Thread by @eliselgould

The COVID-19 pandemic has 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—others less so.
1.
journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcar…

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).
See @LarryMishel+@joriskywalker's latest on the growth in CEO pay: epi.org/blog/prelimina…
2.

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.
3.
epi.org/blog/only-one-…

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 the current jobs shortfall is likely in the range of 9.0 to 11.0 million jobs.
4.

Disproportionately low-wage workers lost their jobs. @joriskywalker and I find that 80% of the net jobs lost in 2020 were held by wage earners in the bottom 25% of the wage distribution.
epi.org/publication/st…
5.

The lowest-wage workers lost nearly 7.9 million jobs, while the highest-wage workers gained nearly a million
6.

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, as @its_Melat and I show in the latest State of Working American 2020 employment report:
epi.org/publication/sw…
7.

Within major occupations in the leisure and hospitality sector, management and professional occupations--with higher average wages and hours--saw losses lower than their shares while the lower-wage lower-hour service workers saw job losses in excess of their shares.
8.

Even given occupational segregation into lower paid occupations, Black and Hispanic workers experienced disproportionate job losses compared with white workers. And, AAPI workers experienced job losses in excess of 20% of their proportionate share of pre-pandemic jobs.
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Racial bias may be a factor in the worse labor market outcomes for AAPI workers, particularly those with lower levels of educational attainment, and cannot be explained by their occupational employment patterns, via @ChicagoFed #racismandtheeconomy.
10.
doi.org/10.21033/wp-20…

Job losses disproportionately impacted Black and Hispanic workers early on and those workers continue to face significantly higher unemployment rates than other workers.
epi.org/publication/la…
epi.org/publication/bl…
11.

Young workers and older workers were particularly devastated by the pandemic recession as well.
epi.org/publication/ol…
epi.org/publication/yo…
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Before the pandemic hit, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), distributed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, provided a baseline on workers who could and did work at home by various demographic and job characteristics.
bls.gov/news.release/p…
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Using the ATUS and the CPS, @joriskywalker and I show that teleworking spiked at the beginning of the pandemic. A little more than one-third of the entire workforce was teleworking because of the pandemic, more than four times what the economy experienced pre-COVID.
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Unsurprisingly, the ability to work from home was not evenly distributed across education levels. About one in three workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher still teleworks as a result of COVID, compared with about one in 20 workers with a high school degree or less.
15.

Looking over the pandemic period, 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%).
16.

When @joriskywalker and I examine race/ethnicity and education, we find that Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to telework among both high school and college graduates. Only having an advanced degree appears to narrow the teleworking disparity gap with white workers.
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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. This does little to ease the pain that millions of workers who have not had the ability to telework from home have experienced.
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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.
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We must keep in mind who has been most shielded from the economic and health devastation of the pandemic recession, and policymakers must build an economy that works for everyone now and before the next disaster strikes.
@EconomicPolicy
20/20
epi.org/blog/only-one-…