As Valerie Wilson—the director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute—told Fast Company last December, the labor market is still rebounding from the fallout of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies.
Fast Company
July 13, 2026
The flip of the calendar to July brought a scrap of relief to workers scattered from California to New York, as a series of minimum wage adjustments kicked in. Alaska, Oregon and the District of Columbia all made broad-scale adjustments — in Alaska’s case, by $1 an hour — that will increase the earnings of more than 361,000 workers by roughly $221 million, according to research by the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute.
Capital & Main
July 13, 2026
But that surplus hasn’t reached every worker—between 1979 and 2023, wages for the bottom 90% grew just 43.7%, while wages for the top 1% grew 181.7% and wages for the top 0.1% grew 353.9%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Realtor.com
July 13, 2026
That pathway has narrowed during the Trump administration’s workforce reductions. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the federal workforce has shrunk by roughly 277,000 jobs. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found those reductions disproportionately affected Black workers, particularly Black women, who accounted for more than 95,000 government job losses in 2025 alone.
St. Louis American
July 13, 2026
While we have made progress since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, there is still a lot of work to be done. The unemployment rate for Black workers has long remained consistently higher than the overall unemployment rate. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the employment rate among Black women recently experienced its sharpest one-year decline in the last 25 years. Women with college degrees and public sector employees were hit the hardest.
Bloomberg Law
July 13, 2026
“There is no single policy that will close the wage gap,” said Emma Cohn and Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog. Possible solutions would include “pay transparency” laws that require employers to “include wage information in job postings.” Expanded medical and family leave requirements, universal childcare and an improved minimum wage would also help. Such efforts could “build an equitable economy that works for all.”
The Week
July 13, 2026
According to an analysis by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a worker earning the $7.25 federal minimum wage in 2022 made 27.4 percent less in inflation‑adjusted terms than a counterpart in July 2009. Compared with 1968—the historical peak of the minimum wage’s value—the 2022 federal rate had lost 40.2 percent of its purchasing power.
Newsweek
July 13, 2026
American unions have been making this case since the 1980s, and the economists at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) went up against virtually the entire economics profession when they made this case in the early 1990s.
And their case wasn’t protectionist as such. Decades ago, a number of EPI staffers and associates laid out discrete wage standards (as a percentage of nations’ various outputs and living costs) that nations would have to meet to be America’s trading partners.
American Prospect
July 13, 2026
The nonprofit Economic Policy Institute, in a public comment sent last week to the Labor Department, estimates that the proposed rule would affect about 15 million workers in “fissured establishments,” of which about 10 million would be the employees of franchisees, and that the rule would cost these workers almost $1 billion annually.
New Republic
July 13, 2026