The reckoning comes as the U.S. Department of Labor issued a rule to make it cheaper for employers to hire seasonal foreign agricultural workers through H-2A visas — a policy the Economic Policy Institute estimates could drive down wages for farmworkers nationwide by more than $4.4 billion annually.
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The UFW continues to fight well-resourced grower associations, sometimes successfully, said Daniel Costa, who directs immigration policy at the Economic Policy Institute and co-authored the H-2A wage rule analysis. The UFW helped beat a similar pay-cut policy during the first Trump administration, he added, which helped hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers.
“They are punching above their weight for sure,” Costa said. “They’ve been able to leverage the attention that they’ve gotten over the years to really make a big impact.”
KQED
March 31, 2026
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, waves of automation and digital transformation have added more than 70 million net new jobs to the U.S. economy since 1980. Yet productivity has grown 2.7 times more than average compensation (wages and benefits) for production and nonsupervisory workers since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute. This group represents roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce.
Time Magazine
March 31, 2026
But women still earn less in the workplace. The gender gap narrowed slightly in recent years but widened again in 2025, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. Controlling for socioeconomic factors, women earned 18.6% less than men.
USA Today
March 31, 2026
Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute said job-wise, he’s most concerned right now about people who work in industries fueled by discretionary spending.
“Obvious ones are like restaurants, arts, entertainment, some travel,” he said. “That’s where people have the most ability to quickly adjust their spending, and those are also industries that are pretty quick to lay people off as soon as that spending dries up a little bit.”
Marketplace
March 31, 2026
Among Black women, the unemployment rate has skyrocketed over the past year, from 5.5 percent in February 2025 to 7.1 percent in February 2026. What’s worse, college-educated Black women suffered the sharpest declines in employment, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), likely the result of Trump’s massive layoffs in the federal government early last year.
Washington Monthly
March 30, 2026
According to a blog post from the Economic Policy Institute, the employment rate for Black women dropped by 1.4% to 55.7%, one of the “sharpest one-year declines in the last 25 years.” Black women with college degrees who worked in the public sector were the main ones to be targeted in Trump’s political ploy.
Thegrio.com
March 30, 2026
The Economic Policy Institute tracked declines for Black men and white women of no more than 0.5 percent. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women actually saw small increases in employment. And while many people know about the “300,000” Black women who left the workforce in just three months, Fortune reported a much bigger number: nearly 600,000 Black women had been “economically sidelined” by November 2025. Experts note these losses were compounded by DEI backlash.
The Root
March 30, 2026
The majority of unions fail to secure a first contract within a year of winning an election, says Margaret Poydock, senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). “While the National Labor Relations Act requires employers—and unions—to bargain in good faith, there is nothing in the law that requires parties to reach agreement”, she says. A Bloomberg Law analysis from 2021, for example, found that the average time-to-contract was 465 days.
The Pourover Newsletter
March 30, 2026
The structural pressures driving women out of the workforce also land unevenly by race. An Economic Policy Institute analysis published this year found that Black women’s employment rate fell 1.4 percentage points in 2025—one of the sharpest single-year declines in 25 years, with college-educated Black women experiencing the steepest drop. Federal layoffs and the rollback of diversity initiatives drove much of that loss, according to EPI, concentrated in agencies where Black women held a disproportionate share of the workforce.
Forbes
March 30, 2026