of $20,714, far (far) lower than in other sectors, even with the recent acceleration. Those increases are not going to create broad wage pressure,” tweeted Heidi Shierholz, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. She added that measured wages included tips, which had fallen off substantially when dining was banned or limited.
“Recent wage growth in restaurants may not be largely from employers raising pay to attract workers, but from workers’ hourly tips—which plummeted during the downturn—normalizing as customers return,” she added.
The Hill
June 11, 2021
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Elise Gould, one of our best analysts on employment data, sees the report as a “promising sign that the recovery is on track.” But she also notes that the “jobs shortfall” compared to pre-pandemic trends is “in the range of 8.6-10.7 million” additional jobs. If this trend keeps up, Gould says the unemployment rate could hit 4% “by mid-2022” with full recovery before that year ends.
Forbes
June 11, 2021
I really like this point from Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute. She was the chief Labor Department economist during the Obama administration. She notes that we’re still down 7.6 million jobs from before the pandemic, but…
“7.6 million is not the total gap in the labor market. Without COVID, we would have added jobs over the last 15 months as the working-age population grew. Taking that into account, the total gap in the labor market right now is at least 8.5 million jobs.”
Bloomberg
June 11, 2021
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote on Twitter that the industry is still below pre-pandemic employment by about 2.5 million. She added she’s “optimistic that we will continue to see solid growth in coming months as vaccine distribution continues and businesses find it safe to reopen.”
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
Low-wage sectors have seen swifter job growth than higher-wage sectors in recent months. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect to find if unemployment benefits were keeping people from working. This is because pandemic programs, like the extra $300 weekly benefit, are worth much more to low-wage workers than to higher-wage workers. Unemployment insurance, then, is not hampering job growth.
…
Finally, the 25 states cutting pandemic programs are weakening their own recoveries. The recipients of benefits in these states are expected to lose $22 billion in aid, and as a consequence these states will be forgoing an enormous amount of economic activity.
For lawmakers creating policy that will shape the future of a recovery, affecting both the larger economy and the lives of those hardest hit by the recession: Look at the facts.
The New York Times
June 11, 2021
A new paper from the Economic Policy Institute analyzes where America’s wages would be if worker pay actually tracked with worker productivity. They found that the median American worker earns $9.95 less per hour than their counterparts from 40 years ago.
Let me say that again: If you’re a typical American worker, you should be earning about $10 more per hour than you actually do. You’re working harder than your parents and grandparents, and you’re making, on average, $400 less per week than they did.
The EPI paper doesn’t stop there: It also disproves 40 years of trickle-down lies that mysterious “market forces” are the cause of sluggish wage growth. Policy choices, not the invisible hand, have taken this money out of your paycheck and leveraged it over to wealthy Americans, and EPI actually put a price tag on every single trickle-down policy and what it’s cost you out of your paycheck.
In this week’s episode of “Pitchfork Economics,” economist Larry Mishel and EPI director of research Josh Bivens discuss their findings and characterize the three biggest trickle-down policy decisions that have resulted in American workers making much less over the last 40 years.
Business Insider
June 11, 2021
With the economy down 7 million jobs from February 2020 and low labor force participation rates, the numbers don’t add up to a labor shortage, according to economists and union leaders.
Elise Gould, a senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, explained that employers are fundamentally having trouble finding the workers they want at the wages they want to pay them. “We’re not seeing the acceleration in wages that suggests they [employers] are trying that hard. And I think if they were, you’d see it in wage growth,” she said.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
June 11, 2021
The decision by Republican governors in 25 states — including Maryland last week — to pull out of federal unemployment insurance (UI) support in their states is dangerously shortsighted. The most recent data show that the economy is improving but still far from healthy. Cutting back aid for jobless workers now, while suitable jobs are still not available for many of them, is not just cruel — it is damaging to these states’ long-term economic health.
A robust unemployment insurance system serves three main purposes. The first is straightforward — providing a financial cushion to workers who lose their job through no fault of their own, so that they can still pay the bills and keep food on the table while they search for new employment. Aside from being the humane thing to do, providing this safety net is also economically prudent. No state economy benefits from workers and families falling behind on mortgages or auto loans, being evicted, having cars and homes repossessed, cutting back on food, or delaying or opting out of needed health care. Yet, these outcomes will become more likely in the states cutting aid for the jobless.
The Hill
June 11, 2021
Josh Bivens/Economic Policy Institute: “They should definitely stand pat.” Fed officials view the price spike as a temporary consequence of the economy’s rapid reopening….and say supply will eventually rise to meet demand. “We’re measuring prices relative to a year ago and prices had just collapsed. and so if you take out what economists call that base effect, you get numbers more like just over 2% for core inflation over the past 12 months. That’s not much to worry about at all.”
Hearst TV
June 11, 2021