The federal government sets the Adverse Effect Wage Rate (AEWR) for H-2A workers, a base rate that’s designed to keep H-2A wages from outcompeting US-born workers’ pay. A report from the Economic Policy Institute estimates the new AEWR rules set by the federal government could result in H2A farmworkers’ wages being “cut by a total of $2 billion or more—between 26% to 32% of their wages.”
WMUK (Michigan)
December 8, 2025
Elsewhere on the web
Josh Bivens, Raising taxes on the ultrarich, Economic Policy Institute. Americans accurately believe that many rich households and corporations are not paying their fair share. This perception will change only when just our richest — and the corporations they run — see their taxes increase.
Inequality.org
December 8, 2025
Black men saw an increase in unemployment from 4.9% in September 2024 to 6.6% in September 2025, and Black women experienced the highest rate of unemployment at 7.5%.
“I think what is particularly troubling about that is that we don’t see that decline show up for other groups of women for whom we have data for,” said Valerie Wilson, director of The Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. “We don’t see it in terms of employment trends for Hispanic women or white women. We also don’t see that huge of a drop-off for Black men either.”
Spectrum News 1
December 8, 2025
According to a December 2021 report by the Economic Policy Institute, researchers found that skilled H-1B visa employees working as subcontractors at companies such as Disney, FedEx, Google and others appeared to have been underpaid by at least $95 million.
DC Journal
December 8, 2025
The average cost of child care is $15,394 a year in New York, the sixth-most expensive state in the nation, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute.
The Center Square
December 8, 2025
The harder question, perhaps, is whether parents should actively contribute to the accounts over the next 18 years.
“It’s free money. The question is whether you would add onto it,” said Monique Morrissey, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
USA Today
December 8, 2025
According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation grew nearly tenfold faster than typical worker pay between 1978 and 2024. Stock-related pay now accounts for 79% of average CEO compensation.
Nasdaq
December 8, 2025
As a landmark 1995 study by economists Larry Mishel and Jared Bernstein for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) revealed, a gap between the rise in productivity and the rise in median workers’ wages opened in the mid-1970s and has grown steadily wider since then; the difference between those two rates today is 55 percent. In the years between 1948 and 1979, when the egalitarian legacy of the New Deal was at its apogee, with high levels of unionization and progressive taxation and constraints on the financial sector, productivity grew by 108 percent and median worker’s compensation by 93 percent. In the years between 1979 and 2025, an EPI analysis found productivity grew by 87 percent but median worker’s compensation by a bare 33 percent.
American Prospect
December 8, 2025
The Economic Policy Institute offers a Family Budget Calculator. It says a family of four would need about $123,000 a year to attain “a modest yet adequate standard of living” in Essex County, New Jersey. In a prior blog post, Green examined living costs in Caldwell, a borough in that New Jersey county.
Green’s poverty-line exercise “basically is trying to replicate” the calculator, said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the left-leaning think tank. “But we’re clear in this measure that it’s not a measure of poverty or material deprivation – it’s a measure of a modest but adequate standard of living.”
USA Today
December 8, 2025
State and local governments were required to allocate funds they had received through the American Rescue Plan Act by Dec. 31, 2024, and must spend them by the end of 2026. Unused funds must be returned to the U.S. Treasury, according to a blog post by the Economic Policy Institute.
The News Tribune
December 8, 2025