New survey and report reveals mistreatment of H-2A farmworkers is common: The coronavirus puts them further at risk [feedly]

New survey and report reveals mistreatment of H-2A farmworkers is common: The coronavirus puts them further at risk
https://www.epi.org/blog/new-survey-and-report-reveals-mistreatment-of-h-2a-farmworkers-is-common-the-coronavirus-puts-them-further-at-risk/

The irony should be lost on no one that NPR's reporting on the Trump administration's push to lower wages for H-2A farmworkers came out the same week that a new report was published by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM) that calls into question whether the H-2A temporary work visa program should exist at all without major reforms to protect migrant workers.

The report details the findings of in-depth interviews with 100 H-2A workers, who "reported discrimination, sexual harassment, wage theft, and health and safety violations by their employers—and a chilling lack of recourse." Every single H-2A worker "experienced at least one serious legal violation of their rights, and 94% experienced three or more." And before they had even arrived in the United States, many were already heavily in debt as a result of paying illegal recruitment fees in exchange for the opportunity to work in a low-wage farm job.

Thanks to numerous past media reports, government audits, and reportsfrom advocates, the public has long known that abuses like these are common among H-2A employers. This is not simply about a few "bad apple" employers. Rather, this is largely a structural problem. Because employers own and control the visa status of their H-2A employees, H-2A workers have a powerful incentive to never complain about mistreatment: If an H-2A worker gets fired, they become deportable. That's why one EPI study found that H-2A workers earn roughly the same as similarly situated unauthorized immigrant workers, who have virtually no workplace rights in practice.

During the coronavirus pandemic, H-2A employers should be devising safety plans and procedures and procuring additional safety and sanitation equipment. H-2A workers desperately need access to masks, gloves, and other equipment, as well ways to disinfect their hands, tools, clothing, and machinery. They also need to be able to keep a safe distance from other workers where they live and while they're being transported to and from worksites. And since housing and transportation is provided by employers in the H-2A program, bosses of H-2A workers have a special responsibility to ensure this is the case.

Recent news reports plus the admission of at least one agribusiness representative about the cost of safety measures do not inspire confidence: They have revealed that many farmworkers and H-2A workers are currently at risk of infection and lacking basic health and safety protections. Sadly, if H-2A workers contract the coronavirus, like other farmworkers, whether they'll have access to paid leave is an open question that will depend on the policies of their employer and the size of the farm they work on.

CDM's groundbreaking report is a stark reminder that the H-2A program is "Ripe for Reform" and must be overhauled to ensure basic decency and fairness. But so far during the coronavirus pandemic, while the federal government has claimed that H-2A workers are a "national security priority," they've yet to take any new concrete steps to ensure that H-2A workers are able to stay safe and healthy.

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Women have been hit hard by the coronavirus labor market: Their story is worse than industry-based data suggest [feedly]

Women have been hit hard by the coronavirus labor market: Their story is worse than industry-based data suggest
https://www.epi.org/blog/women-have-been-hit-hard-by-the-coronavirus-labor-market-their-story-is-worse-than-industry-based-data-suggest/

Key findings:

• The latest payroll employment data for March show that women were the hardest hit by initial job losses in the COVID-19 labor market; women were 50.0% of payroll employment in February, but represented 58.8% of job losses in March.
• If women's share of new unemployment insurance (UI) claims in recent weeks was driven solely by sector-level differences in gender composition, then they would have accounted for roughly 45% of new UI claims, or about 6.8 million new claims.
• However, relying solely on the gender composition of sectoral unemployment may lead to an underestimate of new UI claims that were filed by women. Using three states that provide direct estimates of the gender composition of new UI claims shows that the female share of these claims is substantially higher than what we estimate by using only the sectoral composition of employment by gender.
• We estimate that once the over-representation of women with sectors in new layoffs is corrected for, between 7.8 and 8.4 million women filed for unemployment insurance in the three weeks ending April 4.

Since March 15, 15.1 million workers in the United States have filed for unemployment insurance. Tomorrow, the latest initial unemployment insurance claims will be released by the Department of Labor for the week ending April 11 and estimates suggest that there could be another 4.5 million initial claims reported. These top-line numbers are vital for understanding what is going on in the economy and the extent of the economic insecurity millions of workers and their families are experiencing. But what is less clear is who these workers are and where they work. While national statistics that directly report the demographic characteristics of UI claimants will not be available for months, we use national employment data from March and preliminary state UI reports through April to begin to answer those questions. We find that job losses and furloughs have disproportionately affected women. This is the result of two factors—women are more concentrated in sectors that experienced more job loss, and women also tended to see more job loss than men within these sectors.

We begin by using the Current Establishment Statistics to examine initial job losses by sector and gender. Next we use UI claims data from selected states to estimate the share of UI claims filed by women. 11 states, which represent about 20% of the U.S. workforce, have reported valuable sector-level data on their unemployment insurance claims. We pair this with gender-, state-, and sector-level data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate the number of women who likely filed initial unemployment insurance claims since March 15. In conducting our study, we found that women are likely over-represented in initial job losses as compared to results from the three states with reported gender-specific UI claims data. This over-representation could be due to the types of jobs women hold within each sector—partially the result of occupation segregation—or could be due to other phenomena—for instance, labor market discrimination—which have led to disproportionate shares of women in jobs within each that are more subject to job loss. Either way, it is clear that using sector-level data to estimate the number of women who filed unemployment insurance claims in the last three weeks underestimates the actual number of women experiencing job loss and filing for unemployment

Let's start with the latest Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, providing data for just the beginning of the COVID-19 job market losses. The data for March represented the payroll period including March 12, before the first spike in initial unemployment insurance claims. Payroll employment still fell by 701,000 jobs in March. Using February 2020 as a benchmark, the table below shows job shares by gender as well as job losses that occurred in March by gender for selected sectors. While jobs filled by women represent 50.0% of payroll employment in February, jobs held by women represented 58.8% of job losses in March. The vast majority of the job losses occurred in leisure and hospitality with a loss of 459,000 jobs. In this sector, jobs held by women represented 53.3% of overall employment and 56.9% of job losses. Disproportionate job losses were found in nearly all the largest sectors which experienced significant job losses in March. Women were over-represented in job losses experienced in retail trade and professional and business services. In education and health services, jobs held by men actually increased in March, while jobs held by women fell by 86,000.

Table 1

Overall, the establishment level data show that women were over-represented in job losses, at least in the initial weeks of the COVID-19 labor market.

Now, let's turn to the state-level unemployment insurance claims data available. 11 states, which represent about 20% of the U.S. workforce, have reported valuable sector-level data on their unemployment insurance claims, and three states—Minnesota, North Dakota, and Nevada—have released gender-specific breakdowns of initial UI claims. Using these data, we estimate that women likely filed more UI claims than men, especially during the earlier weeks of the pandemic. This is the result of two factors—women are more concentrated in sectors that saw more job loss, and women also tended to see more job loss than men within sector.

The first column in Table 2 shows that most UI initial claims in Minnesota were filed by women, with women filing larger shares of claims in the early weeks of the pandemic. The second column of Table 2 shows what share of UI claims one would expect should come from women, using a prediction of industry-specific job losses and assuming industry-specific UI claims are distributed according to the share of women who work in those sectors. [i]What is immediately apparent upon comparison is that our estimate based solely on the sectors impacted significantly understate the number of women who filed for unemployment insurance in Minnesota. The pattern holds for North Dakota and Nevada, the two other states that published gender-specific UI data.

This suggests that any estimate based on shares of women in each sector may undercount the number of women who filed for unemployment insurance in the last four weeks. Recall that the establishment survey suggested that 58.8% of job losses were among jobs held by women, and disproportionately even within each sector. The outsized job losses among women wasn't simply because of the overall sectors where job losses occurred, but the occupations or particular jobs within those sectors were skewed towards more losses among women workers. The results below affirm those findings and suggest that using sector-level data from each state alone under-reports gender losses by 11% to 24% depending on the state or specific week. Also, in all three states, the data suggest that women are a slightly higher share of all initial claimants. In Minnesota and North Dakota, it appears that the share of initial claims by women for the week ending March 21 were higher than in subsequent weeks, supporting the prior findings from the establishment survey that women were a larger share of initial job losses.

Table 2

Using what we've learned from these comparisons, we now turn to our estimates of unemployment insurance claims for women nationally and across states. We sum our state-and sector specific claims predictions across all states to get our initial estimate for the share and number of women filing for UI claims as shown in the first two rows of Table 3. Next, we use the fact that sector-specific predictions under-report actual gender shares of UI claims in the three states for which we have data, as discussed in Table 2 above. The underreporting ranges from 6.9 to 10.5 percentage points. We use this range to provide lower- and upper-bound estimates of the share and level of women filing UI claims since March 15. According to our analysis, women represent 52.2% to 55.8% of overall claims and 7.8 to 8.4 million claimants.

Women may continue to be over-represented among claimants, more so than their sector averages would suggest. This may be true for the reasons already stated—women hold jobs within sectors that may be materially different from the jobs men hold. For instance, if women are less likely to be managers within an establishment and all but the high-level managers are laid off, women will be more likely to be laid off. In addition, the CARES Act (link) greatly expanded eligibility for unemployment insurance, including provisions to allow workers to claim benefits if workers had to leave for a variety of reasons related to COVID-19 or state-level social distancing requirements. Workers are eligible for UI because of caregiving responsibilities, that is, they can receive benefits if they need to quit to care for a child whose child care or school is closed. Considering caregiving responsibilities are often disproportionately borne by women, this could mean that they continue to shoulder greater job losses and a larger share of unemployment insurance claims.

We will continue to examine the data as it becomes available and analyze as many demographic characteristics as possible to better understand who across the United States are bearing the brunt of the job losses.

Table 3

---

[i] To create this prediction, we first take industry-specific UI claims from the eleven states that have reported them, calculate average industry-specific UI claim shares of 2019q3 QCEW employment. Then, we apply these shares to Minnesota's industry-specific employment totals, proportionally scaling the resulting industry-specific estimates of Minnesota UI claims so that the total matches Minnesota's reported initial UI claims. Finally, we allocate the resulting predicted industry-specific UI claims to men and women by assuming the UI claims are distributed by gender in the same way in Minnesota's sector-specific employment is, as measured by state-sector-specific female shares of employment in the 2017-2019 basic monthly Current Population Survey. The 11 states that reported relatively complete industry-specific weekly UI initial claims at the 2-digit NAICS level found in state-level employment offices Alabama, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, and Washington.]

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The coronavirus will explode achievement gaps in education [feedly]

The coronavirus will explode achievement gaps in education
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-coronavirus-will-explode-achievement-gaps-in-education/

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Trump administration reportedly looking to cut the already low wages of H-2A migrant farmworkers while giving their bosses a multibillion-dollar bailout [feedly]

Trump administration reportedly looking to cut the already low wages of H-2A migrant farmworkers while giving their bosses a multibillion-dollar bailout
https://www.epi.org/blog/trump-administration-reportedly-looking-to-cut-the-already-low-wages-of-h-2a-migrant-farmworkers-while-giving-their-bosses-a-multibillion-dollar-bailout/

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Trump administration has weakened crucial worker protections needed to combat the coronavirus: Agencies tasked with protecting workers have put them in danger [feedly]

The Trump administration has weakened crucial worker protections needed to combat the coronavirus: Agencies tasked with protecting workers have put them in danger
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-trump-administration-has-weakened-crucial-worker-protections-needed-to-combat-the-coronavirus-agencies-tasked-with-protecting-workers-have-put-them-in-danger/

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Human-Capital Costs of the Crisis [feedly]

The Human-Capital Costs of the Crisis
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/covid19-pandemic-erosion-of-human-capital-by-barry-eichengreen-2020-04

text only

Unlike a hurricane or earthquake, the coronavirus pandemic has caused no damage to physical capital stock. But firm-specific skills have no value when the firm that uses them goes out of business, which is one reason why US productivity, wages, and economic growth are likely to be affected for years to come.

BERKELEY – US President Donald Trump tells us that once COVID-19 is contained and it is safe to go back to work, the economy will be "great again." Is he right?


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There is at least one reason to think he is. After all, unlike a hurricane or earthquake, the pandemic has caused no damage to the physical capital stock. It follows, Trump and his advisers argue, that we can pick up where we left off. The economy took a time-out, but now output will rebound swiftly to pre-crisis levels and growth will proceed as before.

We are even told that the economy will be stronger than ever. People who put off buying a car because it was unsafe to visit the dealership will do so now. Firms that have put expansion plans on hold will double down on investment. Baseball teams unable to play in the spring will schedule double-headers in the fall.

Unfortunately, reality will not oblige Trump's rosy scenario. Households newly aware that they lack the financial reserves to deal with unforeseen circumstances will increase their precautionary saving and continue to put off buying that new car. Firms won't invest in expanding capacity until they are confident that the virus won't return. With the developing world entering and exiting the crisis later than the United States, exports will be weak.

The good news is that public spending can replace the private spending that is lost. With interest rates at rock-bottom levels, the US still has fiscal space, despite its staggeringly large deficit. It's important to recognize that fiscal stimulus will be needed for an extended period, given that higher precautionary saving and weak investment will persist. The temptation to turn off the fiscal tap too early, as the US (and Europe) did in 2010, must be resisted.

But the supply-side damage from the crisis is not so easily repaired. Inevitably, supply chains will have to be restructured in ways that make production costlier. Even if they have to pay more, firms will produce closer to home, whether because of their heightened recognition of the risks of relying on far-flung operations, or in response to political arguments for achieving national self-sufficiency in the provision of essential goods. For firms, enhanced security and certainty will mean higher costs and lower productivity, which will translate into higher prices for consumers.


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But this is a small problem compared to the impact on labor. Workers experiencing unemployment in a downturn can be permanently scarred. They are less able to form durable attachments with employers and more likely to experience additional episodes of joblessness. Their wages tend to be lower, not just in the immediate aftermath of the event, but for decades, even over their entire working lifetimes. Lower wages are a sign that these workers' productivity has been impaired.

In other words, while there has been no destruction of physical capital in the pandemic, the risk of damage to human capital is significant. At a time when unemployment in the US is on course to reach 25% and higher, this is a serious concern.

Historical evidence of the negative effects of unemployment on human capital is extensive. My Berkeley colleague Jesse Rothstein has documented their prevalence following the Great Recession. My teacher Nick Crafts, now at the University of Warwick, analyzed their ubiquity during the Great Depression.

In part, these effects reflect the frictions that arise when a worker's attachment to a firm is broken. Firm-specific skills have no value when the firm that uses them goes out of business. Even when a worker's skill set is more widely applicable, finding a suitable match with another employer may take time. This suggests that the US is more at risk of squandering human capital than European countries, where governments are pursuing ambitious policies to preserve employer-employee relationships.

Unemployment and hardship can also lead to demoralization, depression, and other psychological traumas, lowering affected individuals' productivity and attractiveness to employers. We saw this in the 1930s, not just in declining rates of labor force participation but also in rising rates of suicide and falling rates of marriage. Here, too, one worries especially about the US, given its relatively limited safety net, its opioid crisis, and its "deaths of despair."

Many of these negative consequences are most prevalent when unemployment is recurrent or extended. If this downturn turns out to be as short as it is sharp, one can hope that the loss of human capital, the resulting damage to the economy's productive capacity, and the pain and suffering that come with them will be limited.

The length of the downturn will depend above all on our success at containing the coronavirus and mitigating its effects. And that success will hinge, in turn, on our cohesiveness as a society and on the quality of our leadership. For Americans, that is not a very hopeful note to end on.
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Vietnam’s Low-Cost COVID-19 Strategy

Hong Kong Nguyen is a researcher at the A.I. for Social Data Lab in Hanoi.  

Vietnam's Low-Cost COVID-19 Strategy
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/vietnam-low-cost-success-against-covid19-by-hong-kong-nguyen-2020-04

text only

Tightened border controls, agile health departments, tech platforms, and a hand-washing song that went viral have added up to a frugal but highly effective response to the threat of COVID-19. The country's success provides a model that other developing and emerging economies should follow.

BEPPU – As COVID-19 expands across the southern hemisphere, governments there have a lot to learn from Vietnam's approach. Clear communication and government-citizen cooperation that leveraged technology are the main reasons why the country has had relatively few cases.


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Much attention has been paid to other models in Asia. Taiwanese health authorities investigated cases of pneumonia reported in Wuhan before community spread occurred. South Korea installed a nonstop emergency response system to screen all travelers entering the country from Wuhan in early January. Similarly, Singapore mobilized an inter-agency taskforce for extensive contact tracing, targeted community quarantine, and aggressive testing, while also covering the costs of screening and treatment.

These countries' timely response was rooted in their leaders' palpable awareness of the severity of the new virus. Vietnam's government tightened border controls and set hospitals and local health departments on high alert for the new pneumonia cases on January 3 – before the first fatality in China and only three days after confirmation of the outbreak there. Vietnam's first cases were recorded on January 23, and the situation appeared to be under control until an additional wave of cases fueled by foreign tourists and returning travelers and students. Still, Vietnam managed the crisis so well that it avoided becoming a hot spot.

Perhaps most remarkably, unlike South Korea, which has spent considerable funds on aggressive testing, or Singapore, which has established strong epidemiological surveillance, Vietnam has followed a budget-friendly approach that has proven equally effective. Despite expectations of high rates of transmission, owing to a shared border with China and the high volume of bilateral trade, Vietnam has recorded only one-fifth the number of infections that much-lauded Singapore has, with no reported deaths to date. Our recent study of Vietnam's COVID-19 policy response attributed the country's initial success in slowing the rate of infection to the authorities' focus on communication and public education through technology platforms and systematic tracing of pathogen carriers.

With 65% of Vietnam's 96 million people online, official news outlets and social media channels (60% are on Facebook) successfully shared information about the new virus. In an age when it is difficult to track and stop the spread of mis-/disinformation, understanding the threat, particularly its contagion rate, has been key to citizens' willingness to cooperate, whether through social distancing or self-isolation.

Since January 3, Vietnamese media have described the disease emerging from Wuhan as a "strange" or "mysterious" pneumonia. Between January 9 and March 15, an average of 127 articles on the topic were published daily in 13 of the most popular online news outlets, leaving little room for rumors and fake news to spread. As a result, Vietnamese generally have not viewed COVID-19 as just another seasonal flu, but as a serious illness as menacing as the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The public's experience with SARS, as well as with the swine and avian flus, have helped to shape perceptions of COVID-19, and likely influenced people's readiness to respond.


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Comprehensive contact tracing works only when individuals understand the urgency of the issue and are willing to provide an honest and detailed account of their travel and interactions. This is true even in countries under single-party rule. In Vietnam, citizens have been voluntarily sharing personal health information via a government-launched app called NCOVI. It has become the top free app in Vietnam since its launch on March 10.

Although there is no Vietnamese equivalent to community-developed apps tracking compromised locations or individuals with suspected symptoms, as in Taiwan and South Korea, tech-based platforms have proved valuable. They provide up-to-date information on the outbreak and tips for disease prevention, quickly correct misinformation, collect information systematically, and identify case clusters as early as possible.

Technology is also helping those fight the pandemic. In the three months since the beginning of the outbreak, local hospitals, research institutes, and universities have created reliable platforms to track COVID-19 quarantine cases, increase production of hand sanitizers, publish important clinical findings on the disease, and develop low-cost test kits for the virus that causes it.

Investments in mitigation and response can take other simple, yet powerful forms. The song "Ghen Co Vy," which went viral globally (no pun intended) after appearing on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, helped build public awareness of the new virus and the importance of hand washing. More notably, as targeted and mandatory quarantines of all returning travelers were tightened in late March, individual updates and reviews about the availability and quality of government-run dorms, food, health checkups, and testing attracted thousands of reactions on Facebook. Hundreds of pictures of carefully packaged breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and midnight snacks have circulated so widely that the two-week isolation period is favorably perceived, which has encouraged compliance.

As the global pandemic worsens daily and uncertainty envelopes much of the world, Vietnam's experience demonstrates how, by focusing on early risk assessment, effective communication, and government-citizen cooperation, an under-resourced country with a precarious health-care system can manage the pandemic. In facing an indefinite unknown, decisive leadership, accurate information, and community solidarity empower people to protect themselves – and each other.

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

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