Media clips
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REPORTER: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted on Tuesday to rescind the requirement that private employers collect demographic data. Can you talk about that?
VALERIE WILSON: Yeah, this is really a reversal of 60 years of the EEOC’s history and mission in enforcing anti-discrimination law, specifically anti-discrimination in employment law in this country. The big news is about the EE01 form, which is required by private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees.
But they actually voted to rescind all of the data collection. So that would also include employment data from state and local government, as well as elementary and secondary public schools and local labor unions. So it’s not just the EE01, they voted to rescind all of the data collection efforts that, again, have been in place for 60 years in order to support their role in enforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, and a number of other protected classes.
WORT-FM (Labor Radio, Madison WI) July 28, 2026 -
An economic theory was sold to us that people adopted that dramatically increased the power of capital, decreased the power of labor, and shifted this income share. I should just note that, wearing my economist hat, there are lots of reasons income shares can change. One is productivity, for example, but in the case of this period, actually worker productivity kept going up. Just more and more of that productivity was captured by the shareholders and owners of capital and not captured in workers’ wages. The Economic Policy Institute has done some great work on this.
Current Affairs July 28, 2026 -
By the numbers: About 16.5 million U.S. workers were represented by unions in 2025, the highest number in 16 years, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data.
- That amounts to just 11.2% of workers, but the rate varies drastically by industry and job.
- About 36% of education, training, and library employees are unionized. Just 4.4% of workers in computer occupations are represented by unions.
Axios July 28, 2026 -
In an interview with The National News Desk on Friday, Josh Bivens, Chief Economist with the Economic Policy Institute, said,
I think what today’s numbers tell us is that so far, we still have pretty low unemployment. And we have a weird mixture of very low hiring, but very low layoffs. And it’s the layoffs which would trigger it increase in unemployment insurance applications. Those remain low.
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“I would say I’m going to bet inflation over this whole year is going to look closer to like the 3.5% range, which is a notable jump up and which will erase a lot of real income gains for a lot of Americans,” Bivens said.
Sinclair Broadcast Group July 28, 2026 -
Economic Policy Institute modeling shows 616,700 Ohio workers would get a raise due to a state minimum wage increase of $15 an hour by 2030, according to a report by Policy Matters Ohio published earlier this year.
Ohio Capital Journal July 28, 2026 -
The problems with the program are inherent in this explanation. Children from low-income, economically vulnerable backgrounds stand to benefit much less than those who are wealthy enough to supplement the accounts with their own savings. Trump Accounts therefore may broaden systemic inequalities. “Overall, it seems like the instrument of the Trump account seems like a really good vehicle for people and families that are already well-positioned to save but will do very little to change the material reality of those families that are economically vulnerable,” says Ismael Cid-Martinez, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “In fact, because of the structure, it doesn’t really target these families that are in need, and it doesn’t reach them.”
When you factor in that OBBBA also contained billions of dollars in cuts to funding programs including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Trump Accounts barely even look like a nice gesture. What’s more, the fact that wealthy people like the Dells are contributing to the program reflects a troublesome indicator that impoverished Americans may have to increasingly rely on assistance from the private sector.
“It leaves your basic guarantees in the hands of the charitable contributions of individual actors, which is not how we have structured programs like Social Security programs, like Medicaid,” says Martinez. “Our social safety net system is not based on whether or not you’re moved by my predicament to contribute to my well-being.”
American Prospect July 28, 2026 -
The reason for fewer field trips may have to do with overall transportation trips, but there’s also an issue with drivers. As of 2024, the country was short of school bus drivers by about 12% compared with 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The study also found that the median driver is earning 43% less than the median weekly wage for all workers. So, it’s a job with heavy responsibility, split hours, and pay that has slipped. You might be thinking that sounds like a job that people quit.
Stacker July 28, 2026 -
And what we know from the data from economic policy institute economist valerie wilson is that about 61% of the public sector jobs that were lost by black women were mainly concentrated in the federal government. Wow. Okay. That’s intense. So the big question is, what do we do about this?
NBC News Daily July 28, 2026 -
Gig work might offer flexibility, but many workers pay for it through low wages, limited benefits, and financial insecurity. An Economic Policy Institute analysis found that 29% of those in the industry earned less than their state’s minimum wage, while 14% made less than the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Almost one in five said they had gone hungry because they could not afford enough food, and 31% had been unable to pay their utility bills in full during the previous month.
TechSpot July 28, 2026 -
The lack of demographic data will hinder accountability for employers, said labor economist Valerie Rawlston Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy.
“(The proposal) is consistent with the general anti-equity push of this administration to eliminate pretty much all of the infrastructure that have been in place for equal employment in this country,” Wilson said. “We have laws in place that prohibit discrimination, but the effectiveness of those laws is really dependent on our ability to enforce those laws. And the enforcement of those laws is facilitated by having consistent reliable data.”
States Newsroom July 28, 2026