“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
The minimum wage is going up in 17 states and localities July 1, but Nevada isn’t one of them.
With one or two exceptions, this summer’s minimum wage increases across the country are the result of statutes or ordinances by which the wage is adjusted each year for inflation, according to tracking by the Economic Policy Institute.
Nevada Current
July 13, 2026
“People’s purchasing power has diminished,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “That’s not only harmful to workers and their family’s ability to afford their basic necessities, but that means less demand for goods and services, which is what drives the economy.”
The Washington Post
July 13, 2026
So what’s driven the decline in work among teens?
“This is a decision of labor supply,” said economist Hilary Wething at the Economic Policy Institute. “Fewer teens are looking to participate in the workforce. For 18- and 19-year-olds, the share enrolled in high school or college grew from about 45% in 1984 to 63% in 2025. That’s a pretty big jump. They just have more competing priorities than previous generations: extracurriculars, college prep, academic programs, internships.”
Marketplace
July 13, 2026
A stronger, bolder federal minimum wage would restore a national wage floor that more effectively puts workers within reach of a living wage and eliminates unfair competition based on subpar wages. This means setting the federal minimum wage to two-thirds of the national median wage, which new research from the Economic Policy Institute and the Roosevelt Institute projects would reach about $20 an hour by 2030, raising pay for 40 million workers and their families.
The Hill
July 13, 2026
As his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sought to reduce the federal workforce, analysts such as Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute saw a rapid rise in the unemployment rate for Black workers, an increase only the pandemic and the Great Recession could surpass.
The exact number of Black employees who were among the 280,000 federal jobs lost was not immediately clear. It was hard to tell because agencies had stopped collecting employment data about race to comply with Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
But digging into the available statistics, Wilson noted that the large number of college-educated Black women losing their jobs would certainly be connected to government cuts. Nearly one-fifth of the federal workforce was Black, despite them being 13 percent of the population. And after President Harry S. Truman integrated the federal workforce in the 1940s, government jobs became a dependable pathway to the middle class for those who were Black and ambitious.
The Washington Post
July 13, 2026
The latest push from House Democrats urging the Department of Labor to withdraw its proposed rule revising the joint employer definition follows a familiar script.
Lawmakers, including Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), argue the proposal would narrow accountability in ways that could harm workers and small businesses, citing estimates that weaker standards could cost workers more than $1 billion annually, based on Economic Policy Institute analysis referenced in their letter to Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling.
McKnight’s Senior Living
June 25, 2026