“The hires rate today looks a lot like the hires rate did coming out of the Great Recession,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “And you pretty clearly see that the labor market softened over the years. We saw that payroll employment growth slowed pretty substantially.”
Capital and Main
March 2, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute (a left-leaning think tank) estimates that from 1979 to 2024, net productivity grew roughly 80% while median hourly compensation grew only about 30%.
John Dickerson Substack
March 2, 2026
01:13:10 – Economic Policy Institute’s Heidi Shierholz previews Trump’s SOTU
Bloomberg TV
March 2, 2026
“Trump policies will hamstring the economy’s ability to supply goods and services, and these policies aim to increase inequality by transferring income from the bottom and middle toward the top,” according to a new report by Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. This shift will happen through funding cuts for public services, including Affordable Care Act subsidies, and tax cuts favoring the rich, he wrote.
“Sometimes this affordability crunch will manifest as higher prices or faster inflation, but it is more likely to appear as slower wage growth and the rollback of public supports for households,” Bivens wrote.
MarketWatch
March 2, 2026
But Trump didn’t talk about the root cause of these affordability problems: the long-running rise in inequality. And he didn’t call for the single most-effective way to reverse this inequality: raising taxes significantly on the ultra-rich families and corporations. In a new Economic Policy Institute report, I highlight how we got here and offer meaningful solutions to tackle growing inequality through wealth taxation.
The link between inequality and affordability is clear: Affordability improves when incomes (mostly wages and public benefits for typical families) grow faster than prices. Rising inequality means that the economy’s average growth rate is buoyed by stratospheric growth at the top and hence no longer maps onto what is available to typical families to help them afford a secure and decent life.
In These Times
March 2, 2026
Overall, real wages rose slightly faster in the 12 months ended in January than in the prior 12 months. That resilience, combined with the low unemployment rate, helps explain why consumer spending has held up, boosting the economy. But the picture isn’t all positive. Americans with the lowest incomes saw their real wages fall in 2025, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that analyzed census data.
Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2026
Sources:
- Economic Policy Institute. “CEO pay declined in 2023.”
Investopedia
March 2, 2026
Overall, unions gained some ground in 2025, reversing a trend in which membership had been declining, according to research from the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI found that 16.5 million U.S. workers were represented by a union last year, an increase of 463,000 from 2024 and the highest number of unionized workers in 16 years.
Supermarket News
March 2, 2026
Some 14.7 million workers were estimated to be members of unions in 2025, which is 10 percent of the workforce, narrowly up from the previous year. An additional 1.8 million were represented by a union but were not members. According to analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, nearly half the union growth was in the South.
Jacobin
March 2, 2026
On today’s episode of the America’s Work Force Union Podcast, Economic Policy Institute Senior Strategist Dave Kamper joined host Ed “Flash” Ferenc to discuss his book, Who’s Got the Power? The Resurgence of American Unions, and the worker-led momentum that has accelerated since the pandemic. Kamper traced his path from skeptical graduate student to union officer and organizer, then explained how EPI research helped ground labor’s moral case in measurable economic outcomes.
America's Work Force Union Podcast
March 2, 2026