Preserving Payrolls and
Supporting Unemployed People
This week’s economic news has been
sobering beyond precedent: 10
million Americans filed unemployment claims in the
last two weeks alone, and Oxford economists project that 20 million
more will do so in the next few weeks. With lives and livelihoods at
risk, experts are calling on government to support those both with and
without jobs—and Americans
agree. “The American public is very concerned that
the money [of stimulus relief] be used to support workers, to keep
employees on payroll and that it not be used for things like stock
buybacks or excessive CEO pay," Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia
Wong told
Hill.TV this week.
-
The coronavirus economic
crisis: “Fundamentally, this needs to be a government
solution. Individual acts of charity or trying to keep the economy
afloat are not sufficient at this moment,” Roosevelt Director of
Progressive Thought Mike Konczal tells Vox in a new explainer. “The
recession is ultimately a collective problem, and the government will
be the one who determines what happens to small business,
self-employed people, and so on down the line.” As Roosevelt Fellow
Darrick Hamilton adds, this unprecedented economic shock will
disproportionately harm workers of color: “We know that Black, Latinx,
and Native people . . . have lower levels of reserves, and we also
know that their employment is more precarious than that of white
people.” Read
on.
-
Another angle: “This dramatic spike in jobless
claims is an American peculiarity. In almost no other country are jobs
being destroyed so fast. Why? Because throughout the world,
governments are protecting employment,” University of California,
Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
write in
a New York Times op-ed. “. . . government
should pay not only wages of idled workers, but also essential
business maintenance costs, like rents, utilities, interest on debt,
health insurance premiums, and other costs that are vital for the
survival of businesses in locked down
sectors.”
- Moving forward: The CARES Act passed by
Congress last week is an essential, if imperfect, leap forward. It’s
also a springboard for policymakers to invest more in worker and
health care security in future relief packages. Citing recent polling,
Wong argues for the blog that “the popular support is there for
building on the momentum of the CARES Act to create a more resilient
economy for all.” Read
more.
Ending
Shareholder Primacy Once and for All
“Corporate greed did not cause the coronavirus, but it did
create an economy extremely vulnerable to crisis—one that will only
make it harder to fight the economic consequences of this pandemic,”
Roosevelt Fellow Lenore Palladino writes for Boston Review.
“Working families do not have safety nets because they have been
underpaid for years, and are now relying on the federal government to
come through with guarantees for paid sick leave and income support .
. . We must put an end to shareholder primacy now, both to improve
business resiliency and to distribute economic gains more
fairly.” Read
on.
- An unequal playing field: "For the bigger
players, it will be easier to go back to business as normal of late
last year,” Mike
Konzcal tells HuffPost. “This could present a
perfect opportunity for big businesses to swoop in and consolidate
their market power since even the small businesses that survive a
recession are likely to come out of it with considerable
debt."
The
Double Wage Gap and the Bottom
Line
“As the American economy currently grapples with the onslaught
of the coronavirus, the main work-related challenges
currently confronting Black women are reductions in work
hours or job loss. But if and when the US economy recovers, African
American women will once again face the double gap,”
Michelle Holder (assistant professor of economics at John Jay
College, City University of New York) writes in a new Roosevelt report
about the confluence of race and gender income gaps. Based on three
quantitative methodologies, Holder estimates that Black women lost
approximately $50 billion in involuntarily forfeited wages in the US
in 2017 alone—systemic undercompensation with generational
consequences for wealth-building in the Black community. Read
more.
- Why this matters: “Like most of our problems
today, the double gap is a structural issue that requires a rebalance
of power,” Roosevelt Managing Director of Communications Kendra
Bozarth writes for the blog. “Expecting US companies to pay workers,
especially Black women, what they’re worth ignores the reality of who
our economy is working for and who it is working against. Until Black
women are made whole, none of us are.” Read
on.
Rewriting the
Rules—During the Pandemic and
Beyond
Roosevelt is covering all angles of the coronavirus
economic crisis and response efforts in a new blog
series:
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