A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that, collectively, these policies will transfer between $4.4 and $5.4 billion a year from farmworkers to their employers.
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The Department of Labor currently employs between 490 and 611 investigators, the lowest number on record in its history; they’re tasked with overseeing 11 million workplaces.
“Employers are going to know that they can act with total impunity,” says Dan Costa, a lead researcher at EPI.
The Nation
February 17, 2026
Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute say the tide really started to turn against labor and in favor of capital some 45 years ago, when the “productivity-pay gap” began to widen. Between 1980 and 2025, productivity rose more than 90% while hourly pay rose only 33%, meaning productivity grew 2.7 times faster than wages. That gap is now a chasm.
Reuters
February 17, 2026
Underemployment has been on the rise, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which has tracked the rate of underemployment since 1978. Today, 8 percent of the US population is underemployed, up 0.5 percent from 2024 and it is up 1.1 percent from 2023.
Al Jazeera
February 17, 2026
“The big story is about the final benchmark revisions. With the downward revisions to prior data, the labor market added only 181,000 jobs total in 2025, just 15,000 per month on average,” noted Economic Policy Institute senior economist Elise Gould.
iHeartRadio
February 17, 2026
The prime-age employment-to-population ratio, which measures the percentage of 25-to-54 year olds who are currently employed, reached 80.9% in January, matching its highest level since 2001.
“It’s a little puzzling because of other labor market weakness,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Perhaps there’s a demographic angle because young adults are facing much higher unemployment.”
S&P Global
February 17, 2026
The loss of manufacturing jobs coincides with the softening in the labor market, said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank.
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Another challenge the industry is facing right now: Trump’s tariffs. According to Bivens, tariffs are currently doing more damage than helping the sector. Tariffs make imports expensive, which also makes manufacturing outputs expensive, making it harder for firms to compete in global markets. Countries can also retaliate and add their own tariffs on their goods.
But Bivens points out tariffs can be beneficial in some cases; however, what he’s seeing from this administration doesn’t show evidence of a larger plan, and tariff decisions tend to be erratic.
Hearst TV
February 17, 2026
On the surface, Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz said Wednesday’s report was good.
“It was one of the surveys that is showing, okay, we are still humming along,” Shierholz said.
But it was different that what we’ve been seeing lately, she said. In 2025, the economy only added about 15,000 jobs a month, on average.
“So what we saw in January was a big change,” Shierholz said. “It could signify that things are strengthening, or it could be volatility in the data. We are really in a wait and see moment.”
Marketplace
February 17, 2026
Features interview with Daniel Costa on economic impact of mass deportations.
Noticias Nevada (Univision)
February 17, 2026
The Archbridge report doesn’t correlate the economic freedom of the child care market with costs across states. But in 2023, Move.org published a report drawing on data from the Economic Policy Institute and the U.S. Census Bureau that ranked states by cost and percentage of average income consumed by child care.
Reason Magazine
February 17, 2026
In 2024, five years after Dayton and Walker had left office, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found that job growth in Minnesota grew 11% compared to 7.9% in Wisconsin. Minnesota’s wages increased by 9.7% compared to 6.4% in Wisconsin. Household income in the Gopher State jumped 8.5%, compared to 6.4% in the Badger State.
And while union membership in Minnesota fell by 0.4%, it had dropped by 15.2% in Wisconsin.
Capital Times
February 17, 2026