Yellen Passes Deal-Making Test on Taxes, With Long Road Ahead [feedly]

Yellen Passes Deal-Making Test on Taxes, With Long Road Ahead
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-07/yellen-passes-deal-making-test-on-taxes-with-long-road-ahead

Janet Yellen proved her bona fides as a political deal-maker by leading the world's richest economies to an agreement on global taxes that had eluded negotiators for nearly a decade.

Yet what was hailed as a victory at the Group of Seven for President Joe Biden's Treasury secretary may not carry far in Washington, where winning lawmakers' support for the administration's vast plans for tax and spending increases will be a far tougher challenge.

The G-7 finance ministers on Saturday sealed a landmark deal in London, paving the way to help countries collect more taxes from big companies and setting a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15%. That would signal an end to decades of nations racing each other to lower levies, eroding their collective revenues.

Yellen's role was "crucial" and "decisive," European Union economy chief Paolo Gentiloni said at a press conference at the conclusion of the G-7 meeting. He said that "six months ago, we were in the middle of nowhere."

LISTEN: Terry Haines, founder of Pangea Policy, discusses the G-7 tax agreement with Nathan Hager on Bloomberg Radio.

Read more: G-7 Strikes Deal to Revamp Tax Rules for Biggest Firms

A final, global deal is a still a long way off, however. Talks will continue next month, when Italy hosts Yellen and colleagues for a Group of 20 meeting. Any accord must also have support from a majority of about 140 nations involved in negotiations under the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Domestic Audience

Then, Yellen needs to pitch it to Congress -- and Republicans are already signaling that they will be difficult to persuade.

The G-7 deal could "adversely" impact and "ultimately harm" American workers and businesses, Senator Mike Crapo and Representative Kevin Brady said in a statement released Saturday. They are the senior Republicans on the congressional tax-writing committees.

Global Tax

U.S. initiative for OECD could recast landscape for corporations

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Still, the accord shows that Yellen is making the transition from monetary policy chief to international financial diplomat. The 74-year-old former Federal Reserve chair provided a jolt to global tax talks that had plodded on since 2013.

Read more: Yellen says higher interest rates would be a plus

"We reinvigorated these tax negotiations by really listening to the concern that they had about digital taxes," Yellen said, referring to G-7 counterparts who had been pushing levies on mainly American technology giants.

The second key was "trying to craft a creative" strategy and new alternatives "that could get us beyond an impasse and find something that is fair on all sides," she said Sunday in an interview during her flight back from London.

At little more than five feet tall, Yellen's personal demeanor is self-effacing. She disregards the pomp that comes with being a cabinet secretary; many of her new aides at Treasury refer to her simply as "Janet."

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F45

On the way to and from the G-7 she was seen towing her own bright red suitcase.

Fed Experience

Her more than two decades of experience at the Fed have given Yellen the kind of intellectual heft that's valued on both sides of the political aisle. Still, the Brooklyn native came to her new job as Biden's top economic policy maker with little practice generating consensus in the public eye.

Finance ministers around the world have known her as a central banker, not as a deal-maker on a global stage such as seen the past few days, a G-7 official noted, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

As vice chair and then chair of the Fed from 2010 to early 2018, Yellen engaged with foreign counterparts and titans of the banking industry during the prolonged recovery of the world's largest economy from its brush with financial collapse and depression.

That was all conducted with less of the political interest and oversight that's attached to fiscal policy. Though her job has changed, Yellen still doesn't see herself as a politician.

International Pressure

"It's not that different than what I was doing" at the Fed, Yellen said of her work as Treasury chief at the G-7. While monetary decisions were deliberated in private, board members and heads of the 12 Fed district banks would speak publicly about their views on the economy and on policy decisions, Yellen noted.

Still, such interlocutors are part of a single institution, whereas as Treasury chief, she contended in London with the likes of French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, whose political career spans more than 15 years, and Japan's Taro Aso -- a onetime prime minister.

Before arriving in London, Le Maire ratcheted up pressure on the U.S., saying it was "essential" to get a deal by Friday on taxing digital giants such as Amazon.com Inc. -- something a raft of American lawmakers have opposed.

G-7 Strikes Deal to Revamp Tax Rules for Tech Giants

G-7 Strikes Deal to Revamp Tax Rules for Tech Giants

WATCH: The Group of Seven rich nations secured a landmark deal that could help countries collect more taxes from big companies. Tony Czuczka reports.

(Source: Bloomberg)

Yellen indicated that she approached the task first as a student, learning the issues from experts such as Itai Grinberg whom she had hired at the Treasury Department.

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Yellen relied on Grinberg, previously a law professor at Georgetown University focusing on international tax and trade laws, to work with counterparts to find fresh solutions to the years-long international tax impasse.

Grinberg, 45, previously worked as an outside adviser for the OECD, and now serves as deputy assistant secretary for global tax policy at Treasury.

Yellen met with her G-7 counterparts as a group and then bilaterally during the gathering. She started some meetings openly recognizing that while she has a strong background in monetary policy, global tax policy was new to her -- but that she has spent time deepening her knowledge, one official said.

"What you have to do is try to craft a way forward that takes into account the interests and perspectives of different partners to make them feel that, yes, they may be compromising on something -- but their core interests and concerns are being understood and addressed," Yellen said.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Wage theft enforcement against corporate thieves on the rise [feedly]

Wage theft enforcement against corporate thieves on the rise
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/wage-theft-enforcement-against-corporate-thieves-on-the-rise/

BOULDER, Colo.—If Colorado's discoveries are any indication of a national trend, wage theft, especially from low-wage workers of color, is much more pervasive than people realize—and, increasingly, local District Attorneys and state Attorneys General are stepping up enforcement against such corporate thieves.

So says Michael Dougherty, DA for Boulder, Colo., and one of four DAs from around the U.S. whom the Economic Policy Institute convened on May 17 to discuss the issue and a new EPI report on its extent. They also discussed increasing enforcement measures in their areas.

"In Colorado, workers were losing up to $750 million a year in stolen wages," says Dougherty. "The impact on lower-wage workers was profound."

But in past years, DAs often didn't pursue wage theft cases, for several reasons, panelists explained. One is it's usually a misdemeanor. "Prosecuting someone for stealing your cell phone is a felony. Prosecuting someone for stealing your pay isn't," said Dougherty.

Another is difficulty finding evidence or getting workers, especially low-wage and undocumented workers, to come forward and testify, for fear of boss retaliation or deportation.

A third was the law itself, where sums individually are so small workers are told to go hire a private lawyer and file a civil claim. Few can afford the expense.

And bosses often try to evade the law by misclassifying workers as "independent contractors," who are not covered by minimum wage and overtime pay laws—or any other worker protection laws.

There's another reason workers lose which the DAs infrequently discussed: Workers often don't know how bosses steal their pay.

"At Domino's, I earned $8.25" an hour, Maryland's minimum wage, as an inside worker, former pizza chain employee Jake Burdett told Press Associates Union News Service after speaking at a Fight for $15 and a Union rally in D.C. the next day. "We were not only being paid poverty wages, but we didn't get hazard pay."

It was even worse when Domino's switched Burdett to driving, delivering pizzas door-to-door. Then he got the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 an hour. Under federal law, bosses are supposed to make up the difference between that and the regular minimum. They often don't.

"You're tipped in cash, and it's very complicated and difficult to track," Burdett explained. "It's hard to tell whether you're getting the amount of tips you deserve. I can't say definitely and give you a smoking gun" about whether if he suffered wage theft. "But there's no way to say it hasn't occurred."

It's cases like Burdett's, especially common in the construction industry, that led the DAs and state

Attorneys General to step up their enforcement against corporate law-breakers. Dougherty in Colorado went further. At seminars he hosted for fellow DAs on the issue, he convinced them to unanimously back state legislation to make wage theft a felony.

Colorado's also changed its laws so that if a contractor or a subcontractor threatens workers, especially undocumented workers, who complain about wage theft, the boss is guilty of a felony, too.

"If he says 'If you go to the police, I'll go to ICE,' that's extortion." ICE, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is infamous for rounding up workers—documented as well as undocumented—based on their last names or their brown skin.

Making wage theft a felony "could do the obvious: It could lead to someone sitting in jail" for robbing workers of their pay, said another DA on the panel, Jose Garza, the new DA for Austin and Travis County, Texas—and a former workers' advocate in the Rio Grande Valley. The former congressional aide saw many varieties of wage theft down there.

Unions can help workers battle wage theft by gathering the initial evidence to start a probe, said another of the DAs, Danielle Newsome, the assistant DA who heads Philadelphia's new worker protection unit.

"My DA said he didn't want to target the smaller employers," she added. That's where a Philly building trades union came in. "For the 37 workers (involved), we needed to break down" payroll records to discover how much money, per worker, the employer took out of their pay for union dues, pensions, and health and welfare funds—and then kept for himself instead.

Then the DA's detective "had to reach out to all 37 to confirm they didn't give the employer permission" to pocket the money, instead. But the diversion also let her office charge the employer, and convict him, under existing anti-fraud laws, Newsome said.

Publicity also serves as a deterrent to potential wrongdoers, Crumb pointed out.

"We had a labor broker misclassifying workers, and we got the information from a community organization," the Centro Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL) worker center. The workers "weren't paid wages on time, they weren't paid overtime, and there were no benefits." And the broker called in federal ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents for a raid on the construction site. ICE arrested and deported workers who complained.

The labor broker was charged and convicted of labor trafficking, debt by swindle and fraud. "Other firms quickly got the message," Hennepin County, Minn. (Minneapolis) Assistant DA Susan Crumb noted.

EPI's Report, How District Attorneys And State Attorneys General Are Fighting Workplace Abuses, authored by EPI Senior Fellow Terri Gerstein, lays out justifications for district and state action against wage theft, in detail. The entire hour-and-a-half session, which Gerstein moderated, is on EPI's YouTube channel. The report's conclusions include:

• Criminal prosecution of violations of workers' rights is appropriate and helps strengthen worker protection laws by establishing meaningful consequences for lawbreaking employers."Egregious violations of workers' rights harm workers and communities, make it difficult for honest employers to compete, and deprive public coffers of money needed for critical safety net programs. Prosecutors engaged in workers' rights issues should continue to build on this work, and more offices should join the effort," it says.
• State legislatures should strengthen statutes protecting workers, and ideally create funding mechanisms for pursuing criminal cases against lawbreakers.
• Worker organizations and advocates should build relationships with DAs and the AG in their states to draw these untapped resources into the effort to protect workers' rights.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Latest CDC anti-virus guidance draws some union criticism [feedly]

Latest CDC anti-virus guidance draws some union criticism
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/latest-cdc-anti-virus-guidance-draws-some-union-criticism/

OAKLAND, Calif.—Wear a mask? Don't wear a mask? Stand six feet away? Stand less than that? Go to bars and events with big crowds? Don't go? The Center for Disease Control's latest guidance on battling the coronavirus pandemic is drawing confusion and criticism, especially from the two major unions of front-line workers, National Nurses United and the United Food and Commercial Workers.

The CDC announced on May 13 that "if you are fully vaccinated" against the virus, officially called Covid-19, you can resume many normal "safer" activities. That's despite the continually rising toll of positive tests—33.041 million, equal to one of every 10 people in the U.S.—and deaths (588,185) since the pandemic officially began on March 13, 2020.

In response, even "blue" states and cities that had shut down longer and harder rushed to reopen bars, restaurants, and arenas, let crowds of larger than ten people gather and signal that school systems should fully reopen, with precautions.

"On July 1, we will take the final step," said Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D-Mich., who was under literal siege last year by armed anti-mask right-wingers and other virus skeptics. That final step includes 50% capacity in restaurants and no more outdoor masks.

So Broadway will reopen. Baseball parks—other than Texan parks, forced to fully reopen earlier this year by virus denier GOP Gov. Greg Abbott—will let capacity crowds in. Bars and restaurants can resume indoor seating, although in lower numbers. And so on.

And in the immediate wake of the CDC's announcement, Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten threw her union's official support behind the full reopening of public schools (see earlier story).

But NNU, the largest union of registered nurses, and UFCW, which represents grocery and packing plant workers and other food chain workers—all of them in vulnerable frontline jobs—say CDC's going too far, too fast. NNU says CDC's science is dubious, too.

Removing protections is doubly dangerous, NNU reports, because its data and related studies show fully half of the people the virus has hit caught it from infected people who show no symptoms. Those people, under CDC's new rules, could go maskless. Yet masks are "simple, cheap and highly effective" safeguards, NNU adds.

NNU even published a 17-page medical analysis of the state of the virus, and the state of the data CDC used, or lack of it. It's posted at www.nationalnursesunited.org.

The CDC's new guidance "is not in the best interest" of worker protection or public health, union co-President Zenei Cortez, RN, a longtime California nurse, told a May 20 zoom press conference. "Science shows this is exactly the wrong time to relax controls."

That's because only 37% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated and because virus variants are potentially more vaccine-resistant. It's also because vaccinations of teenagers have just begun and kids under 12 aren't vaccinated at all, she said.

And the best protection—which CDC's new guidelines weaken and remove—is "layering" anti-vaccine measures which individually may have holes but together stop the virus's spread, the union adds.

Cortez and the union's health and safety director, Jane Thomason, likened the layers of protection to slices of Swiss cheese. Each slice, Thomason says, has holes and can't completely stop the virus.

But each slice's holes are in unique places, so no holes overlap each other when you put the "slices" against each other. Together, the protection is complete.

"Our best solution would be for everyone to keep their masks on, follow the other measures and follow the science," added Cortez. "Our duty is to speak up and advocate for what we know is in the best interest of people's health," said NNU co-President Jean Ross, a veteran nurse from Edina, Minn.

It would have said the same thing to CDC if the agency had asked, Ross noted. CDC didn't.

UFCW President Marc Perrone, whose union has seen 157,290 of its worker members, including meatpackers jammed close together in processing plants, become infected, calls CDC's latest guidance "confusing." Some 758 of his members have died from coronavirus infections, the union's data shows. There's been a 35% increase in grocery worker deaths and a 30% rise in virus infections just since March 1.

"Millions of Americans are doing the right thing and getting vaccinated, but essential workers are still forced to play mask police for shoppers who are unvaccinated and refuse to follow local COVID safety measures. Are they now supposed to become the vaccination police?" Perrone asked in a statement.

"With so many states ending mask mandates, this new guidance must do more to acknowledge the real, daily challenge workers and the American people still face. Vaccinations are helping us take control of this pandemic, but we must not let down our guard."

The Auto Workers aren't doing so, either. Though the union did not openly oppose CDC's new guidance, its actions spoke louder than words.

UAW's Covid-19 task force, representing workers at GM, Ford, and Stellantis—the old FiatChrysler—decided to keep mask-wearing, physical distancing, and other anti-viral rules in place in car plants until the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issues a standard, which it can enforce, ordering firms to protect workers against the virus.

"We know masks can be uncomfortable, but we ask that everyone comply," UAW said. "While we continue following the protocols that kept our workplaces safe, we know one of the best ways to fight this virus is by getting vaccinated. We encourage everyone to roll up their sleeves so we can move more quickly toward continuing to relax protocols" against Covid-19.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

West Virginia unions sue state for attacking unionized workers [feedly]

West Virginia unions sue state for attacking unionized workers
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/west-virginia-unions-sue-state-for-attacking-unionized-workers/

CHARLESTON, W. VA.—In yet another battle seeing unions defending their members and themselves against continued right-wing assaults from coast to coast, West Virginia unions sued the GOP-dominated state government there for illegal retaliation against unionized workers by banning automatic dues collection from those workers' paychecks.

The suit, led by the state AFL-CIO, says HB2009, the so-called "paycheck protection" act, violates due process and the state constitution. It's also retaliation from right-wing GOP Gov. Jim Justice, who is a billionaire and the state's wealthiest person.

"Paycheck protection," which unionists call "paycheck deception," is one of a horde of anti-worker anti-union measures enacted in Republican-run states. Many of them are designed to, as one right-wing leader once told the British press to "defund the left."

And many, including paycheck protection, were also crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a secretive cabal of corporate interests and radical right legislators, who meet to scheme ways to impose their agenda on the rest of the U.S.

The suit, filed May 20 in Kanawha County Circuit Court in the state capital, Charleston, says the law "selectively prohibits the long-standing"—50-year—"practice and contractual rights of public employees and their employers to have dues automatically deducted."

Banning the deductions also violates free speech rights under the state constitution, the suit says. It "legislative animus" against unions from the heavily GOP state House and Senate drove HB2009.

The ban also makes no sense in the workplaces both statewide and in its 55 counties, school boards and other unionized public agencies, such as fire departments.

"This cooperative practice" of automatic dues deductions "reached by verbal or written agreement" between unions and agencies "demonstrates the collaborative relationship" between the two. It's "designed to promote workplace harmony and industrial peace, which benefits employer and employee alike."

The law "selectively and discriminately prohibits paycheck deductions for public employees and their unions, a practice that has gone on for more than 50 years without a problem, while still allowing hundreds of other paycheck deductions to remain in place," state AFL-CIO President Josh Sword said in a statement.

"This is still America, and we should not have our freedom attacked and we think this is an attack on our freedoms to spend our money how we want to spend it," added American Federation of Teachers-WV President Fred Albert.

Besides the state fed and the Teachers, other unions suing the state in general and Justice in particular are the Mine Workers, Communications Workers District 2-13 and also Locals 2055, 2019—which represents state troopers–and 2001, the West Virginia Fire Fighters, the West Virginia Education Association, the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association and Steelworkers District 8.  Local 2055 represents corrections officers. The state Federation of Police, which is not a union, also signed on.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Only one in five workers are working from home due to COVID: Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to be able to telework [feedly]

Only one in five workers are working from home due to COVID: Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to be able to telework
https://www.epi.org/blog/only-one-in-five-workers-are-working-from-home-due-to-covid-black-and-hispanic-workers-are-less-likely-to-be-able-to-telework/

ey takeaways:

• At the beginning of the pandemic, we showed that not everybody can work from home, with the ability to telework differing enormously by race and ethnicity.
• As with the pre-pandemic period, there remains a large disparity between the share of Black and Hispanic workers who are able to telework during the pandemic, compared with white and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers.
  • Specifically, only one in six Hispanic workers (15.2%) and one in five Black workers (20.4%) are able to telework due to COVID, compared with one in four white workers (25.9%) and two in five AAPI workers (39.2%).
• According to April monthly data, the disparity in teleworking across educational level still persists. About one in three workers with a bachelor's degree or higher still teleworked as a result of COVID (33.8%), compared with about one in 20 workers with a high school degree or less (4.8%).

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated underlying disparities in the health and economic wellbeing of people across the country. Segregated cities and neighborhoods have devastated many—disproportionately Black and Hispanic communities—under the weight of the pandemic and the ensuing recession, while others have been less impacted. Some families have seen multiple family members and friends become seriously ill or lose their jobs, while others have come away relatively unscathed (and in some cases, prospered). Millions of workers have risked their health and the health of their families by going to work in-person, while others have been able to work from home and don't regularly encounter those facing the pandemic's wrath.

The bottom line: disparities persist between who can safely stay home and get a paycheck and who cannot.

There are three main groups of workers in the COVID-19 economy: those who have lost their jobs and face economic insecurity, those who are classified as "essential" workers or are otherwise working on-site and face health insecurity as a result, and those who are able to continue working from the safety of their homes. In this blog post, we examine workers who are able to telework across demographics and job characteristics and find not only that only one in five workers are able to telework because of the pandemic, but that there are overwhelming disparities among Black and Hispanic workers and those without a college degree or higher.

In spring 2020, 22.4 million jobs were lost in two months. As of April 2021, 14.1 million jobs had been added back, but that means employment is still down more than 8 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Further, if we include the likelihood that thousands of jobs would have been added each month over the last year without the pandemic recession, the jobs shortfall is more likely in the range of 9.0 to 11.0 million.

Disproportionately low-wage workers lost their jobs; even within the low-paid leisure and hospitality industry, it was the low-wage and low-hours workers who were more likely to suffer job losses in the recession. Job losses disproportionately impacted Black and Hispanic workers early on and those workers continue to face significantly higher unemployment rates than other workers.

Women have also faced disproportionate job losses in the pandemic, due in part to both occupational segregation (i.e., women are disproportionately more likely to hold lower-wage service-sector jobs) and caretaking responsibilities (i.e., closed schools, limited day care options, and caregiving responsibilities for other family members in general). Young workers and older workers were particularly devastated by the pandemic recession as well.

The second major group of workers in the economy are those who had to go to work in-person, those classified as essential workers and others working on-site who have faced health insecurity as a result. And the third major group of workers are those who could keep receiving a paycheck but could do it from the safety of their own home. Because these are the flip side of the same phenomenon, we discuss them together.

Before the pandemic hit, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2019), provided a baseline on workers who could and did work at home by various demographic and job characteristics. Using these data, we knew that white and Asian workers were more likely to be able to telework than Black and Hispanic workers. The youngest and oldest of workers had less access to telework. Higher-wage workers were six times as likely to be able to work from home as lower-wage workers. And, not surprisingly, workers in certain industries were more likely to be able to work from home than others. Leisure and hospitality—the sector with the largest job losses—had the smallest share of workers with the ability to telework, about one-sixth as likely as workers in financial activities, professional and business services, and information.

During the pandemic, the Monthly Labor Review published research examining how often workers actually teleworked (among those who were able) and which jobs were most able to be performed from home once the pandemic shuttered businesses. They found that employment fell by 21% in occupations where telework was not feasible and only 8% in occupations where telework was feasible. Other research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that those workers who commuted pre-pandemic had less ability to transition to working from home and were more susceptible to job loss, thus making it harder to maintain economic and health security during this time.

In our analysis, we examine the supplemental data questions added to the monthly Current Population Survey, the household survey that reports official unemployment rates among other important indicators. The key statistic provided in this supplement analysis answers this question: "At any time in the last four weeks, did you telework or work at home for pay because of the coronavirus pandemic?"

At the beginning of the pandemic (and the height of teleworking), a little more than one-third of the entire workforce was teleworking because of the pandemic (see Figure A). This is more than four times what the economy had ever experienced pre-COVID, according to the ATUS estimates (8.1% of the workforce 15 years and older teleworked for pay at least one full day per week).i

Unsurprisingly, the ability to work from home was not evenly distributed across education levels. At the beginning of the pandemic, more than half of the workforce with a bachelor's degree or higher teleworked as a result of COVID (59.6%), contrasted with only about one in eight workers with a high school degree or less (12.2%). The disparity in teleworking across educational level still persists: About one in three workers with a bachelor's degree or higher still teleworks as a result of COVID (33.8%), compared with about one in 20 workers with a high school degree or less (4.8%).

These disparities are two-fold: first, as previously stated, low-wage workers (who often have lower levels of education) experienced a massive decline in jobs at the start of the pandemic. Second, the types of jobs that are typical for workers with lower levels of education tend to rely on social interaction, such as retail and food service. These types of jobs do not have a teleworking counterpart and cannot easily transition to remote. As a result, workers with lower levels of education suffer from the pandemic by losing their jobs, while those who are able to remain or become employed are forced to work in unsafe conditions.

Figure A

Figure B shows the share of workers who teleworked as a result of COVID by select demographics to expose the disparities that exist not only across education levels (as previously discussed), but also across age groups, gender, race/ethnicity, and citizenship. According to Figure B, young workers are least able to work from home, which is not surprising given their tendency to work in face-to-face occupations, where job losses were also greater. In the pandemic, women were more likely to telework than men.

As with the pre-pandemic period, there remains a large disparity between the share of Black and Hispanic workers who are able to telework, compared with white and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers. Specifically, only one in six Hispanic workers (15.2%) and one in five Black workers (20.4%) are able to telework due to COVID, contrasted with one in four white workers (25.9%) and two in five AAPI workers (39.2%). Some of these disparities can be directly linked to job losses within the Hispanic community, as research shows that there is a much smaller share of Hispanic workers that have been able to work from home during the pandemic. A similar story can be told for Black workers who were already much less likely to have a job where they could work from home pre-COVID compared with white workers. U.S. citizens also had a higher likelihood of teleworking than non-citizens.

Figure B

The disparity in those who telework among racial and ethnic groups persists across education level, as shown in Figure C. Black and Hispanic workers are least likely to work from home regardless of educational attainment, compared with their white and AAPI counterparts. Figure C indicates that attaining a college degree does not insulate Black and Hispanic workers from either losing their jobs during the pandemic-driven recession or from obtaining jobs that don't have the flexibility to transition to remote work. Alternatively, having an advanced degree appears to help close those gaps, albeit for the small share of the population with those levels of education (just 15% of the current workforce has an advanced degree). With that notable exception, Black and Hispanic workers are economically suffering from the pandemic more than their white and AAPI counterparts across the board.

Figure C

As shown in Figure D, workers who are hourly (12.3%), in the private sector (22.4%), and are part-time (18.8%) are least likely to telework, with disparities across occupation. Specifically, workers with occupations that have higher levels of in-person contact or active production of goods are less likely to telework, and ultimately are less likely to be protected, than workers in white-collar occupations. In-person workers also face higher costs in time and expenses when commuting, in addition to increased health risk.

As the labor market continues to recover, we will see in-person employment pick up and the share of the workforce teleworking continue to fall. Unfortunately, this does little to ease the pain that millions of workers who did not and do not have the ability to telework from home have experienced during the pandemic. These drastically different realities—those who can or cannot work from home—are reinforced by those we encounter, work with, go to school with, socialize with, and highlights the difficulty of seeing other people's experiences when they may be so different from our own. Although it remains to be seen what the long-lasting impact of teleworking will be on the labor market and the economy as a whole, it's important to keep in mind who has been most shielded from the economic and health devastation of the pandemic recession—and underscores why policymakers must build an economy that works for everyone now, not just for those we know and can see, and before the next disaster strikes.

Figure D

i. The 2017/2018 ATUS data is not exactly comparable to the CPS pandemic data on telework, but we made some reasonable assumptions to make them more useable for comparison. We include only those who teleworked one day a week or more in the ATUS, removing those who only teleworked a few minutes or occasionally. However, the fact remains that the CPS is only measuring those who teleworked because of the pandemic so it may be seen as a lower bound on the overall number teleworking. For instance, some teleworkers may have always been teleworkers and therefore would not be teleworking because of the pandemic, so they'd be captured as teleworking in the ATUS but not the CPS. Duration of teleworking was not available for workers with less than a high school degree, so we apply the share of regular teleworkers (at least one day a week) among all teleworkers with only a high school degree to those with less than a high school degree.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed