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The UI Supplement Is
Necessary for Recovery
On the heels of the
worst
economic quarter
in American history, the $600-a-week unemployment insurance (UI)
supplement preventing
financial ruin for
millions is now likely to plummet to $200. As Groundwork Collaborative
Executive Director and Roosevelt Fellow Michael Linden writes in a CNN
Business op-ed, the argument for gutting UI doesn’t add up: “What's
preventing people from going back to work is [not UI but] that there
aren't enough jobs . . . What's preventing people from going back to
work is that some work is still unsafe, as COVID-19 cases continue to
rise around the nation. What's preventing people from going back to
work is a lack of childcare and the inability of schools to reopen
safely.” Read
on.
This week on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Michigan State University economist and
Roosevelt board member Lisa Cook explained how reductions to
unemployment benefits could
harm the economy.
Unsurprisingly, the effects may fall hardest
upon Black and Latinx women; per
a new survey conducted by PerryUndem and
commissioned by the Time’s Up Foundation, 51 percent of Latinx women
and 48 percent of Black women already lack the money to cover
fundamental expenses like food and housing.
Congress Must Do More to
Rebalance Workplace Power
“While COVID-19 has destabilized life
and work in unpredictable ways, the imbalance of power in the
workplace is within Congress’s control,” Roosevelt Director of
Education, Jobs, and Worker Power Suzanne Kahn and Senior Manager of
Editorial Strategy Matt Hughes write for the blog. After extending the
UI supplement, they argue, policymakers should pursue three policies
to boost worker power in the long term: change the definition of
suitable employment; create sector-based, labor-management
commissions; and make workplaces more transparent and democratic.
Read
more.
 Expand the Consumer
Safety Net
Ten years after Dodd–Frank created the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency’s full powers
remain untapped; in a new report from the Great Democracy Initiative
(GDI), Graham Steele explains how the CFPB can use its legal authority
to expand the consumer safety net—with
three critical reforms. “Constructing a consumer
safety net requires an understanding that people actually bear very
little responsibility for the financial challenges that befall them,”
Steele writes in
a Barron’s op-ed about the report. “It
also requires a CFPB led by public servants who are willing to use
their existing legal authorities to aggressively protect people from a
predatory financial industry.”
 Climate Justice Means
Systemic Change
“If communities of color are
consistently disempowered, there will always be a place to burn fossil
fuels. There will always be people you can poison,” Roosevelt Director
of Climate Policy Rhiana Gunn-Wright tells Bloomberg Green in an
interview. “We’re in the midst of a recession, a public health
emergency, climate change, a political emergency on lots of levels.
People are talking about systems change. They are saying something is
rotten here. I don’t think there’s an actual path for anything other
than policies that seek to address injustice and climate at the same
time.” Read
more.
 Rescheduled: Hidden Rules
of Wealth and the Role of Reparations
On Wednesday, August 5, 2020, at 3
pm ET, join Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong, Community
Change President Dorian Warren, and Sandy Darity—Roosevelt Senior
Fellow and Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and
African American Studies—for a webinar discussion of how the hidden
rules of race have driven today’s wealth inequality—and why
reparations are a critical and powerful tool to move forward.
Register
now.
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