Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go.
They thank Ms. Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles.
It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker. But she wonders whether, once everyday life is safe again, people will remember the role she played when it was not.
"Don't forget that we were open to serve you in your time of need," she said on a break one recent workday afternoon. "You never know when you might need us again."
From the cashier to the emergency room nurse to the drugstore pharmacist to the home health aide taking the bus to check on her older client, the soldier on the front lines of the current national emergency is most likely a woman.
One in three jobs held by women has been designated as essential, according to a New York Times analysis of census data crossed with the federal government's essential worker guidelines. Nonwhite women are more likely to be doing essential jobs than anyone else.
The work they do has often been underpaid and undervalued — an unseen labor force that keeps the country running and takes care of those most in need, whether or not there is a pandemic.
Share of Essential Workers Who Are Women
SHARE WHO ARE WOMEN
TOTAL WORKERS
52%
All essential workers
48,710,000
Social workers
78
2,320,000
Health care
19,090,000
77
Critical retail
53
7,570,000
Medical supplies
520,000
46
Food processing
2,290,000
38
Delivery, warehousing
34
2,620,000
28
Financial IT services
360,000
Utility workers
23
2,100,000
23
Farmers
2,100,000
19
Hazardous materials
330,000
Law enforcement
17
1,940,000
Transit, transportation
15
6,140,000
14
Defense
1,030,000
Resource extraction
11
380,000
Source: American Community Survey microdata, 2014-18; ipums.orgBy The New York Times
Women make up nearly nine out of 10 nurses and nursing assistants, most respiratory therapists, a majority of pharmacists and the overwhelming majority of pharmacy aides and technicians. More than two-thirds of the workers at grocery store checkouts and fast food counters are women.
In normal times, men are a majority of the overall work force. But this crisis has flipped that. In March, the Department of Homeland Security released a memo identifying "Essential Critical Infrastructure Workers," an advisory guide for state and federal officials. It listed scores of jobs, suggesting they were too vital to be halted even as cities and whole states were on lockdown. A majority of those jobs are held by women.
Among all male workers, 28 percent have jobs deemed part of this essential work force. Some of the biggest employers of men in the United States are building trades, like construction and carpentry — lines of work that are now, for the most part, on hold.
Men do make up a majority of workers in a number of essential sectors, including law enforcement, transit and public utilities, and millions face serious and unquestionable risk as they head to work every day. But there are simply not as many of these jobs as there are in the industry at the forefront: health care.
There are 19 million health care workers nationwide, nearly three times as many as in agriculture, law enforcement and the package delivery industry combined.
Long before the outbreak, in an aging and ailing country, the demand for health care was almost limitless. The size of this work force has ballooned over the decades as medical advances extended the lives of the sick and well alike.
There are now four registered nurses for every police officer, and still hospitals raise alarms about nursing shortages. Within this massive, ever-growing and now indispensable part of the economy, nearly four out of five workers are women. This is reflected in another grim statistic: While male doctors and nurses have died on the front lines, a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that women account for 73 percent of the U.S. health care workers who have been infected since the outbreak began.
The nation's health care industry spreads far beyond hospitals, encompassing a vast army of people who tend to the young, old, sick and infirm. This "care work force," said Mignon Duffy, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies women and labor, "is part of the infrastructure of our whole society. It holds everything together." Yet it has long been undervalued, she said, a neglect that is as obvious as ever right now, with acute shortages nationwide of basic safety gear.
"But now we're being forced to identify who the essential workers are," Dr. Duffy said. "And guess who they are?"
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Aurora Ozanick, the 5-year-old daughter of a nurse and a construction worker in Pittsburgh, makes sense of her parents' jobs this way: "Mommy fixes people," she says. "Daddy fixes things."
These days, Bobbi Ozanick — "Mommy" — continues to report to work at the hospital. Her husband, who was laid off when his job site was shut down, stays home with Aurora. Fixing things can wait. This has been hard to digest for both parents.
"The concept of it was one of the weirdest conversations we've ever had," Ms. Ozanick, 33, said. She told her husband that if things got bad, keeping her at work for long hours and putting the health of those around her in jeopardy, he should go with their daughter to a relative's house. He wanted none of that. "His plan is to go apply for what's deemed essential. He used to work in a hospital cafeteria years ago."
But being essential does not at all mean being well compensated or even noticed.
While women have steadily increased their share of high-end health care jobs like surgeons and other physicians, they have also been filling the unseen jobs proliferating on the lowest end of the wage scale, the workers who spend long and little-rewarded days bathing, feeding and medicating some of the most vulnerable people in the country. Of the 5.8 million people working health care jobs that pay less than $30,000 a year, half are nonwhite and 83 percent are women.
Image
Constance Warren is still working at a grocery store in New Orleans, a city where nearly 250 have died of the virus.Credit...Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Home health and personal care aides, jobs that earn little more than minimum wage and until recently were even exempt from basic labor protections, are two of the fastest growing occupations in the entire U.S. job market. More than eight in 10 of these aides are women.
"We're still a part of health care and we're not recognized at all," said Pam Ramsey, 56, who has gone years without health insurance working as a home health aide in rural Pennsylvania.
Ms. Ramsey did not set out to do this. In her 20s, she earned a degree from a trade school in auto body and mechanics, one of just three women in her graduating class of 115. But her father was badly hurt working in a coal mine, and the duty of taking care of him fell to her rather than her brothers. She has been taking care of people, paid and unpaid, ever since.
If protective equipment is in dangerously short supply at big city hospitals, it is virtually nonexistent in Ms. Ramsey's job. She goes to work with no gear beyond what she can find at the dollar store. She does not have a formal letter, like many others have, identifying her as an essential worker. A policeman recently stopped and questioned her when she was out buying medicine.
"People don't look at us because we have no license, no certificate, no proof that we're as good as they are," Ms. Ramsey said. But still she goes to work, bringing whatever rubbing alcohol and peroxide she can get her hands on.
Ms. Ramsey is not alone in having to improvise. While some child care centers are still open for the children of essential workers, this is not true everywhere.
And though educators nationwide are spending long and demanding days teaching online, a young student at home needs an adult there, too. (The federal classification of educator jobs is unclear, so they were not included in the analysis of the essential work force; if they had been, the women's share of the work force would have been substantially higher.)
As a result, many single mothers who have essential jobs are also facing the added emergency of 24-hour child care.
"This one is helping watch this one's child while she works the night shift, then she watches hers for the 7-3 shift," said Keshia Williams, 44, a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Scranton, Pa., where the staff members — "99.9 percent of them" women — are trying to cover an ever-growing list of rotations left unfilled by infected or quarantined co-workers.
"Now we are apparently essential," Ms. Williams said dryly, before describing the critical lack of protective gear where she works. Some N95 masks recently arrived, but she is limited to one a week, an uneasy regimen given that she spends each morning screening residents for the virus. Still, dealing with people face to face is what drew her to her job in the first place. The pandemic has not changed that.
That millions of care workers are "driven by incentives other than purely economic incentives" is in part why this work has traditionally been so undervalued, said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago.
It is a type of work that does not produce an object that can be traded or sold, he said; it is simply work that has to be done. "There is a whole system in place to make us not think of this as critical infrastructure," he said.
Until that system gets a shock.
"I didn't sign up for a pandemic," said Andrea Lindley, 34, an I.C.U. nurse at a Philadelphia hospital where scores of coronavirus patients have been admitted. "But I am not going to walk away when people need me."
Growing up, she wanted to become a doctor, watching her mother come back exhausted and back-sore from long hours as a licensed practical nurse. Health care is harder physical work than people realize — workers in health care and social assistance suffer nonfatal injuries on the job at a rate higher than workers in construction or manufacturing. Ms. Lindley's mother described the job to her this way: "You work too hard and you don't get paid enough."
But Ms. Lindley was attracted to the personal, hands-on practice of nursing. "We are in the rooms way more than the doctors," she said. It is what she still loves about the job. These days, with her husband unable to find carpentry work and her daughter recovering from leukemia, it is also what makes the job so dangerous.
"I have horrible nightmares knowing I'm going into the hospital the next day," she said. She felt a sense of deep relief when, on a recent shift, she was transferred to the burn unit.
Across the state, in southwestern Pennsylvania, Crystal Patterson heads to work. Her stepfather was laid off from his airport job, and her parents are unsure what they will do.
For Ms. Patterson, 30, a home health aide, there is less uncertainty. Yes, she has to manage caring for her son, but there is a client in her 90s who is depending on her. So for around $10 an hour, she stays on the job. There is a fundamental question before her, one faced by countless other women keeping the country alive: If she does not do this, who will?
"As a woman, this is nothing new to me," Ms. Patterson said. "That's how it's always been in this country: 'When we're sick, get us through this.'"
Katy Reckdahl contributed reporting.
Methodology: The New York Times identified essential workers by applying the federal government's essential worker guidelines with industry and occupation codes contained in U.S. Census American Community Survey microdata, 2014-18, obtained from ipums.org. In some cases, all workers in a category, such as law enforcement, were tagged as critical, but in other cases, such as retail, only workers for stores that have widely been allowed to stay open, such as supermarkets and drugstores, were included.
Robert Gebeloff is a reporter specializing in data analysis. He works on in-depth stories where numbers help augment traditional reporting. @gebeloffnyt
Saturday, April 18, 2020
How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America
Friday, April 17, 2020
Dean Baker: It’s the End of the World Economy as We Know It, Just Like the Great Recession [feedly]
Neil Irwin tells us there will be fundamental changes in the world economy as a result of the pandemic. While he repeats many things that are conventional wisdom, as is often the case, the conventional wisdom is not very wise.
First, the pandemic is supposed to teach us the dangers of having foreign sources of supply, as parts of our supply chain from China shut down when it was hard hit by the virus in December and January. While this is supposed to be a key takeaway from the pandemic, it makes little sense.
We have seen major factories shut down in the United States as a result of the pandemic, most recently a South Dakota processing plant that produces five percent of the nation's retail pork. The United States does have a huge domestic market, so it can see shutdowns in certain segments and still likely get by without severe shortages, but smaller countries absolutely need diverse sources. And, even in the case of the United States, it is helpful to have access to producers worldwide rather than being forced to just rely on domestic sources, especially since the timing and severity of the pandemic have varied greatly across countries.
The real lesson from this episode is the importance of having large stockpiles of key medical gear. The U.S. did not have adequate stockpiles because of the negligence of its government, but this issue is independent of where the items are produced.
The piece also raises the issue of U.S. companies being reluctant to invest in China because of concerns over intellectual property theft. While this is an often-stated concern, most items, like prescription drugs, can be reverse engineered without great difficulty. The U.S. will be better able to limit China's appropriation of items to which U.S. corporations have patent monopolies or related claims if it has agreements with China requiring it to respect these rules.
In the absence of such agreements, there is no reason that China should not make copies of items like prescription drugs, medical equipment, fertilizers, pesticides, computers, and software, to which U.S. companies have intellectual property claims, and sell them freely both on their domestic market and internationally. If the U.S. wants to protect the intellectual property claims of its corporations it will need more engagement with China, not less.
Finally, the piece does raise the importance of the dollar as the world's major reserve currency. This is and has been a growing problem for the world economy, since it makes much of the world subject to the whims of the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. administration. In the last crisis, dollar swap lines were extended to certain countries, and not others, for clearly political purposes. This is likely happening again today.
However, the issue here is not the importance of the dollar, but rather the reluctance of other major economic powers (e.g. the EU, Japan, and even China) to directly challenge U.S. policy. Given the erratic and arbitrary actions of the Trump administration, hopefully, they will get over this reluctance, but to date this has not been the case.
The post It's the End of the World Economy as We Know It, Just Like the Great Recession appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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Thursday, April 16, 2020
Eight-Weeks of Relief Is Not Enough for Small Firms Facing Failure [feedly]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/eight-week-clock-ticks-too-fast-for-small-firms-facing-failure
For many U.S. small business owners, eight weeks of federal coronavirus relief won't be enough to survive the pandemic's economic damage, spurring calls from mom-and pop firms to extend the time frame.
The rescue plan for small companies, designed as a stopgap until life returns to normal, falls short for restaurants, hair salons and other small companies that are bracing for months of poor business. Long after the lockdowns are lifted, customers will face economic hardship and be wary of crowded spaces, say advocates who are calling for funding that's not tied to a tight timeline.
"We're not going to open our hotels in April, and we're not going to open our hotels in May," said Richard Born, a longtime New York City hotelier who has shut 40 operations qualifying as small businesses. "We're hoping for July, and we are the poster child for the industries that have been hurt the most."
With money from the $349 billion package for small businesses running out, the focus in Washington is on pushing for more funding to shore up a key portion of the economy. But without a change in the structure of the loans, advocacy groups say, many small businesses will fail despite the hundreds of billions in relief that have been laid out for them.
"A month or two, they might manage, but by the third month you get in the questionable zone," said Richard Prisinzano, director of policy analysis at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model. "This is a short-term relief bill. It is predicated on the shutdowns being over in two months."
The rub is in the conditions of the Paycheck Protection Program, known as PPP. Borrowers must use the loans to cover payroll over about eight weeks for the debt to be forgiven, and keep or rehire the same number of employees as before the shutdowns. The point is to ensure people continue to receive paychecks even as unemployment has skyrocketed in recent weeks.
Clock Ticking
The clock starts ticking on the first day of disbursement, meaning borrowers who got funding this week would be covered through mid-June. And the period covered by the program ends June 30.
That timing doesn't work for Clara Osterhage, who owns hair salons in Ohio and other states and had to lay off hundreds of employees. She wonders what she'll do with her employees if her businesses are still closed or limited at the end of the eight weeks.
"Do I lay them off again, which is not the nicest thing to do to these people who are already upside down?" she said.
Almost half of small businesses in a recent survey published in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper said they think the crisis will still be going on at the start of July. Many respondents to that question weren't confident about their answers, reflecting the uncertainty of today's world, according to the paper.
| READ MORE ON SMALL BUSINESS WORLDWIDE |
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Industry groups including the National Restaurant Association are seeking a number of fixes to the PPP, including an extension of the period when owners can use the loan and still have it forgiven.
Rather than bringing back staff for a few weeks and then letting them go again, owners should be able to use the funds later, perhaps when they're reopening in the late summer or fall, said the restaurant group's executive vice president of public affairs, Sean Kennedy.
"If they have more certainty that there is a chunk of cash that will be available to them, that is going to be the difference between them saying, 'I'm turning my keys back in to the bank,' or, 'I'm going to try to ride this out,'" Kennedy said.
The restaurant association also wants owners to be able to put more money from the aid toward rent.
It took 12 to 18 months for the travel business to return after 9/11 and the 2008 recession, according to Brian Crawford, executive vice president of government affairs for the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a lobbying group. Businesses will have to contend with the social reality that customers may be scared to find themselves wedged into an airplane seat beside a coughing stranger.
"People are not going to travel until they feel safe again," Crawford said. "The notion that we would be at 75% by June 30th is not realistic in our opinion and probably not workable."
The International Franchise Association -- a lobbying group representing franchises in hotels, retail, restaurants and business services -- is pushing for a series of demands, including extending the maximum loans to cover eight times the average monthly cost of all expenses, an additional $600 billion in funding and extending the time covered to December.
Hugh Acheson, a judge on the TV show "Top Chef," who owns the restaurant 5&10 in Athens, Georgia, is selling future catering, on top of a government loan, to stay afloat.
"Whether the public comes back is the biggest thing right now, and the longer this goes on, I think the longer people get used to distancing," Acheson said.
For Mark Christ, the uncertainty over how to use his government-backed loan is proving particularly vexing.
Christ, who owns a Florida business that cleans kitchen exhaust systems, Hoodz of Orlando, said he'd received $290,000 under the program. Now he must decide whether to use the money to pay his staff for the next two months and get the loan forgiven, or keep it on the books as a hedge against his concerns about Florida's economic prospects for the rest of the year while his laid-off workers can draw unemployment.
"I am so consumed with this," he said. "It's driving me crazy."
— With assistance by Mark Niquette, and Michael Sasso
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New survey and report reveals mistreatment of H-2A farmworkers is common: The coronavirus puts them further at risk [feedly]
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]
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.
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.
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.
[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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Wednesday, April 15, 2020
The coronavirus will explode achievement gaps in education [feedly]
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-coronavirus-will-explode-achievement-gaps-in-education/
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Trump administration reportedly looking to cut the already low wages of H-2A migrant farmworkers while giving their bosses a multibillion-dollar bailout [feedly]
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/
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