Job gains were steady in April, but wage growth continued to weaken
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 115,000 jobs added in April. Read the full thread here.
Class of 2026: Young college graduates face a weaker labor market—but a more mixed picture than the headlines suggest
Key takeaways:
- The unemployment rates for young college graduates and young noncollege workers have risen slightly faster than the overall unemployment rate.
- But the rise in young college graduate unemployment in particular was mostly due to higher labor force participation: The employment-to-population ratio for young college graduates has held steady since 2024.
- Certain demographic groups, such as Black and Hispanic workers, face higher unemployment and lower hourly wages, even for young people with limited work experience.
- In the long run, the college degree is losing its edge: Unemployment for young college graduates has risen in historical terms, and the college wage premium has been flat or falling in recent years.
Over the last couple of years, the overall labor market has slowly weakened—with many arguing that the weakening is most pronounced for young college graduates (whom we define as young workers ages 22–27 with only a college degree).1 The evidence is actually pretty mixed—by some measures the young college graduate labor market is notably weaker, but their outcomes are largely no worse than those of noncollege young people or the labor market writ large.Read more
A snapshot of Black employment trends under Trump 2.0: Black workers—particularly men—are experiencing lower employment compared with a year ago
Key takeaways:
- Black unemployment rose and employment fell in Q1 2026, reflecting a deterioration in labor market conditions. In the first quarter of 2026, the Black unemployment rate (7.6%) was 1.2 percentage points higher than in the first three months of the second Trump administration.
- Black men’s employment-population (EPOP) ratio decreased by 1.7 percentage points (from 60.5% to 58.8%) since the first quarter of 2025, with noncollege graduates driving this decline.
- Black women’s EPOP ratio was the same in Q1 2026 as in Q1 2025 (56.4%), with gains among noncollege graduates offsetting losses among college graduates.
The rising Black unemployment rate and big employment losses among Black women made major news headlines in 2025. In a February 2026 analysis, I examined the nature of those losses, noting the large impact on Black women who were college graduates and public-sector workers. With so much of the Trump policy-induced 2025 labor market decline appearing to land first on Black workers who typically have relatively secure employment, the longer-term significance of those losses is of continuing interest. This post provides an update for the first quarter of 2026, examining changes in the overall Black unemployment rate and gender-specific employment trends for Black women and men relative to the first quarter of 2025. For consistency with the prior analysis, I apply the same mutually exclusive race and ethnicity categories used in EPI’s State of Working America Data Library and include all people age 16 or older when examining outcomes by gender. While these estimates differ slightly from those reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), they lead to similar conclusions.
In the first quarter of 2026, the Black unemployment rate (7.6%) was 1.2 percentage points higher than in the first three months of the second Trump administration. While a rise in the unemployment rate can sometimes be for “good” reasons—workers getting drawn into the labor force because of strengthening job opportunities—that was not the case here: the rise in the Black unemployment rate reflected a decline in employment. The Black employment-population ratio (EPOP)—the share of working-age people who are employed—declined 0.8 percentage points over the same period, from 58.3% in Q1 2025 to 57.5% in Q1 2026 (see Figure A).
First quarter 2026 estimates reveal lower employment among Black men relative to the first quarter of 2025: Q1 Black employment-to-population ratios, 2025 and 2026
| Q1 2025 | Q1 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Black overall | 58.3% | 57.5% |
| Black women | 56.40% | 56.40% |
| Black men | 60.50% | 58.80% |
Source: Author's analysis of Current Population Survey microdata, EPI Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 2026.4.13, https://microdata.epi.org.
Looking more closely at changes in employment for Black women and men separately, Black women’s first quarter EPOP was the same in 2026 as in 2025 (56.4%), while employment among Black men was 1.7 percentage points lower (from 60.5% to 58.8%). BLS published estimates by race—limited to the sample of people age 20 or older and not exclusive of ethnicity—show a similar decline for Black men (-1.5 percentage points), but a 0.4 percentage point increase for Black women.
Figure B shows that among Black women, Q1 2026 employment was lower than Q1 2025 for college graduates but higher for noncollege graduates, resulting in essentially offsetting effects. The opposite was true among Black men, for whom the decline in employment was driven by lower employment among noncollege graduates and higher employment for college graduates.
First quarter 2026 estimates reveal lower employment among Black workers, specifically Black men, relative to the first quarter of 2025: Q1 Black employment-to-population ratios by educational attainment, 2025 and 2026
| Q1 2025 | Q1 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Black women, non-college | 49.4% | 50.0% |
| Black women, college | 72.9% | 72.0% |
| Black men, non-college | 55.6% | 53.3% |
| Black men, college | 75.4% | 77.6% |
Source: Author's analysis of Current Population Survey microdata, EPI Current Population Survey Extracts, Version 2026.4.13, https://microdata.epi.org.
These first quarter 2026 estimates incorporate annual population adjustments applied to Current Population Survey (CPS) data each January to reflect updated population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Since the previous year’s data are not adjusted, monthly data across the two years are not strictly comparable. This year, shifts in the demographic composition of the population also resulted in larger than usual discontinuities in labor force measures by race, ethnicity, and gender between December 2025 and January 2026—which is why this analysis is focused on a comparison between the first quarters of 2025 and 2026, when the population controls are the most up to date.
Based on this analysis, we can conclude that overall, labor market conditions for Black workers were not better in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the early months of the Trump administration. Black men’s employment is lower than what was reported in the first quarter of 2025, and while Black women’s employment is unchanged overall, employment among college-educated Black women is lower than first quarter 2025 estimates.
May Day then and now: The ongoing fight for workers’ rights
May 1 is International Workers’ Day. Also known as “May Day,” its origins trace back to 1856 in Australia, where workers organized a day of stoppages and celebrations to demand an eight-hour workday. However, May 1 didn’t become a widespread international day for labor until after the infamous Haymarket Affair of 1886.
Workers in Chicago, including many immigrants, went on strike on May 1 to demand the eight-hour workday. At least four strikers were killed while picketing the McCormick Harvester factory, at that point the largest factory in the world. A large rally was held on May 4 to protest violence against peaceful picketers. As police moved to disperse the crowd, someone threw a bomb that killed seven officers. Police fired back indiscriminately, wounding and killing an undetermined number of workers.
What followed was a sweeping crackdown: police raids, the arrests of hundreds of men and women, and the indictment of eight people—five of whom were German immigrants. The partisan judge Joseph E. Gary conducted the trial where all 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants. All defendants were convicted with no evidence and seven were sentenced to death; four were hanged, one died by suicide, and two had their sentences commuted. The trial is widely considered a miscarriage of justice.
In the aftermath, socialists and unionists worldwide began marking May 1st as a day of international worker solidarity. However, in 1894, U.S. President Grover Cleveland—looking to make peace with labor prior to the midterm elections after more than 30 workers were killed during the Pullman Strike—established Labor Day in early September. He did this explicitly to avoid associating it with May Day and the labor unrest it represented. In 1955, at the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 “Loyalty Day” instead of “May Day” in response to the holiday’s popularity in communist countries.
Rising inequality is the root of affordability problems
Key takeaways:
- Income inequality has skyrocketed since 1979 because of intentional policy choices that suppressed wages for typical families to accelerate income growth at the top.
- Middle-class household incomes would be roughly $30,000 higher today if their incomes had simply kept pace with average income growth since 1979.
- Recognizing that today’s affordability problems are overwhelmingly inequality problems is the key to constructing the right policy solutions.
- As a start, protecting workers’ right to organize unions, fostering long periods of very low unemployment, and keeping minimum wages high will help typical families claim their fair share of income growth.
When most people—including policymakers—complain about a lack of affordability, they think of prices being too high. But affordability is the outcome of a race between prices and incomes. After all, goods and services were a lot cheaper 90 years ago during the Great Depression, but we all know that nearly everybody is richer today than their peers back then. Bringing incomes into the affordability picture makes for better understanding and better policy.
New Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data show that rising income inequality is the main reason that affordability feels out of reach for too many U.S. families. For more than four decades, most of the income growth in the U.S. economy has been funneled to those at the very top, leaving typical families with far less than their proportionate share of the economy’s gains. If middle-class household incomes had simply kept pace with average income growth since 1979, their pay would be roughly $30,000 higher today. If we account for taxes and government transfers, incomes would still be $19,000 higher today for these middle-class households. Think of this gap as an “inequality tax”: the amount that rising inequality has cost the typical U.S. family. Life would be much more affordable for these families today if they hadn’t been hit by this inequality tax.
Virginia governor’s amended collective bargaining bill would leave workers’ rights optional and large public-sector pay gap unaddressed
This year, large majorities in both houses of Virginia’s General Assembly passed landmark legislation to extend equal collective bargaining rights to most public-sector workers. The Assembly’s collective bargaining bill proposed replacing Virginia’s Jim Crow-era ban on public employee collective bargaining with a new law affirming public-sector workers’ rights and creating a legal pathway to a union contract for those who choose to unionize. The Assembly bill was poised to put Virginia on a transformative path to narrowing one of the largest public-sector pay gaps in the nation and improving public education and services for all Virginians by reducing crisis-level shortages of educators, first responders, health care workers, corrections staff, and other frontline workers. Strengthening collective bargaining rights is also one of the most powerful policy levers states have available to confront primary economic challenges affecting all workers today: an affordability crisis driven by the failure of wages to keep pace with inflation, growing income inequality, and persistent racial and gender labor market disparities.
Once the Assembly’s bill reached her desk, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger had the opportunity to strengthen it or sign it into law. Instead, Governor Spanberger put forward her own heavily amended version of the bill last week, weakening the proposed collective bargaining framework so extensively that her version would lock Virginia into an unstable, ineffective system in which collective bargaining would remain merely “optional” and where employers and workers would remain perpetually uncertain about what rules might apply to them from year to year depending on what appointees of future governors might decide. The governor’s amended bill will now be considered by the Assembly in its one-day veto session this week. Below, we analyze some of the many substantive differences between the Assembly bill and the governor’s bill, as well as the likely economic impacts.
Voucher programs fail rural schools
Voucher programs—which use public funds to finance private education—have been sweeping state and federal legislatures over the past few years. These bills are harmful to public schools, especially public schools in rural communities. Yet, this week, the “Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act” was introduced in the Senate, which would repeal the national private school voucher program passed in the 2025 reconciliation bill, thereby protecting rural communities from these programs. Often framed as “school choice” programs, vouchers give parents the equivalent of per-pupil public school funding to send their child to any private or homeschool program they choose.
But diverting public funds away from public K–12 schools and toward private schools does not guarantee educational opportunities will be expanded for all students—and this is especially true in rural communities. Most obviously, because students in rural communities often don’t have a private school option and therefore cannot use the vouchers, state voucher programs—which are financed by all the taxpayers in a state—amount to an education subsidy for wealthy urban families at the expense of strong public schools. Moreover, for rural areas that can support multiple school systems, voucher programs introduce a potentially large cost for the students that remain in public schools, as any sharp drop in public school enrollment will raise the fixed cost per pupil of running schools. For example, school facilities and staff that are efficient for 1,000 students in a school may no longer be efficient if enrollment were to drop to 800 or 900.Read more
Taxes are good, actually—especially if you care about affordability
Key takeaways:
- Recent Democratic proposals to exempt broad swaths of the middle class from federal income taxes accept a damaging frame of taxes as a pure drain on affordability.
- But taxes aren’t a drain on affordability; they fund the public services and social insurance programs that make a decent life possible for middle-class families.
- Progressive taxes on the ultrarich and corporations are essential and should be the immediate priority, but they cannot sustain the public sector alone, let alone expand it in ways needed.
- Middle-class tax rates have fallen by a third since 1979, yet economic anxiety remains high. Tax-cutting has failed because it has left the private-sector drivers of inequality untouched and starved public services.
For decades, anti-tax politicians have tried to smuggle in large tax cuts for the ultrarich and corporations by loudly offering tax cut crumbs to the middle class. Key to this effort has been framing taxes as a pure drain on typical families’ ability to afford a secure economic life. Any success in this dishonest campaign to foster anti-tax sentiment is a disaster for working people—and that’s why some recent tax policy ideas from Democrats and the rhetoric around them are so deflating.Read more
A snapshot of college athletes: Who are they and how much do they earn?
Key takeaways:
- The growing revenue of college sports and the heightened attention on the experience of college athletes suggest that college athletics is far from the amateur endeavor it might have started as decades ago.
- Recent policy changes have allowed some college athletes to receive compensation, whether in the form of name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights or revenue sharing. However, not all college athletes have the right to be compensated.
- The NCAA has backed the SCORE Act, which would jeopardize college athlete compensation by prohibiting them from being classified as employees in the first place.
- Policymakers should consider proposals that strengthen rights for college athletes, including granting them employee status under federal labor laws.
Introduction
It has long been argued that college athletes should not receive compensation to maintain the “amateurism” of college sports. However, the growing revenue generated from college sports and heightened attention on the experience of college athletes suggest that college athletics is far from an amateur endeavor.
Only recently have college athletes been granted the right to be compensated for name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. This decision came into effect after years of antitrust lawsuits against the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) compensation rules. These lawsuits culminated in the Supreme Court decision in NCAA v. Alston, as well as a growing number of states enacting their own compensation laws for college athletes. The recent House v. NCAA settlement allows Division I schools—those with the largest and most economically lucrative athletic programs—to share revenue with college athletes, and further expands opportunities for college athletes to receive compensation.
As a result of these policy changes and a growing movement among college athletes to demand fair compensation for their performance, federal policymakers have put forward proposals to address college athlete compensation. In this blog post, we examine these proposals and their impacts on college athletes and their labor/employment status.
Supporting manufacturing employment: No president has tried so of course it has never worked
Quibbling with headlines is annoying, I know, but I was provoked by the title of economist Jason Furman’s New York Times piece last week: “Every President Tries It. It Never Works.” The “it” being referred to here is “reversing the loss of manufacturing jobs.”
The provocation was the “every president tries” part. If “trying” is defined as changing policy to consistently support employment growth in U.S. manufacturing, no president has tried in my lifetime to do this. Amazingly, doing nothing has indeed failed. Doing nothing was also the wrong choice.