Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
At the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, Elise Gould, Ben Zipperer, and Jori Kandra write—Women have been hit hard by the coronavirus labor market:
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. [...]
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. [...]
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~~Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind, 1983
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2011—Paul Ryan's 'welfare state,' everything but tax cuts for the rich:
Here's a snippet of Rep. Paul Ryan's closing remarks during the debate on his budget plan:
We don't want a welfare system that encourages people to stay on welfare. We want them to get back on their feet and lead flourishing, self-sufficient lives. So let's reform welfare for people who need it, and end it for corporate welfare for people who don't need it.
Number four. Let's do the work of lifting this crushing burden of debt from our children.
And there you have it. While you thought welfare was reformed two decades ago and no longer exists for Republicans to beat up on, you were wrong. Basically, everything but tax breaks to the wealthy is welfare. Any domestic spending, welfare. Let's look at what Ryan is actually slashing, here, what he calls welfare.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Skype socially distanced itself from Greg Dworkin today, but we still got to discuss Biden's Veepstakes, and that thing people don't say: Trump could get trounced. Congress' 12th richest guy ready to make us "reopen." Trump fake signs virus checks.
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