Weak September jobs report shows hiring and wage growth slow
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning. Read the full thread here.
Despite a softening labor market, Latina workers continue to register record-high employment rates in 2026. Young Hispanic workers are not seeing similar gains.
Around this time last year, we wrote about the remarkable resilience Hispanic workers were showing in the labor market. Despite weaker job growth, the share of Hispanic workers with a job remained high, largely driven by a record-high employment rate among Latina workers.
Today, despite the ongoing economic and social toll of Trump’s draconian mass deportation policy, prime-age Latina workers continue to drive much of the strength in the employment rates of Hispanic workers. But we also see signs of weakness for younger workers between the ages of 16 and 24. New data released this year also show that Hispanic adults and their families share growing concerns about their employment security. We highlight each of these dynamics below.
New Trump child care plan would strip resources from low-income working families: A better solution is to fully fund the Child Care and Development Fund instead of redirecting resources away from working families
Key takeaways
- The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) was created to provide child care for low-income families while parents work or obtain education and training. But the program is so underfunded that it provides subsidies to just 16% of eligible children.
- Child care is so costly that a full-time minimum-wage worker in Alabama would need to work 29 weeks, from January to July, and use every penny of their earnings to cover the cost of unsubsidized child care for one infant.
- The Trump administration is proposing a new plan to divert CCDF funds from current recipients and give the resources to married couples with a stay-at-home parent. This will result in low-income working families losing CCDF funds, leading to increased child care costs for everyone and possibly resulting in the closure of some child care providers.
Reporting in The New York Times describes an upcoming proposal from the Trump administration to use funds from the Child Care and Development Fund to provide “parent-based child care” in which a married parent could receive financial assistance to stay home to care for their children, while the other parent works. Providing additional income to support economically struggling families, including support for family members who want to be full-time caregivers for children, is a great idea. Pulling the funds to do so from the Child Care and Development Fund is not.
The CCDF was created in the 1990s to provide child care subsidies for low-income families, so parents, primarily mothers, could work or go to school. The program is severely underfunded, however. It serves just 16% of all eligible children and just 17% of eligible children, age 5 and younger. That leaves hundreds of thousands of eligible children sitting on waitlists. Worse, some states don’t maintain a waitlist or have simply implemented an “enrollment freeze,” turning eligible applicants away rather than adding them to a waitlist.
Wages, inequality, and the roots of America’s affordability crisis
This piece was originally published in American Educator, the professional journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Read it here.
Outside of a crisis or recession, Americans’ perceptions of how the country and economy are being managed have never been so negative. Many have attributed this voter unhappiness to a crisis of “affordability.”
It is objectively true that it is too hard for most American families to afford a secure and dignified life. But the word “affordability” leads too many people—including policymakers—to fixate on prices. Affordability is not just about prices; instead, it’s the outcome of a race between incomes and prices.
This is not just economists quibbling. Focusing on prices will lead policymakers to ignore far too much of the useful playing field when thinking about what changes could make life better for working families.
In this article, we make the following arguments:
- Far too many families are unable to afford a decent economic life.
- The primary cause is a large increase in income and wage inequality, with incomes and wages for the vast majority of families lagging far behind what they could and should be.
- This rise in inequality was caused by increasingly unequal “market” incomes (e.g., wages and salaries, returns on investments), while changes in taxes or transfers (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance) slightly dampened the rise of income inequality.
- The large rise in income inequality was driven by intentional policy changes that affected typical workers’ leverage and bargaining power in the labor market—and that means they can be reversed.
- In capitalist economies (like ours), labor markets are inherently tilted toward employers—but historically and globally, broadly shared prosperity has only been achieved when policies that intentionally support workers (like strong unions, adequate minimum wages, and full employment mandates) have provided a countervailing force against employers’ power in labor markets.
- Much of the post-1979 period in the United States saw an assault on worker-friendly policies, and this led directly to the rise in inequality and to weak income growth for working families.
Consequences of austerity: How reductions in BLS funding threaten the credibility of our statistics
Key takeaways
- Years of government funding cuts are undermining the U.S.’s position as a global leader in providing the reliable statistical information that businesses and policymakers need for sound decision-making.
- The Trump administration has accelerated the funding cuts and worked to degrade the effectiveness and independence of data-collecting agencies.
- The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a prime example of an agency whose data collection in areas like employment and wages is integral to our understanding of the economy’s health and whether it is heading into a recession.
- A decline in response rates to one of the BLS’s key surveys was already underway but, absent funding increases and survey modifications, it will be harder for economists and policymakers to make timely sense of changes in the labor market.
Historically, the U.S. has been a leader in providing reliable and timely statistical information to support business strategy and policymaking. The value of information provided publicly and free of charge to businesses, households, and governments is immense. Yet underinvestment over the past 15 years is a key reason why the U.S. lost its position on the cutting-edge of public statistical services worldwide.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, this underinvestment has accelerated, and the administration has made intentional efforts to degrade the effectiveness and independence of the federal statistical agencies (FSAs). This accumulation of threats to the effectiveness of the FSAs will rapidly degrade the value of the key public good they provide, unless policy changes course sharply.
This blog post provides just one example of how cumulative underinvestment has blocked the ability of a key FSA to respond to developments, making its data less reliable over time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects a range of necessary data tracking the performance of the U.S. labor market. This BLS data are a key input into high-stakes decisions across the U.S. economy—including for both public and private actors. For example, the Federal Reserve relies on BLS data about unemployment rates, payroll job growth, wage growth, and price indexes to set monetary policy. The more volatile the BLS data are from month to month, the worse the information that guides Federal Reserve decisions.
The significance of federal employment in raising living standards for Black workers
This piece was originally published in The Journal of the Center for Policy Analysis and Research (JCPAR). Read it here.
Introduction
For Black Americans, public-sector employment has historically provided a pathway to better, more equitable and secure job opportunities compared with available private-sector jobs. The federal government has played an especially vital role in establishing a robust Black middle class in the Washington, D.C. metro area. According to the 2023 American Community Survey, roughly 2 out of 5 Black adults in the D.C. metro area were college graduates, Black median household income was nearly $90,000 and the Black homeownership rate was 52.8%. Postal service jobs have been particularly valuable to Black workers without college degrees because of the uniform wage and benefit structure (all postal employees who have the same job title and job tenure are paid the same nationwide) and higher pay relative to comparable private-sector employment. With a minimum education requirement of a high school diploma, the median hourly wage of a postal worker is 43% higher than the typical high school graduate. While federal employment has opened the door to social and economic mobility for generations of Black Americans, it has often been the battleground and served as a compass in setting higher labor standards and equal employment policies in the United States.
CEO pay surged in 2025: CEOs are paid 325 times as much as the typical worker
Key findings:
- CEO pay at the top 350 U.S. firms rose 14.0% in 2025 to an average of $27.9 million.
- CEOs made 325 times as much as the typical worker in 2025. It hasn’t always been this way. In 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker.
- From 1978–2025, top CEO compensation skyrocketed 1,316% while typical workers’ compensation increased only 28%.
- CEO pay has not climbed so fast because their skills or productivity rose spectacularly. It has risen instead simply because CEOs have gained and used increasing leverage over the corporate boards that set their pay.
- Policymakers can rein in excessive CEO pay through more progressive tax policy, corporate governance reforms, and strengthened labor standards, including laws that make it easier for workers to unionize. One new EPI policy proposal calls for default collective bargaining at firms where the CEO-to-worker pay ratio is especially exorbitant.
Our latest analysis finds that CEO pay rose 14.0% at the top 350 U.S. firms in 2025 as the CEO-to-worker pay ratio hit 325-to-1.
Between 1978 and 2025, CEO pay jumped an astronomical 1,316% while typical workers’ pay only rose 28%. As a result, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio increased more than tenfold since 1978.
2025 Census data on income and poverty: EPI economist breaks down latest findings
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on today’s release of U.S. Census Bureau data for 2025 on annual earnings, income, and poverty. Read the full thread here.
Employers spend over $1.5 billion on union busters: New LaborLab tools help shed light on union-avoidance industry
When workers seek to form a union, employers often respond by hiring union-avoidance consultants to dissuade workers from their organizing efforts. A recent EPI and LaborLab report estimates that employers spend over $1.5 billion each year on union avoidance. Last week, our partners at LaborLab released new tools that shed light on the highly secretive and highly profitable union-avoidance industry.
The Union-Busting Cost Calculator helps workers estimate how much their employers are spending on union-avoidance consultants, instead of investing that money in their workplaces. Too often employers claim unions are third parties that disrupt workplace dynamics and create costs for workers who are paying for representation they don’t need. On the contrary, unions win wage increases and benefits for workers, and it is employers who spend millions on third-party union-avoidance consultants, rather than raising workers’ wages and improving working conditions. Further, employers often hire the same consulting and law firms to help with their union avoidance. LaborLab’s union-buster search helps demystify who the key actors are in the union-avoidance industry and identify who is behind anti-union campaigns.
2025 Census data preview: Key measures of earnings, income, and poverty may show early signs of a softer labor market and weaker safety net
Key takeaways
- The 2025 Census data on earnings, income, and poverty may reflect how the Trump administration’s policy choices were beginning to impact the economic well-being of workers, families, and children last year.
- Last year’s economy was characterized by slowing job growth, rising wage inequality, and growing policy uncertainty. We expect to see little to no improvements in key economic indicators such as lower-end household income and supplemental poverty rates between 2024 and 2025.
- The 2026 story is still unfolding and is likely to be worse, given these factors: decelerating nominal wage growth, higher inflation, and the 2025 budget reconciliation law that will leave more families and children vulnerable to poverty.
Next week, the Census Bureau will release the latest data on earnings, income, and poverty for 2025. This data could show early signs of how the Trump administration’s policy choices impacted the economic well-being of workers, families, and children across the country. The initial strong recovery from the pandemic recession measurably slowed in 2025 as the labor market softened and the policy climate grew more uncertain. To help place the upcoming data release in context, we highlight key trends that have characterized the economic and policy landscape in 2025. Though the economy continued to soften as inflation worsened in 2026 and the safety net grew increasingly more difficult to access as a result of the Republican Budget Reconciliation Law, the data in the Census will only provide specific insights for living standards in 2025.
In summary, we find:
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- The U.S. economy in 2025 grew more slowly than in 2024, adding fewer than half as many jobs—only 764,000 jobs compared with 1.825 million in 2024. The unemployment rate slowly rose over the course of 2025, and the hires rate was depressed, making it harder for young people in particular to break into the labor market. While the prime-age employment-to-population remained relatively resilient to labor market softening, prime-age Black workers experienced large declines in their employment rate.
- With more moderate inflation, strong nominal wage growth translated into decent average hourly wage gains between 2024 and 2025, but gains were not shared equally. Lower-end wage growth stalled in 2025, which could have implications for lower-end incomes and poverty rates.
- Because the Republican budget reconciliation law is making basic needs programs like SNAP increasingly more difficult for families to access, we don’t expect to see any significant improvements in supplemental poverty between 2024 and 2025. We expect to the see the full impact of the Republican law in the years ahead.
- While the release will only provide data for 2025, our examination of the economic and policy landscape for 2026 suggests that a weaker job market, safety net cuts, and high inflation will worsen outcomes.