Survey finds nearly one-third of rehired workers laid off again

Nearly a third of the laid off workers who were able to go back to their previous jobs have been laid off again, according to a Cornell survey released Tuesday.

The survey was conducted by RIWI from July 23 to Aug. 1, as a slew of states experiencing major COVID-19 outbreaks slammed the breaks on their economic reopenings and reimposed social distancing restrictions.

Danielle Goldfarb, head of global research at RIWI, said it was a sign that a second wave of layoffs was well underway.

“Official and private sectors jobs data have not yet picked up the significant share of American workers that have already been re-laid off,” said Goldfarb.

“Since the impact is actually worse in states that have not seen COVID surges, these data indicate a systemic problem and a much deeper recession than the mainstream data suggest,” she said.

The survey found that about 37 percent of people who were not self-employed were laid off after the pandemic struck in March, but over half (57 percent) had been called back to work since then.

But of those, 31 percent had been laid off again and another 26 percent had been told there was a possibility they would lose their jobs.

A deeper dive into the data, however, suggested that the second round of layoffs may be less about the resurgence of the virus than the loss of aid. It found only small differences in “healthier” states, those not experiencing a surge, than in places with new outbreaks.

One possible reason for the additional layoffs are problems with businesses that had remained afloat with the help of forgivable loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

The funds, which started rolling out the door in April, were supposed to be enough to cover eight weeks of salary and expenses.

“The RIWI dataset output clearly shows that a substantial portion of the job growth experienced in May and June resulted from anomalies associated with PPP requirements, as opposed to underlying economic strength,” said Daniel Alpert, a senior fellow and adjunct professor of macroeconomics at Cornell Law School.

Congress has made scant progress in negotiating a new COVID-19 response bill which is expected to include an extension of the PPP and may allow businesses to apply for a second loan.

The survey was completed by 6,383 respondents, though some questions had smaller samples because they were only applicable to some people.

The margins of error for the survey questions ran from plus or minus 1.5 percent to plus or minus 3.9 percent.