A report last month from the Economic Policy Institute found CEOs made 325 times as much as the average worker last year. From 1978 to 2025, top CEO pay has increased 1,316%, while typical employee salary has gone up just 28%.
Forbes
October 7, 2026
Two decades into the NAFTA experiment, the Economic Policy Institute’s Jeff Faux explained: “By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II.”
The result, said Faux, was decades of “stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.”
Capital Times
October 7, 2026
Elise Gould, the senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, called out “the notable weakness” in the U.S. economy.
“Payroll employment growth has averaged 50,000 over the last three months, but it continues to be relatively volatile,” she said in her analysis of the new reportOpen in a new tab. “Four months of jobs losses over the last year, while some notable gains recorded as well. Economic uncertainty may be at play in the latest spell of weakness and downward revisions.”
World At Work
October 7, 2026
As the cost of living keeps rising while Americans’ paychecks fail to keep pace, Jon is joined by labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards to break down where our economy went so wrong for so many. Together, they explore how decades of policy choices and corporate practices have weakened workers’ leverage and channeled gains toward those at the top—and lay out a vision for how to rebalance the economy so that workers share more fairly in the prosperity they help create.
Kathryn and Jon discuss EPI’s pay-productivity chart and how EPI was her first job out of college.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
October 7, 2026
Teachers earn on average about 73 cents on the dollar relative to comparable college graduates, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). This “wage penalty” has increased in recent years. Inflation-adjusted wages went down by more than $46 per week for teachers over the past decade and up more than $220 per week for other college graduates, EPI found.
Governing
October 7, 2026
“Slower wage growth means that with higher prices, workers and their families continue to find it difficult to make ends meet,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a commentary.
Investopedia
October 7, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute celebrated its 40th anniversary Thursday with a policy conference and gala. EPI has long been a key sister organization to the Prospect. We’ve published many of its thinkers, relied on its work, and shared goals for the country.
As my colleague Harold Meyerson wrote in the authoritative history of EPI as the workers’ think tank, EPI “has practiced an empirically rooted institutional economics that documented how unchecked corporate power and its accompanying agenda—the destruction of unions, the offshoring of industry, the suppression of wages, the discrimination against women and minorities—led to the squeezing of America’s middle class, the marginalization of its working class, and the rise in its deaths of despair.”
Along with co-founding the Prospect, one of my proudest achievements is to have co-founded EPI. In 1986, I worked with anti-poverty activist Jeff Faux (who became EPI’s founding president), former labor secretary Ray Marshall, economists Lester Thurow and Barry Bluestone, and future Prospect co-founder Bob Reich to launch and raise money for what became EPI.
The American Prospect
October 7, 2026
Despite Greer’s claims that these tariff policies are boosting industrial employment, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled by the Economic Policy Institute shows that some, 62,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since Trump took office for his second term in January 2025.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
October 2, 2026
Cole Rockarts:
Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.
The Real News Network
October 1, 2026
Quote: “It’s just really hard for workers to enter or reenter the labor market.”—Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, on the rise of long-term joblessness among Americans, despite a low unemployment rate (Bloomberg)
HR Brew
October 1, 2026