But the pay gap could change again if last year’s cuts to Medicaid and food assistance make it harder for families to find care for children and older relatives, or to keep the healthcare they need to keep working, said Ismael Cid-Martinez, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
“I want to be careful about not making too much out of one year,” Cid-Martinez said.
Investopedia
September 16, 2026
Nearly nine decades later, Sanders argues that the standard has outlived the economy that it was built on. Since 1979, net productivity has climbed roughly 90% while typical workers’ hourly pay has risen about 33%, according to Economic Policy Institute data—a gap advocates for shorter workweeks cite as part of the broader case for reform.
Fortune
September 16, 2026
As for the U.S., tipping didn’t become widespread here until after the Civil War, when wealthy Americans returning from Europe helped bring the custom home. But in America, tipping also took on a much more troubling dimension: businesses employing formerly enslaved Black workers, particularly in hospitality and railroad service, used gratuities to supplement low wages. The Economic Policy Institute called tipping “a racist relic and a modern tool of economic oppression in the South.”
Click Orlando
September 15, 2026
Economic Policy Institute data has found that she isn’t alone as unemployment among young college graduates and young workers without a degree has been rising slightly faster than the overall unemployment rate.
Newsweek
September 14, 2026
“The average CEO makes 300 times what their average worker makes — three hundred times. And it’s only getting worse,” Brown said. “It’s getting worse because Jon Husted is in the middle of rigging this system.”
According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs make 281 times their average employee at 350 of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies by revenue in 2024. The report found that in 1965, CEOs were paid 21 times that of an average employee.
Dayton Daily News
September 14, 2026
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that Black women experienced a net loss of 113,000 jobs during 2025. The Economic Policy Institute found one of the sharpest one-year declines in Black women’s employment in a quarter century, with particularly significant losses among college-educated and public-sector workers.
Essence
September 14, 2026
CouponFollow wondered the same thing, which is why researchers at the site conducted and published a report that found the minimum cost of living in the country.
The report is based on an analysis of the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator — which estimates the yearly costs of things like housing and food, as well as taxes for a single adult living alone — as well as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Researchers specifically focused 100 biggest metro areas in the country.
PennLive
September 14, 2026
If typical worker pay had kept pace with productivity over the past 45 years, today’s typical paycheck would be roughly 40% larger. That income went to shareholders and corporate executives. A new Economic Policy Institute report finds that tripling union density to 30% — where Canada sits today, where the United States was before decades of attacks on collective bargaining — would shift $1.2 trillion annually back to working people, raise the median worker’s pay by 14.5%, close racial wage gaps by more than one-third and produce annual wage increases ranging from $1,900 to $10,600 by state.
America's Work Force Union Podcast
September 14, 2026
The study’s findings are striking, but labor market experts caution that the data is also very limited.
“It’s absolutely the case that AI could be affecting the demand for certain types of jobs,” said Ben Zipperer, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, and he added that this demand dynamic could be applying downward pressure on wages. But he was quick to add that the Apollo study had too small of a sample size to be convincing.
Zipperer says this research approach can overstate negative effects of AI. Consider the example of coding, a high AI-exposure professional field. If AI causes it to become cheaper to build software by reducing demand for software developers, the saved money doesn’t disappear. It will go elsewhere, including being spent on hiring elsewhere and thereby boosting demand for other workers. “That makes the highly exposed jobs look worse by comparison, even though some of that measured loss is just income increases for other workers,” Zipperer said.
CNBC
September 14, 2026
The current age of AI is often considered to have begun with the public release of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. However, the potential economic and social implications of large language models were already becoming apparent during the first year of the Biden administration, which began implementing a series of rules and executive orders intended to limit the potential damage from the technology. The Economic Policy Institute maintains a comprehensive list of these actions.
Paul Krugman Substack
September 14, 2026