This piece was published in collaboration with the Albert Shanker Institute.

For some students and workers, hair is a trivial wardrobe decision, while for many Black and Brown people, their hairstyle can be a consequential element of class participation and a job offer. School dress codes and “business appropriate” dress often put high stakes and severe restrictions on how Black and Brown people can express their culture and identity through their hair.

Over the last several years, lawmakers in 24 states have sought to combat this problem by passing the “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair” (CROWN) Act. The CROWN Act is a law that protects against discrimination based on hairstyle and texture in schools, workplaces, and beyond by extending the definition of racial expression to include wearing braids, locs, twists, and other culturally significant hair styles.

Yet the recent court case of Texas high school junior Darryl George reveals that even in states that have adopted versions of the CROWN Act, as Texas has, Black and Brown people can still face educational and career disadvantages for their hairstyles when discriminatory systems—in this case a school dress code—are validated by judicial interpretation that ignores the intent of the law.

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This piece was originally published in Democracy Journal. 

In the decades following World War II, the U.S. economy thrived. Economic growth was strong and the fruits of that growth were broadly shared. Not everything in the economy was perfect in the 1950s and ’60s—far from it. There were massive inequities by race and gender, marked by the exclusion of people of color and women from countless labor market opportunities. Nevertheless, a crucial dynamic was in place: As the economy grew, workers all across the wage distribution—low-wage, middle-wage, and high-wage—saw gains. Racial and gender gaps shrank. Growth was strong, and living standards improved across the board.

This positive dynamic was not a foregone conclusion. It was the result of “middle-out” policy choices that ensured that economic growth was both robust and broadly shared (though the term “middle-out” would not be coined until much later). Macroeconomic policymakers targeted sustained low unemployment, the federal minimum wage increased rapidly and regularly and was well enforced, the federal government actively safeguarded workers’ rights to unionization and collective bargaining, and regulations protected many other labor rights.

Starting in the late 1970s, however, policy began to shift in an ill-fated direction. As a neoliberal paradigm took hold and trickle-down economics secured its dominance among members of both parties as the proper way to manage the economy, policymakers went about dismantling the policy bulwarks that were the crucial foundation of robust, broadly shared growth. Macroeconomic policymakers began to tolerate excess unemployment, increases in the federal minimum wage became smaller and rarer, lawmakers failed to update labor law to keep up with relentless attacks on unionization and collective bargaining, and anti-worker deregulatory pushes succeeded again and again.

We all know what happened in those years. Workers lost ground dramatically. In the earlier era, from the postwar period through the late 1970s, productivity had grown 2.5% per year on average, while the typical worker’s compensation grew at an average of 2.4%. This parity led to life-changing improvements in living standards for working people from generation to generation. But as the policy regime shifted away from the middle-out economics of the New Deal to neoliberal economics, productivity growth slowed dramatically and compensation growth for typical workers absolutely tanked. From 1979 to 2022, productivity grew 1.2% per year on average—less than half the pace of the prior period—and the typical worker’s compensation grew by an average of just 0.3%. And—after improving in the earlier period—the Black-white wage gap widened.

In 2022, “production and nonsupervisory employees”—a Bureau of Labor Statistics designation covering some 80% of the workforce—earned an average of $57,300. If productivity and pay had not diverged since the late 1970s, and instead the average wage for this group had grown at the rate of productivity, a typical worker would have been making $82,000—a 43% bump that would equate to nearly $25,000 annually. That would be a life-changing amount of money for working families.

One of the core pillars of middle-out economics is empowering workers—giving them the tools they need to claim their fair share of economic growth. It’s worth emphasizing that there is no silver bullet here: There was a sweeping transformation to neoliberal economics, and we need another sweeping transformation to set us on a path of robust, broadly shared growth. In what follows, I detail some middle-out economic policies that will help close the productivity-pay gap, and what they would mean for working people.

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This is an excerpt from an op-ed that originally published in CNN. Read the full op-ed here.

The federal estate tax should be an effective tool to slightly level the playing field between those who inherit wealth and those who have to work for a living. It should also ensure that family dynasties who’ve amassed enormous fortunes pay their fair share in taxes.

But because policymakers have repeatedly doubled and tripled the immense sums that can be passed on before the tax kicks in, the estate tax today affects almost no one.

The estate tax exemption—the value of an estate that a mega-millionaire can own before facing taxes—has grown so much over the past quarter century that just eight of every 10,000 people who died in 2019 left behind an estate that was large enough to be subject to the tax, currently at 40%.

Read the full op-ed here.

March 12 is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2024 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2023 simply to match what men were paid in 2023. Women were paid 21.8% less on average than men in 2023, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, and geographic division. 

There has been little progress in narrowing this gender wage gap over the past three decades, as shown in Figure A. While the pay gap declined between 1979 and 1994—due to men’s stagnant wages, not a tremendous increase in women’s wages—it has remained mostly flat since then.

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Below, EPI economists offer their insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 275,000 jobs added in February.

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Workers want unions now more than they have in a generation. Evidence suggests more than 60 million non-union workers would like a union at their workplace. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the agency established by Congress in 1935 to protect workers’ organizing rights—is handling more union representation elections and unfair labor practice charges than they have in years.

So how have companies responded to this surge in worker organizing?

Some have honored their workers’ choice and tried to start a positive labor-management relationship, as Microsoft, New Flyer, Ben & Jerry’s, and other companies have done. These companies see the value of a constructive relationship with their employees to their bottom line.

Others have taken the opposite tack—to the extreme. Led by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and joined by Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Starbucks, these companies are engaged in a legal battle trying to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional, by resurfacing long-rejected constitutional arguments about the agency’s structure. If they succeed, it would kneecap the agency and its operations at the very time workers need it the most.

Why are these companies taking this scorched-earth approach? What is motivating these attacks? 

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The immigrant share of the labor force reached a record high of 18.6% in 2023, according to our analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.1 Anti-immigration advocates have been out in full force, using this as a talking point for deeply misguided commentary and analysis that roughly translates to “immigrants are taking all our jobs.” 

The reality is that the economy does not have a fixed number of jobs, and what we see today is a growing economy that is adding jobs for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers. Here are six key facts that show immigrants are not hurting the employment outcomes of U.S.-born workers.

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This week, Michigan’s 2023 repeal of a so-called “right-to-work” (RTW) law takes effect. Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s state legislature is once again debating a RTW bill at a moment when it could not be clearer that RTW laws damage states’ economies by accelerating income inequality and reducing job quality, without delivering any job growth.  

RTW laws—and the phrase “right to work” itself—are intended to deceive and confuse. The misleadingly named policy is designed to make it more difficult for workers to form and sustain unions and negotiate collectively for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out in 1961, “right to work” is a “false slogan” since RTW laws provide neither rights nor work and are in fact designed “to rob us of our civil rights and job rights [and] to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone.” Decades later, research bears out King’s contention that “wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower.”

RTW laws are historically rooted in racism and designed to maintain unequal power. When private-sector workers first gained legal protection to unionize following passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act in 1935, unionization rates grew quickly. In response, opponents waged anti-union, explicitly white supremacist campaigns to limit worker power and maintain Jim Crow labor relations. These campaigns pursued state legislation as a means to constrain workers’ newly won federal union rights via RTW policies, and especially to block multiracial union organizing. RTW laws have since spread to 27 states and continue to generate economic outcomes that disadvantage all workers.

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Click here for the latest version of our 50-state maps showing legislation to roll back or strengthen child labor protections.

Child labor remains a top issue in 2024 state legislative sessions amid soaring violations and widespread abuse of child labor laws in multiple sectors of the economy. On one hand, the coordinated, industry-backed effort to roll back child labor protections state by state has continued to expand. At the same time, some state legislators are proposing legislation to strengthen the rights of young workers and the laws designed to safeguard their health and education.

Since 2021, 28 states have introduced bills to weaken child labor laws, and 12 states have enacted them. By contrast, 14 states have introduced bills to strengthen child labor protections already in 2024—up from 11 states in all of 2023—as more state lawmakers recognize the need to address increasing violations and threats to current state and federal standards.

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