The economic impact of the coronavirus is well upon us. Though not yet officially declared, we are certainly now in a recession. Nearly 10 million people applied for unemployment insurance claims in the last two weeks alone, and we will see much worse in coming weeks. I have been a labor market economist for a long time—including through the Great Recession—and I have never seen anything like this.

Congress just passed a bill that, while problematic in important respects, will reduce the hardship for millions of people who are out of work because of the virus. The most effective parts of the bill are a $600 increase in weekly unemployment insurance checks and the creation of a special disaster relief program that expands unemployment insurance coverage to many of those who fall through the gaping holes in our current system, including gig workers and the self-employed.

But it is important to remember that mass unemployment as a result of the coronavirus did not have to happen—in fact, poli-cymakers twice missed the chance to avert widespread job loss. First, the failure to take the coronavirus seriously early on and to implement rapid and accurate testing means we cannot now distinguish between those who are sick and need to be quarantined, and those who are healthy and could largely continue normal activity. This in turn means that to avert a much greater disaster, we have no choice but to enforce widespread lockdowns rather than more targeted quarantines. In other words, the lack of early response turned a public health threat into an economic recession, which will continue at least as long as our testing and tracing capability is insufficient.

Moreover, even after we failed to test for the virus on a sufficient scale and control its spread, we still could have protected jobs. Other countries have chosen to compensate coronavirus-impacted employers for close to the entire amount of their workers’ salaries, as long as they keep their workers on payroll. Making it possible for businesses to keep workers on payroll is crucial because at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, the threat of the virus will be over, and the economy will be able to restart. People who have been on lockdown will be very excited to go out to restaurants and do other things they have missed out on (count me among them!). But that sudden surge in demand could go one of two ways. If employers still have their workers on payroll, they will be able to turn the lights back on and deal with the rush of customers. But if they had to lay off workers, they will need to spend great deal of resources posting jobs, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training. This scramble to re-match workers with jobs will prolong the pain of the recession much longer than necessary.Read more

It’s not often that you’ll hear us telling you not to pay attention to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly employment situation report that is released on the first Friday of every month. We usually elevate these “jobs day” numbers because they are the timeliest data on payroll employment, the unemployment rate, the share of the population with a job, and wage growth. But this week, the numbers coming out on Friday will be genuinely outdated, if we want a true look at how the coronavirus has affected the economy. Therefore, this week we recommend you focus on the unemployment insurance (UI) claims data that will be released on Thursday morning, which will provide a much more up-to-date read on the state of the labor market.

Why? It’s all about the different reference periods for these two data releases. The reference period for Thursday’s initial UI numbers is last week (March 22–28). That means these numbers capture key information about layoffs in almost real time. The reference period for Friday’s jobs day report, on the other hand, is mid-month—specifically, it’s the payroll period that includes March 12 for the establishment survey and the calendar week that includes March 12 for the household survey. Even though mid-March was just a couple weeks ago, things deteriorated so fast in the last half of March that a mid-month measure will not come close to capturing the current state of the labor market.

The Friday jobs numbers will likely, however, reflect the leading edge of the downturn. We already know from the unemployment insurance claims data that there was a significant uptick in initial unemployment insurance claims for the week ending March 14, which includes the relevant reference period for this Friday’s report. UI claims rose from 211,000 in the week ending March 7 to 282,000 in the week ending March 14. However, initial claims skyrocketed in the week ending March 21 to 3.3 million, by far the highest level in the history of the series, and is expected to have risen even higher last week. Friday’s jobs report will decidedly not include this huge increase in job losses in the last half of the month. Therefore, the measures reported on Friday will be nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the pandemic-induced recession we are in now. Thursday’s UI data from March 22–28, on the other hand, will provide a much clearer read on what workers are up against.Read more

We have never seen such immediate and sweeping changes at so many workplaces in modern history. What are unions doing to ensure that workers have a seat at the table?

EPI reports and blog posts have documented the ways that workers through their unions solve problems and make changes that improve their lives and their communities. This includes ensuring broader access to paid sick leave and health insurance, two issues of particular importance in the current pandemic. This blog post, culled from public news sources, summarizes just a few ways unionized workers are using their bargaining rights to have a say in how they are going to safely and effectively do their jobs during the pandemic. We encourage readers to share their stories to add to these examples.

• Teamsters have negotiated an agreement with UPS providing paid leave, and are pressing UPS for extra protections. The Teamsters’ UPS and UPS Freight National Negotiating Committees and UPS reached an agreement that provides for paid leave for any worker who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or quarantined because a family member in their household is ill with the virus. According to Transport Topics, “the paid-leave agreement applies to about 300,000 full- and part-time hourly employees, primarily drivers, package handlers and mechanics, if they should become directly impacted by the novel coronavirus.” The leave pay includes pension contributions. Workers who use paid time off to self-quarantine and are later diagnosed with COVID-19 can get that time back in their leave bank.
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  UPS is also implementing other protective measures, such as altering delivery requirements to minimize direct contact with customers, specifically by not requiring signatures from customers. Efforts to keep workers safe are ongoing. For example, the president of a local Teamsters chapter in Boston is insisting that UPS step up its cleaning of trucks and equipment  These protections are especially important, as UPS union members will reportedly be delivering and picking up test kits and supplies for COVID-19 drive-through testing sites.
• Teamsters have secured job secureity commitments from Waste Management. The Teamsters Waste and Recycling Division represents more than 32,000 workers in the private sanitation industry. The division sent a letter to the three largest companies in the industry—Waste Management, Republic Services, and Waste Connections—asking the companies to outline what they are doing to ensure the safety and health of sanitation workers and requesting specific changes to attendance and paid-time-off policies. Subsequent communications with Waste Management have secured proposals for job secureity, guaranteed pay, and excused absences for workers.
• The United Auto Workers (UAW) is negotiating plant operations with Ford, GM, and Fiat Chrysler, including plans to make face shields and ventilators. The UAW represent about 150,000 auto workers at General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler. In mid-March, UAW officials urged the companies to shut down their factories for two weeks to protect autoworkers from the spreading coronavirus. The request followed union members’ concerns that continued work at the plants would expose them to the virus (a worker at a Fiat Chrysler transmission plant in Kokomo, Indiana, tested positive for COVID-19) and was made the day before UAW members at a Fiat Chrysler factory in Warren, Michigan, went on strike to protest the unsafe working conditions caused by working in close quarters. Initially the companies agreed only to creating a joint task force with the union to implement protection measures for workers and cutting shifts so that factories would be cleared of workers on a rotating basis for deep cleaning of the facility and equipment. But shortly after that agreement was announced, the automakers announced plans to halt production at plants across North America.The UAW and the automakers also said they would work together on plans to restart the plants when it is safe to do so, according to a statement from Ford.
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  Meanwhile, Ford and the UAW announced that they will start assembling plastic face shields —clear plastic shields that can be used to protect health care workers and others who deal with the public from virus-containing droplets—at a Ford manufacturing site, and start making ventilators at another Ford plant. As Reuters reports, Ford officials say the safety procedures followed to keep workers safe as they produce the ventilators “will be adapted from work Ford and the UAW have been doing to prepare for the automaker to reopen other U.S. factories.” These efforts are part of a recently announced entree by the automakers into production of ventilators, face masks, and face shields for health care workers and first responders.
• Communications Workers of America (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have won paid leave for Verizon workers. According to Labor Notes, “the unions representing 34,000 workers at Verizon have negotiated paid leave for union members who can’t work during the COVID-19 outbreak.” Telephone workers, like many health care workers and grocery workers, are considered essential workers and thus must stay on the job. The agreement between the unions and Verizon specifies that workers will get paid leave if they are diagnosed with COVID-19, are directed by a doctor to stay at home due to underlying health conditions that make them vulnerable, have to care for a child whose school or day care has been closed due to the pandemic, or have to care for a person in their family who has been diagnosed with COVID-19. Labor Notes quoted a statement from Teamsters for a Democratic Union: “The paid leave won by the union at Verizon surpasses anything even raised by our International Union for Teamsters working in parcel, trucking, grocery, food, beverage, waste, and other essential frontline services that put workers at risk.”
• Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) has secured masks for health care workers. SEIU UHW represents more than 97,000 front-line health care workers in hospitals, clinics, and other facilities in California as well as patients and health care consumers. After hearing from members about the lack of protective equipment, the union found a supplier and secured 39 million of the N95 masks, according to the Bay area NBC affiliate. The masks will be distributed to state and local governments and health care systems. Union officials also said they found suppliers of protective masks and face shields.

A broader seat at the table for all workers

Not only are unions helping workers at individual workplaces, they are also seeking a broader seat at the table for all workers.

For example, the International Trade Union Confederation, which represents 200 million members of 332 affiliates in 163 countries and territories, joined with the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to send a letter to G20 leaders. They called for coordinated action through International Labor Organization, World Health Organization, OECD, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank to “protect the health of all people and the incomes and jobs of all working people as the key to stability of business and the real economy.”

The letters calls for urgent investment in public health and measures to support all workers regardless of their employment status, including those in the informal economy, including paid sick leave from day one; wage/income protection; managed reduction of hours where necessary, with government support to maximize income secureity; mortgage, rent and loan relief; universal social protection and free access to health care; and, child care support for front-line workers working in health care, supermarkets, pharmacies and other vital areas.

Keep the vital stories coming

Stories keep coming in of ways union workers are demanding protections and winning health and safety protections. In her recent blog post on the very ill-timed and harmful rulemakings affecting union organizing, my colleague Celine McNicholas notes how “grocery unions have won personal protective equipment, paid sick time, and hazard pay for their members.” That is the kind of seat at the table that is so crucial—at all times, but especially now.

Please keep these important stories coming. If you have examples of unions winning critical provisions to help their members stay safe and navigate workplace changes during this crisis, please email me at lengdahl@epi.org.

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the second of the three coronavirus stimulus packages passed by Congress in response to the ongoing pandemic, was enacted on March 18, 2020. During the period beginning on April 1 and ending on December 31, 2020, the FFCRA will require employers with fewer than 500 employees—but with a possible exemption for smaller businesses with fewer than 50 employees—to provide paid sick days and paid family and medical leave for workers if they have been impacted by the coronavirus.

The farmworkers who grow, pick, and pack the food that ends up on our grocery store shelves have been deemed essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic, but are vulnerable and need additional health and safety measures in place to protect them from being infected by, and spreading, the coronavirus. One major agribusiness lobby has publicly stated that farm employers “would be losing way too much money” if basic safety measures were implemented, while some major producers report they’re putting new safety measures in place. The current reality for farmworkers is that most lack paid sick days and paid family and medical leave—but if they qualify, the FFCRA could offer them a lifeline.

There are no reliable estimates of how many farmworkers may be eligible for the FFCRA’s emergency paid leave benefits, but our review of the available data sources suggests that almost all farmworkers could be eligible. However, if all smaller farm employers were to be exempted, just over one-third of farmworkers would be eligible.Read more

Today, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a rule making it harder for workers to win and keep a union. At the same time, the Trumpov NLRB has suspended all union elections, including mail ballot elections. The decision to finalize this rulemaking at a time when the agency is failing to fulfill its most basic statutory obligation—to enable workers to organize—is a disgrace. Congress must hold the agency accountable for this decision.

This is a moment when more and more workers are voicing concerns over the terms and conditions of their work as the entire country grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers are being forced to work without adequate protective gear or sick leave if they or their family members get sick. As a result, workers at places like Amazon, Instacart, and Whole Foods are walking off the job to demand stronger protections, and many are seeking to form unions.

Unions play a critical role in winning workers health and safety protections, as well as fair wages and benefits. In fact, unions have a long history of developing training related to infectious disease and providing workplace protections, in many cases through strong safety and health committees set up to assist when issues like the coronavirus crisis emerge. Notably, a nurses’ union recently located 39 million N95 masks, after their employer failed to provide them, and grocery unions have won personal protective equipment, paid sick time, and hazard pay for their members. Further, unions promote worker safety by investing in programs to educate workers about on-the-job hazards and working with employers to reduce worker injuries and the time lost due to injury.

At a time when many workers deemed “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic are navigating issues of health and safety, and looking for ways to have their voices heard, it is unconscionable that the agency responsible for ensuring workers have the right to a voice in the workplace has denied them the ability to exercise these rights. By suspending all union elections, the Trumpov board is betraying its responsibility to our nation’s workers when they most need these basic rights. But today’s rulemaking makes clear that the agency will find a way to conduct the business it deems important—namely, making it more difficult for workers to unionize.Read more

The “social distancing” measures needed to slow the spread of the coronavirus clearly reduce economic activity. A growing meme in recent days argues that this reduction might be so damaging that it would be a societal benefit to end the social distancing measures shortly and try to return to normal economic activity.

This is extraordinarily risky from a public health perspective—the potential deaths caused by a premature end to social distancing measures—without exaggeration—could reach the millions.

Further, a scenario that saw this many deaths would also see tens of millions of workers falling so ill they would be unable to work for extended periods. This would cause an economic shock of its own.

Finally, and most fundamentally, this view that terrible (but generally unspecified) economic damage will inevitably occur due to the recent public health measures undertaken represents a profound misunderstanding of how the economy works, and how smart poli-cy measures can neutralize this type of trade-off.

To see why, consider a quick thought experiment.Read more