Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said there are three major takeaways from this week’s JOLTS: the rate of hiring continues to be low; the rate of those quitting is the nation’s lowest since 2014, and layoffs are up slightly. The nation’s unemployment rate “can quickly spike” if layoffs continue rolling in and employers slow down their hiring, Gould said in a social media post.
“Not only will the unemployment rate spike if layoffs continue to rise as hiring remains depressed, but it may explain why the young adult unemployment has been rising as it becomes increasingly difficult to break into the labor market as employers and workers sit tight under economic uncertainty,” Gould said.
Homes.com
December 15, 2025
Nationally, school bus driver staffing levels are nearly 10% lower than they were in 2019, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Many of those drivers were retirees, and many quit when the coronavirus pandemic-era shutdowns began. Replacing them has proven difficult.
Albany Times Union
December 15, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, tipped workers face higher rates of poverty than other workers. Tips aren’t optional extras. They’re how servers survive.
VegOut Magazine
December 15, 2025
In October 2024 the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, called immigration a source of strength for the U.S. economy. EPI said immigration has great potential to boost the economy even more. “It is crystal clear that immigration expands U.S. gross domestic product and is good for growth. And immigration overall has led to better, not worse, wages and work opportunities for U.S.-born workers.” said the EPI researchers.
Hartford Courant
December 15, 2025
Data from the Economic Policy Institute show that from 1979 to 2023, the share of all wages held by the bottom 90% by income fell by 9.1 percentage points.
MarketWatch
December 15, 2025
This infographic ranks U.S. states by the share of low-wage workers earning less than $20 per hour, using data from the Economic Policy Institute as of July 2025.
Visual Capitalist
December 15, 2025
About 370,000 migrant workers are currently in the U.S. through the H-2A program for agriculture—roughly 17% of the agricultural workforce. The program is projected to grow to around 900,000 workers in 2034, accounting for 42% of agricultural jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank. The H-2B program—for landscaping, hospitality, construction, seafood processing, forestry, recreation, and, increasingly, poultry and meat processing—has a formal cap of 66,000 workers, although 170,000 worked in the U.S. in 2024. This program will have an estimated 252,000 visas in 2026, said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at EPI.
Prism Reports
December 15, 2025
“Because the costs have been rising so much for so many families, we know the cost of child care, the cost of health care, the need to be able to earn more money just to keep up, necessitated more hours per family,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
CNBC
December 15, 2025
A new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute claims that the signature trade deal from President Donald Trump’s first term has actually “created more problems than it fixed.”
The report, published Thursday, notes that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), signed into law by Trump in 2020, has completely failed to fulfill Trump’s stated goal of lowering the US trade deficit with Canada and Mexico, which has grown from a combined $125 billion in 2020 to $263 billion in 2025.
Common Dreams
December 15, 2025
Even that number is questionable because it includes pledges and plans for investment that may not be realized, experts have said, as we reported in May.
“There’s no guarantee that any of the investments that are announced actually come to fruition,” Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said. Economists “wouldn’t count them until they’re actually in the ground,” Hersh said about the listed projects.
FactCheck.org
December 15, 2025