These are individuals who’ve reached retirement age and can’t retire (no matter how much they want to). Financial insecurities restrict their ability to leave the labor market even when facing serious health issues or adverse working conditions. An Economic Policy Institute study (2023) found that significant shares of older workers aged 50–70 experience difficult working conditions.
Psychology Today
March 2, 2026
Economic Policy Institute economic analyst Nina Mast, whose research focuses on child labor standards, disagreed that the reporting system was overly burdensome to employers.
“The fact that the (Youth Employment System) required only employers of five or more minors to register was a flaw of the system, but the solution is not to get rid of the system entirely – it’s to improve it by requiring all employers to register employment of minors, regardless of how many minors they employ,” Mast said in an email.
Indy Star
March 2, 2026
According to Daniel Costa , an immigration and employment lawyer and expert at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Trump dedicated relatively little time to immigration in his speech, focusing more on the economy and the November elections.
However, he noted that the president again portrayed immigrants as criminals , despite various studies showing that crime rates among immigrants are generally lower than among U.S. citizens.
Costa also criticized the president for not mentioning recent allegations of abuse during immigration enforcement operations or the economic impact of mass deportations.
La Opinion
March 2, 2026
Features interview with Daniel Costa.
Noticias con Rosana Romero
March 2, 2026
“Employers will take advantage of anything that makes it easier to classify workers as independent contractors, and more people won’t be eligible for minimum-wage rights and overtime rights,” said Samantha Sanders, government affairs director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The Wall Street Journal
March 2, 2026
President Donald Trump has said some strikingly out-of-touch things about affordability: that it’s a “hoax,” he’s “solved it” and he’s “won affordability.” In his State of the Union address, he even said “prices are plummeting downward.” U.S. families know this is nonsense. But to see how much Trump’s policies will erode affordability in the coming years, you must understand that affordability isn’t just about prices.
Affordability is the outcome of a race between incomes and prices. And for typical families, the Trump agenda is near-guaranteed to harm their incomes far more than it can possibly reduce their prices.
MS NOW
March 2, 2026
Today, research shows that tipped workers are more likely to be people of color who face higher poverty rates. Black workers are especially overrepresented in lower-paying service jobs. The Economic Policy Institute reports that tipped workers are more likely to live in poverty than non-tipped workers, even if they work all year, and they are at greater risk of wage theft and unstable pay.
Federal labor data shows that wage gaps by race still exist among restaurant servers. Black women servers earn much less than white men in the same jobs, showing how race and gender affect tip-based work. States that allow the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 usually have higher poverty rates among tipped workers than states that require employers to pay the full minimum wage before tips.
The Root
March 2, 2026
The “no tax on tips” deduction is projected to provide an average benefit of $1,400 for eligible workers, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute.
Money Magazine
March 2, 2026
Cites EPI productivity-pay gap.
Jacobin
March 2, 2026
As the Economic Policy Institute’s Nina Mast observes, “Most of these workers (about 80%) are employed in facility maintenance and operations…tasks that keep the institutions that imprison them running. Of the other roughly 20%, about 17% work for government-run businesses, where they might staff DMV call centers or wash laundry for public hospitals…. The other 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn meager wages producing goods and services for industries across the U.S. economy.”
The Fulcrum
March 2, 2026