For some teenagers across the country, the summer is the first opportunity to gain work experience for their nascent resume.
In a handful of states, however, teens who find jobs will find fewer protections under child labor laws. Four states — Indiana, Nebraska, Washington and West Virginia — enacted laws this year that weaken child labor protections, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank. In all, 13 states had bills seeking to weaken those protections; some are still under consideration.
Omaha Daily Record
July 13, 2026
“Eliminating these removal protections would jeopardize all facets of agency independence, as agency leaders would be reluctant to engage in regulatory or enforcement actions – or even day-to-day agency decision-making – without coordinating with the White House for fear of termination,” wrote Lauren McFerran, former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair, and Celine McNicholas, a former official at the NLRB, in an Economic Policy Institute report from October 2025.
The Guardian
July 13, 2026
In a Bluesky thread, Economic Policy Institute economist Elise Gould said one of the report’s surprises was a 61,000 decrease in leisure and hospitality jobs, given expectations around the World Cup. The global soccer championships began on June 11 and are being held in North America through July 19, bringing travelers from around the world to the U.S.
Audacy
July 13, 2026
“You’ve got a lot of people who seem to work for firms that, in the aggregate, seem to be doing really well,” said Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. “They’re very profitable, and yet [workers’] wages aren’t growing particularly fast relative to how fast the firms are growing.”
CBS Moneywatch
July 13, 2026
The picture is further complicated by research from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, which found that young workers without college educations are experiencing similar increases in unemployment over the same period. This makes it difficult to pin the slump on AI alone.
Straight Arrow News
July 13, 2026
But Kuttner understood that changing policy first required changing politics, which meant first and foremost finding a counterweight to the right’s new intellectual edifice.
That was very much what Kuttner and some of his fellow policy entrepreneurs had in mind when they established the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a think tank dedicated to restoring the kind of broadly shared prosperity Kuttner got to experience but that succeeding generations have not. EPI remains highly influential today. Its research is cited regularly even by analysts and groups who may not share the organization’s worldview but depend on it for insights into the realities of life for low- and middle-income Americans. It was also the longtime home of Jared Bernstein, who became the Chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Democracy Journal
July 13, 2026
“We won’t get the inflation data for June until July 14, but recent price data suggest year over year real wages likely fell in June,” Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a social media post. “Workers and their families are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet and real wages are most surely now below where they were in January 2025.”
The unemployment rate held fairly steady at 4.2%, down from three straight months of 4.3%. The unemployment rate has stayed between 4% and 4.5% since the beginning of last year.
Gould said the unemployment rate ticked down “for the wrong reasons,” as labor force participation fell by 720,000 and employment fell by 507,000. Even the prime-age employment-to-population ratio, which had remained resilient, fell in June.
Sinclair Broadcast Group
July 13, 2026
Of particular concern: The labor force participation rate for those in their prime working years fell to 83.3% in June, suggesting the trend wasn’t driven solely by people aging out of the workforce.
“What mechanically happens is that the unemployment rate has fallen a little bit and people will think, ‘Oh, that’s a good thing,’” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “But it fell for the wrong reasons. It fell because so many people left the labor force — maybe they didn’t think there were going to be jobs for them.”
Yahoo Finance
July 13, 2026
Valerie Wilson, an economist at the think tank Economic Policy Institute, told the Washington Post that Trump’s directives are turning “the mission of the EEOC on its head, in a way that weaponizes it against the people that it was intended to protect.”
SF Gate
July 13, 2026
Perhaps more strikingly, it found that median wages for 84.5% of all jobs in the Buckeye State pay less than the estimated cost of living for a family of three. In the Canton/Massillon area, annual cost of living is about $81,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator.
Ohio Capital Journal
July 13, 2026