Affordability’s key ingredient is union power: Tripling union membership would raise wages, reduce inequality, and strengthen communities. Policymakers should take note.
This is an excerpt from an op-ed originally published at In These Times. Read the full piece here.
Affordability—or the lack thereof—has dominated the recent political debate in the U.S. And for good reason. Across the country, too many families are struggling to make ends meet. However, almost every conversation about affordability focuses entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life more affordable is to make things cheaper.
But the actual driver of today’s affordability squeeze is suppressed pay—a consequence of decades of policy choices that weakened workers’ bargaining power and shifted income away from working people. Had pay for typical workers kept pace with productivity over the past 45 years, their paychecks today would be roughly 40% larger.
If policymakers are serious about addressing affordability, they would champion one institution that has consistently proven capable of raising pay: unions.
Through collective bargaining, unions are the most effective mechanism for workers to raise their wages and secure their fair share of the wealth they produce. Our new report at the Economic Policy Institute quantifies how transformative it would be to rebuild union power. Specifically, we examine what we stand to gain if we tripled current union membership to 30%—similar to its peak in the U.S. before decades of relentless attacks on unions and collective bargaining eroded it, and just shy of the current rate in Canada.
We find that tripling union membership would raise pay for the typical worker by more than $7,700 every year, or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career. This would be life-changing for a working family—nearly covering the cost of raising a child from birth through age 17, for example.
U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July as wage growth slowed
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning. Read the full thread here.
Thirty states have passed a version of the CROWN Act to ban hair discrimination: Continued action needed more than ever as Trump administration abandons equity
Key takeaways:
- The CROWN Act is legislation that protects students, workers, and housing applicants from race-based hair discrimination.
- 30 states have enacted some version of the CROWN Act, building momentum for a federal version to pass in Congress.
- Expansions of civil rights laws like the CROWN Act are more urgent than ever given Trump administration efforts to weaken nondiscrimination protections.
In an era of Trump administration attacks on nondiscrimination protections and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, workers and students need the guardrails included in the CROWN Act more than ever.
The CROWN Act stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair. It expands existing civil rights law to prohibit race-based hair discrimination in schools, housing, and workplaces. Far from being solely focused on aesthetics, the CROWN Act protects against implicit bias and policing of Black and brown bodies. It codifies hair discrimination as racism and prohibits employers, public schools, and housing agencies from imposing whiteness as the uniform for success.
The CROWN Act is now law in 30 states
Pennsylvania and Rhode Island became the most recent states to pass the law in 2025, joining a growing list of states that have passed some form of the CROWN Act. Similar to the limited protections in Kentucky (which only provides public service and employee protections), Missouri also recently passed a limited version of the law that only applies to educational institutions—not workplaces or housing.
In Trump’s economy, Black adults and their families face worsening job security and financial stability
The Trump-Vance administration inherited a strong labor market with record employment and wage gains. But after a year of the administration’s economic mismanagement, workers are feeling more vulnerable to the softening labor market. While the president is busy touting the stock market’s performance, working people and families are expressing concerns about job security and affordability. This is evident in the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), which shows an increase in the number of adults who worry about finding or keeping a job. More than 2 out of 5 adults reported concerns about finding or keeping a job in 2025, up from 37% in 2024.
The latest SHED survey also shows that the harm caused by the administration’s economic chaos has not affected all people equally. Structural inequities embedded in the U.S. economy and labor market have historically left communities of color disproportionately vulnerable to economic insecurity and poverty, and the Federal Reserve’s survey shows that this trend is continuing. While the overall financial well-being of most adults held steady in 2025, the financial well-being of Black adults declined. These individuals were also more likely to experience layoffs, leaving a higher share of Black adults and their families with increased fear of finding or keeping a job in 2025. The added employment uncertainty of Black adults also left them significantly more likely to report major concerns about making ends meet. The survey also shows that education largely failed to protect these individuals from the experience of increased economic fragility.
The cost of mass deportations in states like Minnesota—and what federal tax dollars could be funding instead
This week, EPI will release a new tool showing the cost of mass deportations to taxpayers in every U.S. city, county, and state. For the first time, the actual economic tradeoffs imposed on all taxpayers will be shown in one place. Below, we preview the data for Minnesota, a prominent target of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown earlier this year.
At a time when families across the country are struggling to afford housing, health care, and education, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have been cutting support for basic needs and diverting huge sums of money to deportations.
In Minnesota, $4.4 billion in federal taxpayer dollars is being spent on detaining immigrants—many of whom are in the country lawfully—and even some U.S. citizens. That means, on average, every household in the state is paying roughly $2,000 to track down, intimidate, detain, or deport people.
If that money were spent instead on programs proven to improve the lives of working families—education, health care, living wages—it could improve Minnesota communities dramatically. Here are a few different ways the money could be spent over the remaining 2.5 years of the Trump administration:
Congress has long underfunded worker protection agencies. The Republican budget would deepen the damage.
On June 9, the Republican majority on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee approved a 2027 budget that slashes funding for worker protection agencies.
The bill includes a combined $71.9 million cut for the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Further, the measure implements a 3% cut to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While the legislation slightly increases funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that the Trump administration has weaponized for political reasons, the amount overall remains insufficient. The appropriations measure now moves to the Senate, where the budget cuts face an uncertain future.
If enacted, these reductions would further strain these agencies that have faced over a decade of flat funding that hasn’t accounted for inflation or rising labor force participation (see Figure A). This chronic underfunding has severely impacted their ability to enforce worker protection laws.
Unions are key to high-quality public education
Our recent report asks a bold question: What would the United States look like if we tripled union membership? We find a range of economic and social benefits—such as higher wages, greater access to health insurance, and a stronger democracy. This post examines another social good generated by unions: strong investment in public education.
Investment in public education was one of the key reasons the U.S. became the richest country in the world in the 20th century. Universal education has many positive effects, including creating a more productive workforce and a more informed and engaged democratic society. Unions play a key role in advocating for public spending in education. Figure A shows that states with higher unionization rates spend substantially more per student on education.
New York City—like the rest of the country—should invest more in public schools. Boosting the pay of paraprofessionals is a start.
Over the past few years, EPI research has highlighted the broad economic and social benefits of investing more in public education. New York City legislators are currently considering one such investment: boosting pay for paraprofessionals in public education by $10,000 annually.
Paraprofessionals—who work under the supervision of licensed teachers to provide focused instructional and behavioral support to students—provide crucial services and play a critical role in educating students with disabilities. Research has demonstrated that paraprofessional educators are key contributors to effective schools.
Despite this, the current pay of paraprofessionals is too low, and clear labor shortages of paraprofessionals have developed in public schools around the country—including in New York City. Paraprofessionals working for the New York City Department of Education have annual earnings ranging from $33,000 to $54,000. EPI’s Family Budget Calculator shows that a single adult with no children in New York City needs to earn $83,262 to afford a modest but adequate standard of living. An additional $10,000 would move those salaries closer to—but still well short of—a living wage.
Industry groups find a back door to weakening child labor protections in Ohio, after years of bipartisan opposition: States must continue to resist coordinated, industry-backed attacks
Child labor protections have existed for nearly a century but have come under attack in recent years. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) set guidelines for the hours and nonhazardous jobs for which employers could hire children under 16, guidelines that have for decades helped ensure that young teens could enter the workforce without jeopardizing their health or education. Where state standards are weaker than those provided in FLSA, federal law preempts the state standard, preventing states from undercutting protections for the youngest workers. But for the past several years, a constellation of business interests and right-wing groups have been proposing or enacting state child labor legislation—in Ohio, among other states—that conflicts with the FLSA with the eventual goal of eroding federal standards.
After years of pushing unsuccessfully to weaken work hours protections for 14–15-year-olds in Ohio, industry groups have partially succeeded with the help of State Senator Tim Schaffer. Just months after a public outcry led Governor Mike DeWine to veto similar child labor rollbacks in 2025, Schaffer revived the attack on child labor laws by sneaking an amendment into a broader bipartisan education bill. An unrelated amendment tacked onto the new law will allow employers to schedule 14–15-year-olds until 9 p.m. during the school year, though (unlike prior versions of the legislation) only on nights not preceding a school day. The change puts Ohio state law in conflict with long-standing federal child labor standards and allows employers to treat young teens more like adults for scheduling purposes, while saving on labor costs. In Ohio, employers can pay youth under 16 the federal minimum wage of $7.25, nearly $4 less than the regular state minimum wage of $11 an hour.
Medicaid and SNAP cuts will harm students and local economies
It has been a year since President Trump signed the 2025 Republican tax and spending megabill (the OBBBA) into law. The bill is guaranteed to lead to some of the largest short-run increases in inequality in American history. It included large tax cuts tilted toward higher-income households and spending cuts tilted against low-income households. The main targets for spending cuts were Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, often referred to as foods stamps). The Congressional Budget Office projects the OBBBA will reduce Medicaid enrollment by 7.5 million people, cut Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion, cut SNAP by $186 billion, and will require states to pay for a portion of the SNAP program. These large cuts will have far-reaching implications for low-income families.
Defenders of the OBBBA cuts claim that, because a large share of these cuts result from introducing new bureaucracy around work-reporting requirements for “able-bodied adults without dependents” (ABAWDs), they will not fall on more vulnerable populations like children or retirees. This is not true. The OBBBA has many near-direct cuts to vulnerable populations’ participation in these programs. More importantly, these cuts will have large spillover effects through families and communities that will harm vulnerable populations—including children.
This post highlights how important Medicaid and SNAP spending is to children, with a particular focus on how these programs support public education. It then outlines some ways that the legislated cuts in the OBBBA will damage this support, either directly or through clear spillover effects through damage to local economies.