This lack of U.S. citizenship makes farmworkers vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by farm owners, says Daniel Costa, a research director at the Economic Policy Institute.
“When workers don’t have status, they, in practice, don’t have workplace rights,” Costa explains. And many, he says, carry heavy burdens of debt from the crossing to the United States. “These workers are risking a lot if they speak up.” Farm owners can easily fire and replace them from the rich vein of desperate third-world workers offered by illegal migration and legal guest worker programs.
The result is that farmworkers, despite the difficulty of the work and the skill and knowledge required, are among the lowest-paid workers in the country, earning around half the wage of the average U.S. worker. Critically, Costa says, this doesn’t only impact undocumented workers; it pushes down benefits for all workers across the industry. If employers have easy access to workers who don’t really have rights, he says, it makes it harder for U.S. citizens to push for better wages or safety equipment, in “a race to the bottom.”
In These Times
July 21, 2025
Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argued that he sees a lot in the bill “that is going to move us in the opposite direction from energy dominance.”
“They should have named this bill the ‘Energy Inflation Act,’ because what it’s going to mean is less energy generated and higher costs for households and for businesses, and particularly manufacturing businesses,” Hersh said.
Hersh also said that even if the bill does lead to increased exports of U.S. produced energy, that would have a direct negative impact on costs for consumers at home.
Inside Climate News
July 21, 2025
Read a report outlining how the passage of the Reconciliation Bill will harm vulnerable communities and the nation at large written by Repairers of the Breach, Institute for Policy Studies and the Economic Policy Institute here.
The Contrarian Substack
July 21, 2025
New research found that the efforts by the Trump administration and Congress to cut the federal workforce, funding to states, and public services will disproportionately harm Black women who hold many of these jobs, specifically in the South. Data from the Economic Policy Institute shows Black women make up more than one in five local government workers and more than one in four state government workers in Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, and Maryland.
Black Enterprise
July 21, 2025
President Trump’s increasingly aggressive approach to the deportation of undocumented migrants could have massive economic implications. Multiple studies, including one conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, found that mass deportations could result in a meaningful economic contraction, reducing wages and driving up unemployment rates among American workers. While the Trump administration maintains its migrant expulsion policies will have the opposite effect, the potential consequences of deportations remain particularly stark in states where undocumented workers make up large shares of the labor force.
24/7 Wall Street
July 21, 2025
Teton County and the town of Jackson have the most unequal income in the US. Data from the Economic Policy Institute states that the top 1% of residents in Teton County generate 142 times the income of the bottom 99%.
Business Insider
July 18, 2025
Additional figures were drawn from the Economic Policy Institute and U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Live Now FOX
July 18, 2025
Nationally, more than 14 million workers are paid less than $15 per hour, including overtime, tips, and commissions, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Low Wage Workforce Tracker. Nearly 27 million make less than $17.
Common Dreams
July 18, 2025