State lawmakers continued to weaken child labor protections in 2026: Efforts to strengthen protections have stalled
Key takeaways:
- So far this year, at least 13 states have introduced bills weakening child labor protections, and four have enacted them.
- Meanwhile, only three states have introduced bills to strengthen standards in 2026, compared with 15 in 2025.
- Industry-backed attacks on child labor standards have followed four troubling trends: 1) lowering minimum wages for teen workers; 2) weaponizing “youth apprenticeships”; 3) eliminating youth permits; and 4) weakening safeguards for teen child care workers.
- The Trump administration has undermined federal enforcement of child labor standards, even amid rising violations.
- Oregon enshrined current federal child labor standards into state law, offering a replicable model for states to hold the line against potential federal rollbacks.
Many state lawmakers took encouraging steps in 2023 and 2024 to strengthen their child labor standards—in response to high-profile reporting of widespread child labor violations across the U.S. and simultaneous efforts to weaken state child labor standards in the wake of COVID-19. But trends in 2026 suggest that this momentum may be waning despite continued increases in child labor violations. Meanwhile, opponents of strong child labor standards have continued to erode state standards and—in effect—chip away at the basis for federal standards, which have also come under threat.Read more
Who are the Asian American and Pacific Islander workers in commonly misclassified occupations?
Key takeaways:
- Misclassification of workers as independent contractors is a pervasive and widespread problem. AAPI workers are overrepresented in three of the 11 commonly misclassified occupations: manicurists and pedicurists, home health aides, and personal care aides. Vietnamese, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Samoan, and other Pacific Islander workers are overrepresented within these occupations.
- Groups with lower median hourly wages also have larger shares of their working populations in the 11 commonly misclassified occupations.
- Federal protections against misclassification are limited and currently under attack by the Trump administration. The state and local landscape for curbing misclassification is varied, which leaves some workers less protected than others.
In March, EPI published updated research highlighting the cost to workers of being misclassified as an independent contractor for 11 commonly misclassified occupations. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers were overrepresented in three of those occupations—manicurists and pedicurists, home health aides, and personal care aides—relative to their share of the overall workforce.
Most federal, state, and local labor laws apply only to employees and not to independent contractors, so misclassification strips workers of key protections such as minimum wage laws or qualifying for employer-provided health insurance and retirement benefits. Additionally, both misclassified workers and social insurance funds lose out on income: the report conservatively estimates that for the three jobs in which AAPI workers are overrepresented, misclassification costs workers at least $7,000 annually and costs social insurance programs $600 to $800 per worker each year.
With the understanding that the umbrella term “AAPI” encompasses an immensely diverse population both in ethnic origin but also in economic outcomes, this piece goes beyond the narrow view that all AAPI workers are high-wage earners. Below, we provide more detail on which groups of AAPI workers are most likely to be employed in lower-wage commonly misclassified occupations.
What occupation data show about AI and the young college graduate workforce: Class of 2026
Key takeaways:
- The vast majority (85%) of young college graduates work in occupations that have seen strong employment growth in recent years.
- Young college graduates, like college graduates in general, are more likely to work in AI-exposed occupations than the overall workforce—and considerably more likely than young noncollege workers.
- But both young college graduates and young noncollege workers have experienced rising unemployment over the last three years, suggesting AI is not likely to be driving labor market weakness.
In the first blog post of our Class of 2026 series, we showed that the strong labor market for young college graduates of the early 2020s had begun softening in recent years. A growing share of young college graduates are seeking employment, but because their employment rates have not kept up with this job search, their unemployment rate has risen faster than the overall rate. The second blog post in the series discussed the industries where young college graduates worked. We found that recent graduates work in growing industries, but are forced to enter a weakened labor market with less job turnover, deteriorating their ability to break in. Young college graduates work in the tech sector at a similar rate to college graduates, and there is no clear evidence that tech sector employment is significantly decreased despite warnings about the advancement of AI.
In this blog post, we delve deeper into the occupations where young college graduates are likely to work.1 We examine whether it has been relatively more difficult to secure employment in these fields as the labor market has weakened. We also scour the data for signs that exposure to AI-related occupations may disproportionately affect the prospects for young college graduates as they enter the labor market.Read more
A depressed hires rate is a major cause of labor market weakness for young college graduates: Class of 2026
Key takeaways
- The depressed overall hires rate is a key driver of new labor market weakness for young college graduates, as it makes it harder for them to break into the labor market. This is true across industries, not just in those that disproportionately employ young college graduates—suggesting the culprit is not a structural change in the economy like AI but a labor market in which employers are hiring less and workers are holding onto the jobs they have.
- The information sector—posited to be more AI-exposed—has experienced recent job losses but employs only 2.3% of young college graduates.
- High-tech industries, which employ about 1 in 10 college workers, expanded at a historically rapid pace in the early 2020s but have shown signs of softening over the last three years.
The early 2020s labor market for young college graduates was strong. But, as we showed in this series’ first blog post, the Class of 2026 is graduating college into a labor market that has notably weakened in the past two years. A growing share of young college graduates are looking for jobs, but their employment rates have not kept pace—meaning unemployment is rising faster for young graduates than for the overall workforce. While their outcomes remain better than those of their noncollege counterparts, the uptick in unemployment has been a rising concern.
In this blog post, we delve deeper into the industries where young college graduates are likely to work,1 examining whether it has been relatively more difficult to secure employment in these fields as the labor market has weakened. Our analysis first examines employment changes, then turns to labor market flows, including hires and separations rates. We also scour the data for signs of contraction in the tech sector that may disproportionately affect the prospects for young college graduates as they enter the labor market.
In the third blog post in the series, we will examine the occupations where young college graduates work with particular attention to occupations that may have grown or shrunk, as well as to those most exposed to AI.
Taking affordability seriously: Even with recent oil shocks, affordability remains mostly an issue of incomes, not prices
Key takeaways:
- Affordability is not just about prices; it’s the outcome of a race between income growth and price inflation. When income growth is slower than price inflation, affordability worsens. When income growth is faster, affordability improves.
- Focusing just on prices is bad for understanding how the economy works and how it has performed in the recent past, and it leads to an overly restrictive policy menu for improving families’ affordability.
- Policy can more reliably address income growth for typical families. This growth has been stunted for decades by the rise of inequality. Closing this gap by ensuring more equitable distribution of future growth is the strongest tool we have for improving affordability.
Affordability has been the policy buzzword of recent years. Much of the affordability discourse—both among policymakers and the public—has focused near-exclusively on prices as the big affordability problem. But affordability is not a problem of high prices, instead it’s the outcome of a race between incomes and prices. And the reason typical families have faced an affordability crunch in recent decades is not because prices have grown exceptionally fast, it’s because incomes for the vast majority have grown too slowly. This income growth has been suppressed mostly by rising inequality that has put a growing wedge between overall economic growth and the income growth of typical families.
Getting the drivers of affordability right is important—it’s not just quibbling. If you only examine price growth and try to infer what has happened to affordability over periods of economic history, you’ll usually get the story wrong. And if policymakers only look at how to change the trajectory of prices while ignoring what they can do to change the trajectory of incomes, they will be far less effective in providing useful relief to U.S. families. There are far more ways to use policy to raise incomes in a targeted and effective way than there are to suppress price growth.
Below, we provide some more background on why analyses of affordability need to include incomes, why policymakers have much more scope to raise incomes in a useful way as opposed to pushing down prices, and why focusing just on prices can obscure whether affordability has improved or worsened.
Raising revenues the right way: How we tax matters for building trust in the public sector
Taxes are the price of living well in a modern democratic community. The social contract relies on the idea that people both benefit from and contribute to maintaining a community in the ways they can; the tax code is one way of making sure that happens. Public trust builds under certain conditions: when the government collects tax revenue fairly and equitably and when people perceive that government institutions are competent and well intentioned in using that revenue to provide community services. This in turn makes it easier to collect revenue and provide expanded services in the future. When governments collect revenues in ways that feel unfair or inequitable, and when programs are hamstrung and unable to meet community needs, people become understandably skeptical.
Our decisions about whom and how to tax are decisions about which community needs we have the capacity to address and at what scale. Progressive taxes like personal, investment, and corporate income taxes generate more revenue from those who have the greatest ability to pay, and for whom the cost of losing the next dollar is small, relative to the last dollar of a family struggling to make rent and afford groceries. On the other hand, regressive revenue strategies like non-strategic tariffs, fees and fines, and an overreliance on sales taxes, especially when combined with cuts to social programs, heighten the sense that the system is unfair. Where progressive revenue strategies can bind a community together in mutual support and expand capacity to meet needs through good governance, regressive strategies erode people’s trust in the public sector.
Colorado and Virginia laws have suppressed unions for decades. Now it’s up to Governors Polis and Spanberger to change course.
At a moment of relentless Trump administration attacks on workers and their unions, state lawmakers across the country are taking action to shore up workers’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain. Yet two of this year’s biggest opportunities for states to remove obstacles to unionization remain in limbo, awaiting action from Governor Jared Polis in Colorado and Governor Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.
Strengthening collective bargaining rights is one of the most powerful policy levers states have available to confront primary economic challenges facing all workers today: an affordability crisis driven by the long-term suppression of workers’ pay, growing income inequality, and persistent racial and gender labor market disparities. It’s widely recognized that in today’s wildly unequal economy, millions of workers wish they had a union contract but face daunting obstacles to exercising their legal rights to get one. Moreover, many workers have never been protected by federal labor law at all due to Jim Crow-era exclusions.
For the second year in a row, Colorado and Virginia state legislators have passed landmark legislation to remove barriers to unionization:
- In Colorado, legislators have passed the Worker Protection Act to repeal an 83-year-old state policy that has limited Colorado workers’ freedom to form unions by requiring they undergo a state-mandated “second election” before they can secure full collective bargaining rights.
- In Virginia, lawmakers have passed collective bargaining legislation to ensure full union rights for more than 500,000 state and local government employees and home care workers—all of whom have historically been denied coverage under federal labor law. The legislation would replace Virginia’s longstanding ban on public employee collective bargaining that has resulted in one of the largest public-sector pay gaps in the nation.
Both pieces of legislation would correct historical wrongs—restoring rights that Colorado and Virginia workers have been denied since the 1940s, when past state lawmakers adopted anti-union policies amid a wave of white supremacist, big business backlash to multiracial union organizing. Yet both pieces of legislation were vetoed by their states’ respective governors in 2025 and are now once again awaiting governors’ signatures in 2026.
In Colorado, Governor Polis has already indicated intent to once again veto the Worker Protection Act, but it’s not too late for Polis to seize his second chance to sign the bill.
In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin vetoed the collective bargaining legislation in 2025 and was ineligible to run for reelection because of term limits. This year, when the legislation was first sent to newly elected Virginia Governor Spanberger, she proposed extensive, damaging amendments to weaken the bill instead of signing it. The General Assembly has since rejected those amendments, and now Spanberger has her own “second chance” to sign this transformative legislation into law.
Meanwhile, scores of anti-worker actions from the Trump administration are continuing to accelerate a decades-long trend of weakening workers’ rights, suppressing wages, and eroding bargaining power. This year, state lawmakers have handed both Governor Polis and Governor Spanberger historic opportunities to rebalance unequal power in their states’ economies and remove major obstacles Coloradans and Virginians face to exercising their rights to unionize and collectively bargain. And the choices Polis and Spanberger make in the next few weeks will shape economic outcomes in their states for years to come.
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.
Young college graduates face a weaker labor market—but a more mixed picture than the headlines suggest: Class of 2026
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.