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Raise Wages, Reverse
Economic Inequity
With the CARES Act’s expanded
unemployment benefits set
to expire by the
end of the month, Congress has both an obligation and an opportunity:
extending increased benefits—which have exceeded the pre-pandemic
earnings of 68 percent of unemployed people—and making changes that
can translate the short-term boosts into long-term wage increases for
millions. Roosevelt Managing Director of Corporate Power Bharat
Ramamurti and Great Democracy Initiative Fellow Lindsay Owens explain
in a New York
Times op-ed: “First, change the rules so that
people lose unemployment insurance only if they turn down offers with
wages comparable to their current unemployment benefits. That gives
laid-off workers leverage to bargain for an offer that sustains their
new, higher level of income. Second, to protect employers and
encourage them to offer these higher wages, provide employers with a
federal subsidy that covers the full difference between an unemployed
worker’s former wage and their new one. Call it a ‘fair wage
guarantee.’” Read
on.
-
Send regular stimulus checks:
In an open letter published
this week by the Economic Security Project, 156
top economists—including Roosevelt Fellows Darrick Hamilton, Michael
Linden, Lenore Palladino, and Naomi Zewde—call for recurring direct
stimulus payments tied to economic indicators. “Direct cash payments
are an essential tool that will boost economic security, drive
consumer spending, hasten the recovery, and promote certainty at all
levels of government and the economy—for as long as necessary,” they
write. Read
more.
The Ongoing Fight for
Women’s Rights
The Supreme Court’s June Medical
Services v. Russo decision last week to uphold abortion rights in
Louisiana is an important, though incomplete, win for reproductive
freedom, as Roosevelt Director of Health Equity Andrea Flynn writes
for Ms. Magazine. But on Wednesday, the court
squelched any fleeting relief with its
Little
Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania ruling, which strikes again at the
Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate and will deprive as many
as 126,400 women of no-cost contraceptive services. As Flynn writes,
“We are in the middle of a global pandemic to which conservative
lawmakers are arguably negligent; we face an unprecedented public
health and economic crisis that is disproportionately harming women;
and anti-choice activists and lawmakers remain laser-focused on
eroding access to reproductive health care.”
- How school closures affect
women: In a new explainer, Vox’s Anna North examines
the debate
over K–12 school reopenings and the potential
effects on parents and students. As Michelle
Holder (assistant professor of economics at John
Jay College, City University of New York) tells North, “Closing public
schools on a prolonged basis poses real difficulties for low-wage
workers”—particularly for women of color and single mothers. Such
unique difficulties for women might garner more attention in the
policy sphere if women were better represented in the field of
economics, as Holder said in a Bloomberg piece on the Federal
Reserve’s diversity problems. “In the economic
profession, women are the significant minority . . . Issues that
affect women don’t really bubble to the surface in terms of mainstream
economic theory.”
 Black Americans Can’t
Breathe
Per new federal data, Black and Latinx
Americans have been three
times as likely to be infected by the coronavirus
and almost twice as likely to die from it than white Americans. As
Roosevelt Senior Research Associate Kristina Karlsson argues for the
blog, disproportionate
lifetime exposure to toxic air pollution could
well explain some of the disparities: “What’s being overlooked, or
even ignored, is the fact that health outcomes are often influenced by
levers of systemic racism . . . In this case, naming and investigating
the environmental determinants of COVID-19 death, such as air
pollution, underscores the already dire need to implement
Black-centered climate policies as we combat the climate crisis.” Read
on.
 Hidden
Rules of Wealth and the Role of Reparations
On Tuesday, July 14, at 12 pm ET, join
Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong, Roosevelt Senior Fellow
Sandy Darity, and Community Change President Dorian Warren for a
webinar discussion of how the hidden
rules of race have
driven today’s wealth inequality—and how reparations are a critical and powerful tool to move
forward. Register
now.
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