Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, and South Carolina have also announced plans to terminate the benefits they blame for slowing hiring.
But it’s an idea that is hotly disputed.
“Cutting pandemic UI benefits now, as some states have done or are considering, will not just hurt workers who are depending on federal benefits while they cannot find work or are unable to work, it will also drag on the economy, as those benefits are supporting spending,” wrote the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute’s Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz.
Reuters
May 14, 2021
Though the numbers are encouraging, there still aren’t enough jobs available for everyone who is unemployed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which analyzes jobs impacting low- and middle-income workers.
On average, there were 9.8 million unemployed workers compared with 8.1 million job openings in March. That means there were 1.2 unemployed workers for every job opening.
In other words, for every 12 unemployed workers, there were only 10 jobs available, the institute said. That means there were no jobs available for 1.6 million unemployed workers, no matter what they did.
The most impacted were educational services, accommodation and food services, other services, and transportation and utilities, where there were more than three unemployed workers for every two job openings, the institute’s analysis showed.
Chicago Tribune
May 14, 2021
“Particularly with the lack of a Wage and Hour administrator, it is tougher to go forward with proactive things,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at DOL and now a senior economist and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It’s going into new territory, and it makes sense—they need a wage and hour administrator in there to lead on that.”
Bloomberg Law
May 14, 2021
Lee was most recently the president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which put on that 2014 conference and has been critical of free trade policies. Earlier this year, she testified on Capitol Hill in support of the Biden administration’s plan to bolster workers here in the U.S., drawing attention to low-wage workers who rely on federal anti-poverty programs to make ends meet.
At the Labor Department, Lee will turn her attention to labor practices and abuses overseas. The bureau she heads up has already been scrutinizing the products made with forced labor in Xinjiang, an issue she is expected to weigh in on during future China trade talks.
NPR
May 14, 2021
Bob spoke with Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, and former chief economist for the Department of Labor during the Obama administration, to find out what the numbers can really tell us, and what they can’t.
WNYC On Media
May 14, 2021
Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said there is some evidence of a labor shortage in the leisure and hospitality industry. Wages may be slowly increasing but they’re still not high enough to attract workers, she argued.
Shierholz said fast-food employers are competing with hurdles like child care, ongoing health concerns and low wages. She said annual earnings for non-supervisory leisure and hospitality workers remain around $22,000 a year.
If employers want to bounce back, they need to address workforce concerns, Shierholz recommended.
“Listen to what workers need and then try to meet those,” she said. “People’s lives are just a lot more chaotic than they were before the recession. As much as policies can be adjusted to make room for that, that will help attract workers.”
ABC News
May 14, 2021
Alexia Fernandez Campbell, Senior Reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, and Terri Gerstein, Senior Fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and Director of the State and Local Enforcement Project at the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program, talk with reporter Chris Bangert-Drowns about wage theft during the pandemic, potential enforcement failures by the Department of Labor, and how to best end the practice.
WPFW
May 14, 2021
David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, told The American Independent Foundation that with the economy still 8.2 million jobs behind pre-pandemic levels, it was not the time to be cutting back unemployment benefits.
“There are far more people looking for work and unable to find it than there are employers unable to fill vacancies, and pulling back on [unemployment insurance] will only slow down the recovery,” he said. “To the extent that employers in some industries — like restaurants and leisure and hospitality — are having trouble finding staff, they need to take a hard look at the wages and quality of those jobs. Those industries are notoriously some of the lowest paying industries in the economy.”
He added, “I don’t think anyone should be surprised that some people might not be eager to take difficult jobs that are even harder now — and that might put their health at risk — if employers aren’t offering better pay and benefits than they were offering prior to the pandemic.”
The American Independent
May 14, 2021
American-made steel has been essential to our national security and our economy for decades. Now, with our economy beginning to recover from the COVID-19 crisis, it’s essential that the Biden administration continue supporting the U.S. steel industry by keeping Section 232 steel measures in place.
Morning Consult
May 14, 2021
Wages overall have not shot up significantly, which would be expected if employers needed to lure workers away from the higher unemployment benefits, said Valerie Wilson, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. And the leisure and hospitality industry, a low-wage sector that would be most affected by a disincentive, had the nation’s strongest growth last month, adding 331,000 jobs.
“If it was true people were staying out because of the money, they certainly wouldn’t be coming back to the lowest-paying jobs,” she said.
Boston Globe
May 14, 2021
“It’s just breathtakingly terrible economics,” Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017, said in a tweet.
“It will cause enormous suffering of those whose benefits are cut off, and damage state economies by turning away federal money that is providing fiscal support,” she added.
CNBC
May 14, 2021
“In this era, there’s been more uncertainty than ever before, so I wouldn’t hang my hat on any number,” former Department of Labor chief economist Heidi Shierholz tells Axios.
Axios
May 14, 2021
Another sign of two Americas: Black unemployment rate rose slightly to 9.7% vs. 5.3% for whites, “making Black workers the only racial and ethnic group (as a whole) to experience worsening metrics,” according to Elise Gould, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. “Clearly, these two groups are experiencing a very different labor market.”
MarketWatch
May 14, 2021
Other economists, including Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, say unemployment benefits’ disincentive effect is overstated. She said if there was a significant shortage of labor, employers wouldn’t be able to hire more than 900,000 workers in a month, as they did in March, and wages would be escalating at a much more rapid rate.
Dr. Shierholz, who worked in the Obama administration, said the pandemic caused a huge disruption in the labor market and it will take time for the dust to settle.
“And if the extended benefits mean some workers can take the time to find a job that’s a better match for their skills, and pays them a better wage, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing,” she said.
The Wall Street Journal
May 14, 2021
Currently, in 33 states and Washington, D.C., infant care is more expensive than college, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
CNBC
May 14, 2021
Vermont has plenty of company in facing calls for unemployment insurance reform. Nationally, experts say the crisis has exposed deep problems in states’ unemployment systems.
The problem was especially pronounced last spring. For every 10 people across the country who succeeded in lining up unemployment benefits in the first month of the pandemic, five to six more either tried and were unable to file a claim, or did not try to apply because it seemed too difficult, according to a study by the Washington, D.C-based Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.
…
“This is another part of the infrastructure in our country that needs to be updated, and we need to put resources into our systems so this doesn’t happen again,” said Elise Gould, an expert on wages and poverty at the Economic Policy Institute. “This is the kind of trouble that many people were facing in the past. But it happened so quickly when millions were claiming that it became clear to more people how broken the system was.”
VT Digger
May 14, 2021
“Employers simply don’t want to raise wages high enough to attract workers,” observes Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist for the Department of Labor who is now policy director at the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute. “I often suggest that whenever anyone says, ‘I can’t find the workers I need,’ she should really add, ‘at the wages I want to pay.’”
LA Times
May 14, 2021
While there is no single measure for workforce shortage, increased work hours and wages are considered some of the signs that indicate employers are struggling to fill jobs and the labor market is tightening, according to Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute. Both occurred in April.
Average weekly hours for workers in leisure in hospitality significantly increased in April, reaching 26.7 hours, up from its pre-pandemic levels of 25.8 hours in February 2020, according to data from the Labor Department.
“If employers really can’t find the workers that they need, they’ll respond by ramping up the hours of the workers,” Shierholz told Yahoo Money.
Yahoo Finance
May 14, 2021
Even so, college seniors will be competing against a larger-than-usual universe of job seekers when you include last year’s crop of graduates.
“Because there is a large pool of unemployed workers, companies can pick exactly who they want and skip over people with less experience,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.
Graduating into a recession has historically led to poor outcomes for many young people, with research showing that they sometimes bear long-running scars. Starting a career in a recession can lead to lower incomes for as long as a decade afterward for those graduates, compared with their peers who completed college just before or after a recession.
Associated Press
May 14, 2021
Perhaps it would be OK if the average American worker shared in the largesse, but they have been left behind. An analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute found the ratio of compensation between CEOs and their workers was 21-to-1 in 1965; by 2019, the ratio was 320 to 1.
Boston Globe
May 14, 2021
“Hard to single out unemployment benefits as ‘dampening’ job growth in the lowest-wage industries when those same industries are the ones with the fastest job growth,” Ben Zipperer, economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, tweeted on Friday.
CNN
May 14, 2021
South Carolina and Montana residents will be cut off from federal pandemic unemployment benefits next month, with Republican governors in each state claiming the payments have led to a workforce shortage. Economists say that’s not the case.
“Employers are just angry that they are unable to find workers at relatively low wages,” Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, said in an interview. “The jobs being posted are more stressful, more risky, harder jobs than they were pre-COVID. … When the job is more stressful, then it should command a higher wage.”
…
Shierholz told ABC News that after the $600 bonus on unemployment expired at the end of July, “You should have seen a bump up in employment, and you can’t see that in the data so it just points to that it wasn’t really causing the labor supply effect. It’s just difficult to imagine that something half that big is having any effect now.”
But a report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that a more likely reason some employers aren’t attracting workers is that many of these businesses are offering too-low wages. In a true labor shortage, the report states, wages will rise as does competition among employers. But wages aren’t growing — at least not quickly enough.
ABC News
May 14, 2021
Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department showed the U.S. added 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the 1 million gain economists had forecast. Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, talks with Bloomberg’s Caroline Hyde, Romaine Bostick and Joe Weisenthal on “What’d You Miss?” about the growing pains as the economy rapidly reopens.
Bloomberg TV
May 14, 2021
Valerie Wilson: Child care responsibilities disproportionately fall on women. And so at a time when everyone was home, children and parents, women clearly took on more of those responsibilities, but they took on those responsibilities at the same time that they would usually be working. So there was some difficult tradeoffs.
PBS Newshour
May 14, 2021
The Biden administration plans to name Thea Lee, a former AFL-CIO trade official, to head the Labor Department’s international affairs division, according to people familiar with the appointment.
Ms. Lee, who most recently served as president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank that often critiques free trade policies, is slated to become the deputy undersecretary for international labor affairs. In that job, she will oversee the bureau that investigates labor rights, forced labor and child trafficking around the globe.
Wall Street Journal
May 14, 2021
The very first thing we talked about, he pulled out a graph that I’d made with Larry Mishel, which showed the gap between productivity growth and median compensation. Okay. So productivity growth grows, grows, grows — not as fast as we’d like but it does grow, you know, a percent percent and a half per year — on trend, and the median compensation, the compensation workers right in the middle of the scale — was flat, flat flat for, you know, not all of those years, and in fact, in the latter nineties, when the job market really tightened up precisely like my earlier theories, were trying predict, then you saw some action at the median. But for the most part — and by the way, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens have a forthcoming paper on this which is really elucidated, you need to get them on here and talk to them about it — and Joe Biden, who was the vice president elect then pointed to that graph and said this is what I want to work on. I want middle-class people to get a fair shake. I want to think about the policy agenda that’s going to, in my words, relink median compensation and overall economic growth. And that agenda is a deep one.
Bloomberg
May 14, 2021
“Employers can’t really expect to post jobs that are actually inherently different and harder than pre-pandemic,” Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, told Yahoo Money. “They can’t expect to post them at the same wages, and get the same number of workers.”
Yahoo Finance
May 14, 2021
Another point to consider: Many of the anecdotes about the inability to hire workers are coming from restaurant owners and others in the relatively low-paying service industry. Yet according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, low-wage sectors as a whole showed “notably faster job growth” in April than other sectors. EPI argued that a bigger problem is the lingering pandemic effects on schools, child care providers and families, which are forcing many women to stay home to care for dependents.
LA Times
May 14, 2021
One of the most urgent questions in economics is why pay for middle-income workers has increased only slightly since the 1970s, even as pay for those near the top has escalated.
For years, the rough consensus among economists was that inexorable forces like technology and globalization explained much of the trend. But in a new paper, Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, conclude that government is to blame. “Intentional policy decisions (either of commission or omission) have generated wage suppression,” they write.
Included among these decisions are policymakers’ willingness to tolerate high unemployment and to let employers fight unions aggressively; trade deals that force workers to compete with low-paid labor abroad; and the tacit or explicit blessing of new legal arrangements, like employment contracts that make it harder for workers to seek new jobs.
Together, Dr. Mishel and Dr. Bivens argue, these developments deprived workers of bargaining power, which kept their wages low.
New York Times
May 14, 2021