Our decisions about whom and how to tax are decisions about which community needs we have the capacity to address and at what scale. Progressive taxes like personal, investment, and corporate income taxes generate more revenue from those who have the greatest ability to pay, and for whom the cost of losing the next dollar is small, relative to the last dollar of a family struggling to make rent and afford groceries. On the other hand, regressive revenue strategies like non-strategic tariffs, fees and fines, and an overreliance on sales taxes, especially when combined with cuts to social programs, heighten the sense that the system is unfair. Where progressive revenue strategies can bind a community together in mutual support and expand capacity to meet needs through good governance, regressive strategies erode people’s trust in the public sector.

H.R. 1 presents a vision of public finance that is unsustainable and erodes trust in government

Much of the federal tax code is in fact progressively structured, but for decades conservatives have weakened and attacked that progressivity. H.R. 1 (which the White House has referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” or “OBBBA”) is the latest Republican-led effort toward breaking down trust in the public sector and social contract. H.R. 1 provides a suite of tax breaks to households across the income distribution; however, the wealthiest households and corporations see a far bigger tax cut from the package than the typical household does. In service to these tax breaks, the bill introduces devastating cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and critical government agencies designed to help workers and their families thrive. Despite their size and the pain they will cause, these drastic cuts in the federal government’s capacity to serve and support working families are not enough to cover the costs of the corporate tax breaks; the Tax Policy Center estimates that H.R. 1 could increase the federal deficit by between $3.7 trillion and $5.1 trillion by 2034.

But unlike the federal government, states and localities cannot run budget deficits; their budgets must be balanced yearly. When major federal cuts happen, states and localities that rely on federal dollars to maintain critical services are forced to curtail and eliminate services, dive into emergency savings where they exist, or else shift to revenue generation strategies that often fall disproportionately on Black, brown, and poor households. The combination of directly hampering public services working people rely on while shifting more of the burden of raising revenue toward Black, brown, and poor workers and their families weakens worker power and exacerbates racial disparities.

H.R. 1 combines a shift toward regressive revenue strategies with massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest households, in service to the Trump administration’s overarching goal: reasserting white, wealthy, and corporate privilege through tax cuts, deregulation, and the defunding of public institutions.

Regressive revenue strategies: Taking from the poor to give the rich even more breaks

The Trump administration has floated using tariffs as a replacement (either in full or part) for the federal income tax. This is not a new Republican strategy: Tariffs are a kind of consumption tax (on imported goods, along with the intermediate products businesses need to create goods and provide services domestically), and Republican-led state governments tend to rely more on consumption taxes1 (like sales taxes) and less on income taxes to increase revenue. Because poorer households spend a larger share of their income purchasing goods and services than the rich do, consumption taxes are inherently more regressive. The current federal income tax is progressively structured, in spite of the ways conservatives have attempted to weaken that progressivity over time. While tariffs can be a sensible part of a larger industrial policy strategy, governments place too large a burden on low- and moderate-income households when they try to use consumption taxes as a primary source of revenue. 

States and localities may turn to fines and fees to raise revenues in the absence of adequate federal support. These penalties are a poor substitute for progressive taxes. Fines and fees historically have only been able to cover a small fraction of state and local budget costs. And this is baked into the design: If the point of a fine or fee is to deter behavior, the best-case scenario (ending the behavior) would result in no revenue.

Even so, fines and fees cause significant economic pain for working-class families in the Black communities that are most affected by them. On an ethical level, a modern idiom applies: “If the penalty for a crime is a fine, that crime only exists for the poor.” The criminal justice system can trap poor folks in a cruel cycle of penalization for being unable to pay traffic tickets, court fees, and even their own surveillance through ankle monitors. Fines and fees increase the economic burden on those with the least ability to pay, all for a low return, making them a poor substitute for broad, progressive taxes.

Faux-progressive revenue strategies are ineffective and distract workers, their families, and policymakers from the need for real change

Ineffective tax gimmicks like temporary deductions on overtime and tipped income distract from the need for real reform around worker pay and scheduling. The point of requiring businesses to pay time-and-a-half for overtime is to discourage pushing workers to work beyond what we have collectively decided is a full and reasonable period of labor. Tipping is an outdated practice with racist roots, designed to shift the cost of maintaining a workforce onto consumers, rather than having employers properly compensate employees. Instead of cynically gesturing toward affordability through encouraging bad business practices, we should empower workers to fight for better wages and consistent scheduling.

Conservatives may also try to balance budgets by allowing progressive tax expenditures to expire (e.g., the recent expiration of the ACA premium tax credits or the expiration of the expanded child tax credits passed as pandemic relief). Temporary tax breaks themselves are not the most effective means of addressing structural economic issues; if health care or health insurance is persistently inaccessible to wide swaths of the population, we should seek to remedy that by making access universal—or, at the very least, making the credits that allowed greater access in the first place permanent. Allowing tax breaks implemented to address structural inequities to expire without an alternative solution to the problem being addressed is negligence. There are ways to balance budgets that do not involve reversing hard-won progress toward equity.

Progressive ways to generate revenue: Worker-centered tax policies can reduce inequality and expand the tax base

There are better ways of raising revenue that will support workers and their families, rebuild public trust in government, and get us the public goods and services we want and need. Since most Americans earn their living through selling their labor, it makes sense to keep some progressive tax on income to ensure people remain invested in the social contract. But with so much wealth and income concentrated amongst a few individuals, a necessary step is shifting more of the tax burden toward extremely high earners, wealth, and investment income. This will generate more revenue to improve public services and infrastructure, while tamping down on inequality. Adding tax brackets for the highest earners, adopting a legitimate tax on wealth holdings, and taxing the income made from investments at a rate closer to that of income from wages and salaries progressively raise revenues without increasing the burden on most U.S. households.

Proper enforcement of the current tax code would go a long way toward improving both our ability to raise funds and the public’s trust in public finance. The tax code is rife with opportunities for wealthy individuals and corporations to evade paying their fair share of taxes, allowing them to skirt holding up their end of the social contract. The IRS is also critically underfunded and recovering from recent staff reductions from the Trump administration. With enough resources to enforce existing tax law effectively, the IRS could go after the largest tax evaders and see returns that matter, as opposed to disproportionately targeting Black households without the funds to instigate a drawn-out legal battle over an audit.

Table 1

We need a tax code that supports states and localities and promotes full economic participation, not temporary tax gimmicks and handouts to the wealthiest

Taxpayers (literally) cannot afford to accept the conservative propaganda that all taxation is a burden on households. Taxes are one way of binding a democratic community together and allowing us to share in the costs of creating collective prosperity and community. Especially at the state and local levels, tax revenues are essential to providing the services people need to thrive. When federal funding gets pulled back and states and localities turn to regressive revenue strategies, it is working-class families who pay the price.

If we are going to rebuild a sense of trust in the social contract, we need to structure the tax code such that it becomes more progressive, tapping into a greater portion of the massive amounts of wealth and income that have pooled at the top. We can use that revenue to fund programs and new infrastructure that allow more people to fully participate in the economy:

• improved funding for public schooling, increasing teacher pay and quality of education
• a fully funded federal food assistance program, and/or adequate funding to states to support their own cash-assistance programs more comprehensive than Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
• expanded access to and adequacy of Medicaid, or Medicare for All

Each of these initiatives could improve affordability and remove the need for state and local governments to pursue revenue regressive strategies that do more harm than good (like fines and fees). We won’t solve every structural inequality and eliminate all disparities through reforming the tax code; but building the resources and will to collect taxes in a progressive way are steps toward a fairer economy and a government that earns the public’s trust.

1. Consumption taxes have some potential uses. Carbon taxes, for example, tax the consumption of goods whose production intensively uses greenhouse gas-emitting inputs; if consumers look to avoid these goods by switching to others whose production involves fewer greenhouse gas emissions, we achieve an important social good.

Rising authoritarianism and the need to upend the failed Southern economic development model

For generations, Southern politicians backed by powerful business interests have promoted a Southern economic development model—characterized by low wages, regressive taxation, lax environmental regulations, a weak social safety net, and vicious opposition to unions—while claiming such policies will attract business and thereby generate regional economic gains. But data actually show a grim reality. The South lags all other regions on most indicators of economic health including job growth and wages, and Southern workers and their families experience significantly higher rates of poverty than in other parts of the country (Childers 2024a).

The truth is that this Southern economic development model was never designed to benefit most Southerners; rather, it is historically rooted in efforts of white plantation owners to retain their wealth following emancipation and ensure continued access to the labor of Black people for as little compensation as possible (Childers 2025). Foundational to these efforts was an authoritarian approach to state governance that suppressed popular democracy and worker organizing—an approach that also sanctioned prison labor, sharecropping, a century of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and other forms of state-sponsored terror and exploitation. Until partially challenged by federal legal and policy interventions won by post-WWII civil rights movements, many Southern states for decades held elections that served merely to provide a cover of legitimacy to one-party rule of white, wealthy elites—functionally excluding Black voters from the electorate and blocking working-class constituencies from any meaningful participation in governance (Mickey 2015; Perez 2024; Mast 2025).

Today, the Trump administration’s increasingly authoritarian actions echo this troubling Southern history. At their foundation, the administration’s approaches to bypassing constitutional checks and balances—while rolling back civil rights, worker rights, and environmental protections; terrorizing immigrant communities; deploying military troops in U.S. cities; and attempting to engineer election outcomes via gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression—are rooted in authoritarian models developed and tested in the U.S. South, and that Black, brown, and immigrant communities across the country are no stranger to.

Recent attempts to terminate federal employee collective bargaining agreements, for example, are familiar to public employees in Southern states for whom collective bargaining has long been banned or severely restricted. The Trump administration’s use of military-style policing in communities across the country echoes Southern histories of weaponizing law enforcement (or National Guard troops) to suppress organizing and instill fear, while prioritizing the expansion of the carceral state over investments in housing, education, and public services. Trump’s efforts to override the authority of state officials mirror Southern state uses of abusive preemption laws to strip policymaking authority from local governments. And administration attempts to halt clean energy investments and environmental protections threaten to repeat harms familiar in Black and brown communities in the South, where corporations have insisted on lax environmental regulations that allow them to degrade air, water, and climate quality, while profiting from the exploitation of local natural resources and labor.

Seizing opportunities to reverse decades of anti-worker, anti-democratic policymaking in the South at a moment of rising authoritarianism in the U.S. is a daunting and unavoidably urgent challenge. It will require robust new forms of multiracial organizing and labor-community coalition building across a broad set of industries in the South. Labor-community coalitions can leverage community benefits agreements (CBAs) as a powerful tool to transform economic power relations in Southern workplaces and communities. Because CBAs are private agreements between labor-community coalitions and project owners, they do not rely on government action and can therefore shape economic outcomes of major projects even in otherwise hostile political environments. CBAs have traditionally been fought for and won by labor and community groups coming together and building necessary public pressure to hold developers, corporations, and elected leaders accountable for ensuring that public investments in major new developments truly benefit workers and communities.

In this report, we analyze the potential for labor-community coalitions to pursue strong CBAs that secure significant economic benefits for Southern manufacturing workers and communities, drawing on examples of existing agreements to model potential impacts. We examine the scale of recent public investments in Southern manufacturing and examine how strong CBAs on major publicly-subsidized private projects could improve the quality of newly created construction and production jobs; open up pathways to unionization; ensure equitable hiring and training opportunities for local residents; and address community needs such as child care, affordable housing, and natural resource protection.

We contend that upending the failed Southern economic development model and the authoritarian structures that underpin it will require building new forms of labor and community power to increase union density in the South. Well-known research shows that unions promote economic equality and help workers win improvements in pay, benefits, and working conditions (Economic Policy Institute 2021). But unions also powerfully affect people’s lives outside of work. They help foster solidarity, increase democratic participation, enable working-class communities to shape economic policies affecting their lives, and serve as a counterweight to corporate power in our economy and democracy (McNicholas et al. 2025). Historically, unions have been engines of resistance to entrenched and undemocratic power—mobilizing working people to challenge inequality, defend civil rights, and push back against authoritarianism in all its forms. For all these reasons, strengthening labor-community coalitions and pathways to unionization in growing Southern industrial sectors is not just good economic policy—it is also a democratic imperative amid national authoritarian backsliding.

Worker and community power can ensure new manufacturing investments yield good jobs and community benefits

The latest wave of manufacturing growth in the South presents both opportunities and pitfalls for workers and communities. Southern states continue to lure businesses—including large manufacturing facilities—with promises of low corporate tax rates, low wages, lax regulations, and massive public subsidies. The automotive manufacturing industry has been a key recipient of public subsidies, receiving billions of dollars from Southern states in recent decades (Childers 2024a; Todd 2021). This system of low taxation and corporate giveaways starves other essential public goods, like education and social safety net programs (Mast 2025b). Likewise, weak or nonexistent environmental regulations have contributed to toxic sites and resource degradation that disproportionately affect Black and brown families, reflecting often intentional decisions to site hazardous facilities in low-income communities of color (Bergman 2019).

Some announced manufacturing projects have been cancelled or reduced in size after the Trump administration’s slashing of federal supports for strategic industries, but many projects launched during the Biden administration continue to move forward. These manufacturing investments, both in traditional industries and nascent ones such as electric vehicle (EV) and EV battery manufacturing, are spurring significant job growth in some Southern communities. Yet past experience shows that new investments and resulting jobs are unlikely to generate economic benefits for most Southerners unless local residents are able to ensure that developers and corporations respect workers’ rights, protect local natural resources, and contribute a fair share toward addressing priority community needs.

Community benefits agreements can be powerful vehicles for communities to secure lasting local economic benefits from major industrial development, at both new and existing facilities. A CBA is a legally enforceable contract between a private developer or company and a local coalition—typically made up of labor, community, faith, environmental, and other grassroots organizations—that details how a project will benefit workers and the community, and in turn how the community will support the project (including via potential public investment). Benefits spelled out in a CBA can include commitments to strong labor standards; respect for workers’ rights to organize; equitable workforce recruitment, training, and hiring practices; affordable housing; environmental protections; or a broad range of other community-identified priorities. CBAs are a well-developed model for responsible community development—so far mostly, but not entirely, in regions outside the South—and have been used for many different types of major projects including sports stadiums, events centers, manufacturing plants, airports, transit projects, and more (WRI n.d.).

CBAs can likewise mitigate risks for project developers by ensuring local project support and addressing important concerns early on, whereas failure to engage local communities in major development decisions can otherwise lead to strong community opposition, interruption of development, obstacles to obtaining necessary siting permits or rezoning approvals, or significant legal costs. In an example from June 2024, developers shelved plans for a $1.3 billion data center in Indiana after facing significant local opposition over environmental concerns (Fazili et al. 2025).

Because a CBA is a private, legally binding agreement, it does not require government action and can be used to shape outcomes of major projects even in contexts (as in most of the South) where state legislators have preempted local governments from establishing their own job quality or environmental standards (EPI 2025a). That being said, state and local governments can still have a role in facilitating, negotiating, or enforcing community benefits. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland have ordinances requiring developers of projects using public resources to engage in a community benefits plan process (City of Detroit n.d.; City of Cleveland n.d.). In 2005, Atlanta passed an ordinance specifying worker and community benefits for the Beltline redevelopment (WRI 2025). However, government involvement in community benefits plans does not guarantee strong agreements on its own. A strong labor-community coalition remains essential for securing meaningful community benefits.

Another key strength of a CBA is that it can set standards across all stages of a project’s development to ensure long-term benefits for the community at large. Private developers or public entities sometimes negotiate Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) or Community Workforce Agreements (CWAs) with building trades unions and community partners to set wages, working conditions, and timelines for the construction phase of a complex development project. A CBA can be negotiated alongside a PLA to also ensure pathways to quality jobs for local residents during the operational phases of a project, including any future expansions of the facility or additions to its workforce. A CBA can also secure commitments to build affordable housing, strengthen environmental standards, and provide other benefits to the community such as child care, public parks, or other community spaces.

To be successful, a CBA must also include defined enforcement mechanisms that hold all parties to the agreement accountable. It must clearly establish the obligations of each party, metrics for measuring progress, and ongoing monitoring of compliance with the agreement’s provisions (Last 2025; PWF and CBLC 2016). If the company or the coalition fails to make good-faith efforts on the agreement’s commitments, an arbitration process is initiated. While monitoring of the agreement is an ongoing responsibility of all members of the coalition, providing a pathway for workers to organize in the operational phase of a project is of particular importance. A newly established union at the project site is well-positioned to monitor the commitments of the CBA and hold the company accountable over the long term.

Organizers and advocates should be clear-eyed that while strong CBAs can yield powerful economic outcomes, such agreements are by no means easy to win. There are generally no legal requirements for a particular company or developer to recognize or engage with a labor-community coalition, much less to agree to negotiate and implement a CBA. Building the broad-based, durable coalitions and leverage necessary to compel private interests to engage in CBA negotiations (and then to implement and enforce the terms of a CBA) is unavoidably a challenging, long-term, resource-intensive organizing project. And like any worthwhile organizing, the formation of strong, durable labor-community coalitions is itself a key outcome of successful CBA campaigns. Vastly expanding the capacity of broad-based coalitions and labor, faith, environmental, and other grassroots organizations to gradually build community and worker power in Southern communities is the most essential ingredient for transforming existing power imbalances and, ultimately, upending the failed Southern economic development model.

Indeed, recent initiatives to win CBAs in Southern states have proven so threatening to some corporate interests that they have sought to undermine them. In 2025, Tennessee Republicans passed legislation prohibiting any company that enters into a CBA from receiving state economic development funds—aiming to create obstacles to replication of a highly successful CBA covering Nashville’s soccer stadium, and to discourage a coalition of West Tennessee residents and allied groups calling on Ford and SK Innovation to negotiate a CBA covering its massive BlueOval electric vehicle and battery manufacturing complex (Abrams 2025). In Tennessee and elsewhere, however, labor-community coalitions are nonetheless continuing to organize to ensure that massive, publicly subsidized new facilities yield good jobs and community benefits.

A new wave of Southern manufacturing is an opportunity to transform working conditions in growing industries—and across the South

Growth in Southern manufacturing industries presents a significant opportunity for labor-community coalitions to shape labor standards and community benefits in new plants and facilities—and to shape economic outcomes for generations of Southern workers to come. In recent years, the South has seen a wave of manufacturing investments. Between 2017 and 2023, manufacturing construction doubled in the East South Central Census division (Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi) (O’Brien 2023). The West South Central division (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas) has the highest amount of manufacturing construction spending of any division in the U.S. These investments are part of a long-term trend of manufacturing industries locating in the South, which in recent years was accelerated by large federal investments through the Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and CHIPS and Science Act. These federal investments included both direct public subsidies and tax credits to businesses that invested in key clean energy manufacturing industries such as the production of batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind energy products.

In contrast to the typical economic development approach of many Southern states, some recent federal investments have included incentives meant to encourage strong labor standards on projects receiving public funds. While the future of many of these investments (and accompanying incentives) is now uncertain, the U.S. has in the past two years experienced its largest investment in clean energy manufacturing ever, and much of that has occurred in Southern states.1 Since the third quarter of 2023, more than $125 billion worth of clean energy manufacturing investments were announced across Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas (CET 2025). Advancing even a portion of these projects would result in thousands of jobs for Southern workers.

Independent of the future of federal support for clean energy manufacturing, the South will likely continue to be the largest manufacturing employer of all U.S. regions. Figure A shows manufacturing employment by region in the United States since 1990. While manufacturing employment overall has fallen during the last three decades, the South has retained the largest share of manufacturing employment of any region. In 2024, 35% of U.S. manufacturing employment was in the South. Furthermore, since 2010, manufacturing employment in the South has grown by 17%, the quickest growth of any region.

Figure A

Manufacturing jobs are often considered to be well-paid, benefit-providing “middle-class” jobs, but there is nothing inherent to the sector that determines their quality. Manufacturing jobs in some industries became “good jobs” thanks to relatively high levels of unionization during the mid-20th century, which improved wages, benefits, and working conditions (Bayard et al. 2024; Rhinehart and McNicholas 2020). As Figure B shows, unionization in manufacturing has fallen in all regions since 1983, but the South has almost without exception had the lowest unionization rate of any region.

Conservative Southern policymakers have long been hostile to union organizing. For example, every Southern state except Maryland and Delaware has passed anti-union so-called right-to-work (RTW) laws, which make it harder for workers to form, join, and sustain unions. Southern states like Florida and Arkansas were among the first to pass such laws in the 1940s, amid a wave of big business backlash against new federal labor laws and white supremacist campaigns to maintain racial hierarchies and suppress multiracial worker organizing. RTW laws suppress unionization rates and, as a result, have driven down wages for both union and nonunion workers alike across the South (Sherer and Gould 2025; Childers 2023).

Figure B

In 2025, Southern manufacturing had a 6.7% unionization rate—slightly below the national unionization rate for private-sector workers (6.8%). Unionization in Southern manufacturing grew by more than a percentage point between 2024 and 2025, a notable one-year reversal of the industry’s long-standing unionization decline, consistent with overall union gains in the South (McNicholas, Poydock, and Shierholz 2026). Nevertheless, Southern manufacturing’s unionization rate remains well below the Midwest’s (11.2%), the region where manufacturing is the most heavily unionized. Unions have a strong impact on job quality because they leverage worker power collectively to raise wages, win benefits like health care and retirement, and enact other meaningful workplace improvements, such as improved health and safety standards. These benefits can extend beyond unionized workers themselves, helping set standards across a workplace, and with enough density, across an industry.

As unionization declines in an industry or region, so does job quality. For instance, as unionization rates have fallen in auto manufacturing, the pay advantage for auto workers compared with the median worker has declined significantly (Barrett and Bivens 2021). Figure C demonstrates how this relationship holds across regions in 2025. Manufacturing jobs in the South have a pay advantage of 7%, the lowest of any region. Southern manufacturing workers also experience the lowest median hourly pay of any region ($24.41).2

Figure C

The Southern economic development model clearly hurts the region’s workers by denying them their right to organize and suppressing their wages, but there are harmful spillover effects for their communities as well. Corporate tax breaks with no strings attached provide billions of dollars to corporations that could otherwise be used to invest in schools and other essential government services. These types of tax breaks might be worthy of consideration if manufacturing employers were required to create high-quality jobs for local workers and make long-term investments in local community development needs (i.e., housing, infrastructure, education, etc.). Without such protections, they are simply taxpayer-funded giveaways that often drain the very resources needed to develop the local workforce recruited by large new facilities.

Southern states enact little to no regulation of workplace safety or environmental pollution. This results in unsafe workplaces with greater levels of injury and death (Childers 2024a). Environmental pollution from manufacturing sites can negatively affect public health by contaminating water, air, and soil. New manufacturing investments also can mean significant changes to the demand for housing in a community. A new plant or factory can drive up the cost of living for nearby residents without yielding any economic benefits to a local community. Labor, community, and environmental groups need to collaborate on shared solutions to effectively address these intertwined challenges.

Labor-community coalitions can obtain commitments that ensure “economic development” means shared prosperity for all

Labor-community coalitions organizing around manufacturing projects can secure commitments that offer direct economic benefits to workers and communities, while also establishing groundwork for the growth of worker and community power in the area. While a campaign to win a CBA can be the impetus for forming a local labor-community coalition, the alignment and relationships built through this shared work can lead to longer-term, sustainable coalitions capable of transforming local and state power relationships.

The following section analyzes a set of commitments that can be included in a CBA for a manufacturing project. The CBA framework is flexible and allows for the inclusion of many different types of commitments prioritized by particular groups of workers, community members, and environmental groups. This report focuses on key types of commitments including union neutrality agreements, living wage floors, equitable workforce development practices (such as local or targeted hire policies and programs to expand pathways to apprenticeship training), affordable housing provisions, child care benefits, and environmental protections. Each type of commitment is analyzed in terms of its economic impacts and effectiveness in reshaping local economic development to ensure that public investments generate broadly shared community benefits.

The construction phase and Project Labor Agreements (PLA)

This report mostly focuses on community benefits for workers during the operational phase of a manufacturing plant. Nevertheless, it is just as vital to set high labor standards during the construction phase. Strong community benefits agreements are ideally developed in tandem with strong project construction labor standards set via project labor agreements (PLAs). A PLA is a multiparty agreement between a project owner and a coalition of labor unions that sets out labor standards and dispute resolution procedures to promote stability and efficiency on complex infrastructure projects while also ensuring the project will generate good jobs. PLAs ensure that construction projects run smoothly, are safer, and pay workers fairly (Mangundayao, McNicholas, and Poydock 2022). By setting negotiated wage and benefit levels for each type of work on a project, PLAs level the playing field in highly competitive construction bidding processes; they ensure that contractors base bids on their ability to deliver on quality and efficiency, rather than low-ball cost estimates that reflect intent to pay substandard wages or cut corners on safety. By standardizing wage and benefit levels and taking them out of the competition in the bidding process, PLAs incentivize the use of skilled union labor, which is 14% more productive than nonunionized construction work (McFadden, Santosh, and Shetty 2022). PLAs typically set wages, fringe benefits, and working conditions but can also include requirements to utilize certain numbers of apprentices, hire locally or from certain target worker populations, and/or provide child care or other benefits that open up pathways to good union construction jobs for members of underrepresented groups.

Several of the types of standards for construction workers typically included in a PLA have analogous labor standards in the operational phase. For instance, a CBA can secure commitments for local or targeted hiring and the development of registered apprenticeship programs in a manufacturing facility, extending equitable recruitment and high-quality training requirements that a PLA typically sets for construction into the operational phase of a project.

Removing obstacles to unionization: Neutrality and labor peace agreements

Protecting workers’ freedom to unionize has historically been key to turning manufacturing jobs into good jobs. This remains just as true today. However, like workers across the country, Southern manufacturing workers continue to face formidable obstacles—including weak labor laws, powerful anti-union corporations, and hostile politicians—to exercising their legally protected rights to form or join a union. Employers are charged with violating federal labor law in more than 40% of union elections and spend more than $400 million a year on “union avoidance” consultants (McNicholas et al. 2019; McNicholas et al. 2023). Because existing weak labor laws do not effectively deter employers from union busting, these tactics are treated by many employers as a normal cost of doing business—stacking the deck unfairly against workers seeking to exercise their rights to organize and collectively bargain.

Union neutrality agreements can help safeguard workers’ right to form unions free of the types of interference employers often deploy. Under a neutrality agreement, an employer agrees to remain “neutral” and not interfere with workers’ decisions on whether to unionize. Such agreements typically include joint commitments to a “card check” process for verifying whether a majority of employees have indicated interest in forming a union. Unions and employers sometimes also enter into a labor peace agreement, where unions agree not to engage in certain types of picketing, work stoppages, or other economic disruptions during the organizing process in exchange for employer neutrality.

Employers can also choose to commit to union neutrality as a matter of principle or company policy. Union neutrality—providing workers a more free and fair choice to decide whether to unionize—has been a key component of successful unionization drives in Southern manufacturing. To take two recent examples:

• In 2024, workers at the Volkswagen (VW) Chattanooga plant voted to join the United Auto Workers. Like many European corporations, the German-based VW has an established policy of maintaining neutrality in union election processes, although workers still voiced concerns that in its U.S. facilities, VW management tried to intimidate and dissuade workers from forming a union (Bomey 2024).
• In tandem with community benefits agreement negotiations with New Flyer in Anniston, Alabama, the United Steel Workers and Communications Workers of America negotiated three neutrality agreements with New Flyer and its subsidiaries in 2022. Over the two years that followed, these union neutrality agreements enabled workers to pursue five successful union drives, including at the New Flyer facility in Alabama (Last 2025; Sasha 2024).

Successful recent instances of union organizing in Southern manufacturing facilities have been powerful enough to generate their own backlash. Because of the threat that union neutrality agreements represent to the reigning Southern economic development model, several conservative state legislatures in the South have used model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council to pass laws intended to interfere with these agreements (Sachs 2024). While the legality of such measures remains in question and has not yet been tested, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia now all have legislation in place stating that employers who agree to a union neutrality agreement will be barred from receiving state economic development funds, disincentivizing companies from participating in these agreements (Stephenson 2024).

Importance of unionization to improve manufacturing jobs and wages

Securing unionization in Southern manufacturing can have significant wage benefits for workers. Unionized manufacturing jobs are more likely to provide family-sustaining wages. Unionization in manufacturing is associated with a 17.9% wage premium for workers (Scott et al. 2022). This means that compared with similar workers in terms of education, occupation, experience, race, and ethnicity, unionized manufacturing workers are paid almost a fifth more per hour than their nonunionized counterparts.

Table 1 translates this union premium into how much more unionized workers in the South could make on an hourly, annual, and plant-wide basis. The average nonunionized manufacturing worker in the South earns $34.50 an hour, so with the typical union premium, that worker would be earning an additional $6.18 an hour. If that worker works full time, year-round, the hourly premium translates to $12,846 more a year. To illustrate the potential impact of unionization in an entire plant, we take the example of the BlueOval auto manufacturing investment in Tennessee, which is projected to create 6,000 jobs (TN Office of Governor 2023). For a plant of that size, unionization could mean more than $77 million in additional wages for workers.

Table 1

Wage gains from successful unionization are not hypothetical for manufacturing workers in the South. For example, in 2024, workers at New Flyer in Anniston, Alabama, ratified a union contract with significant pay raises, with some workers gaining raises of up to 38% through 2026 (CWA 2024). Establishing a union contract with transparent pay ladders will also help New Flyer workers combat persistent pay gaps between white and Black workers in Anniston’s manufacturing industry (Erickson 2021).

The benefits of unionization go far beyond hourly wage increases. The workers at New Flyer also achieved significant gains in terms of vacation time and retirement contributions. Unionized workers secure critical benefits like health care and sick days at greater rates than their nonunion peers. Adjusting for differences in industry, sector, and region, union workers are 18.3% more likely to have employer-covered health insurance than their nonunion counterparts (EPI 2021). Almost 9 in 10 private-sector union workers have paid sick days, compared with less than three-fourths of nonunion private-sector workers (EPI 2021).

Unions also contribute to safer and healthier working conditions across a wide range of industries (Dean, McCallum, and Venkataramani 2022). By strengthening workers’ voice on the job, unions empower workers to report safety issues and demand better protocols. One example of this is that unionized construction sites experience significantly lower rates of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations than nonunionized sites (Manzo IV, Jekot, and Bruno 2021). This is despite the fact that unionized workplaces actually experience greater rates of OSHA inspections than other workplaces, likely because many unions maintain active health and safety committees and because unionized workers have greater access to education on how to recognize safety hazards and are less afraid of reprisals from their employer for reporting them (Leigh and Chakalov 2021).

As the New Flyer agreement demonstrates, a strong CBA includes (or is negotiated in tandem with) union neutrality commitments ensuring that workers have a free and fair choice to unionize, without employer interference or retaliation. Securing a pathway to unionization can provide direct benefits to workers at a particular facility, while also increasing local organizing capacity and coalition strength for future negotiations over new projects and local development decisions. Not only is a new union a legally recognized institution that can monitor and hold the company accountable for commitments in the CBA, but it can also play a critical role in amplifying demands of workers and communities outside of the workplace and building power for working people more broadly.

Living wage floor

CBAs can also include commitments to minimum wage floors for the workers who will operate a new facility. For example, the 2018 Nashville Soccer CBA in Tennessee included a commitment to an hourly wage of at least $15.50 for stadium workers (SUN 2018). This provision set the stadium’s wage floor well above the minimum wage in Nashville, where workers—like all Tennessee workers and many across the South—are otherwise subject to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

If a wage floor set by a CBA is high enough, it can help workers achieve a living wage in the place that they live. What constitutes a living wage must be determined by labor and community partners (Gould, Mokhiber, and DeCourcy 2024). For example, a living wage could be defined narrowly as covering the necessities for a single adult, or more broadly as including the needs of a working parent and their children. A living wage target must also make assumptions about nonwage income such as health care benefits and government transfers. Manufacturing workers in the South can also rightfully seek wages that not only cover bare necessities but provide the family-sustaining resources needed to be healthy and thrive.

Figure D shows the share of manufacturing workers in the South earning less than $30 an hour, or $62,400 a year in wages for a full-time worker. More than 3 in 5 (60.8%) manufacturing workers in the region earn less than $30 an hour. Around 80% of Southern Black and Hispanic manufacturing workers earn below the $30 threshold. Women in manufacturing are also more likely to earn below $30 an hour (71.8%) than men (59.1%).

Figure D

A $30 wage floor exceeds the minimum costs for a single adult in most jurisdictions in the U.S., but still barely covers needs for many families with children in manufacturing-dense counties nationwide. EPI’s Family Budget Calculator estimates living wage standards by county that cover modest but necessary costs families face like food, rent, and transportation in the United States. Table 2 shows three Southern counties with significant clean energy manufacturing investments in recent years (CET 2025). Each county has significant manufacturing employment, exceeding the U.S. average for manufacturing employment density. For each county, living wage standards from the Family Budget Calculator are listed for different family types. In Morgan County, Georgia, and Maury County, Tennessee, a single adult with a child must earn at least $30 an hour to cover basic needs. For a single economic provider to cover the costs of a four-person family, they must earn over $35 an hour in all the counties listed. These living wage standards indicate that a $30 wage floor would provide significant economic security for workers with smaller families or multiple wage-earners.

Table 2

A CBA that secures a strong living wage standard in a manufacturing facility can create a virtuous cycle that brings about greater prosperity in the area. Higher wages for low- and middle-income workers boost spending in the local economy because these workers spend a greater share of their paycheck than high-income workers (Anderson 2014). Other employers in the area might have to raise their wages to compete for workers with the CBA-bound employer. The establishment of a living wage also demonstrates to other workers in the area that higher wages are a feasible goal through collective action.

Local and/or targeted hire policies

Local and targeted hiring refers to policies that prioritize recruitment of individuals from the local community, or workers from specific groups who are otherwise underrepresented in a given workforce relative to local population demographics, such as women, people of color, veterans, low-income workers, formerly incarcerated workers, or workers with disabilities (Lawliss, Finfer, and Sherer 2022). A local hire policy can require that a certain percentage of hours worked on a project be completed by local workers. These policies can also require giving local workers the first option to apply for jobs on a project. For the prosperity created through manufacturing investments in the South to be shared equitably, it is important that local community members have access to the jobs that are created during both the construction and operation phases of a development. Workforce policies also should be designed to remove barriers to employment for groups of workers—especially workers of color and women—who have historically been excluded from many construction and manufacturing career opportunities. Increasing access to these well-paying jobs can increase economic mobility for workers with more limited opportunities.

Despite these benefits, some state policymakers have been hostile to local hire as a public policy. In 2015, Nashville voters passed a ballot initiative that required city-funded construction projects to dedicate 40% of construction hours to Nashville residents, with 25% of those hours going to low-income Nashville residents (Blair et al. 2020). The Tennessee state legislature then quickly passed a bill that preempted the city from creating its own local hire policy.

As Figure E shows, the harm of Tennessee’s preemption of local hire falls disproportionately on workers of color. The construction workforce in the Nashville metro area has a higher share of workers of color and immigrant workers compared with the state construction workforce overall. Black workers are 8.2% of the construction workforce in Davidson County, but 5.5% of the overall state workforce. More than half (51.5%) of construction workers in Davidson County are Hispanic, compared with less than a quarter (20.1%) of the state overall. Davidson County construction workers are also more than twice as likely to be immigrants (40.2%) than in all of Tennessee (14.8%). State preemption of local hire prevented Nashville from ensuring that public spending would benefit local workers. However, private agreements like CBAs offer an opportunity to incorporate local hire and/or targeted hire requirements into publicly subsidized developments, even in heavily preempted jurisdictions.

Figure E

In 2018, three years after the preemption of Nashville’s local hire policy, the labor-community coalition Stand Up Nashville was able to leverage $275 million in public subsidies for a new professional soccer stadium into a successful CBA (SUN 2018). The Nashville Soccer CBA included commitments to local hire for stadium workers, particularly workers from “Promise Zones,” i.e., high-poverty areas with fewer economic opportunities (SUN 2020). Through the CBA, Nashville Soccer Holding, LLC agreed to consider qualified Promise Zone resident referrals for jobs at the stadium. So far, the program has succeeded in hiring Promise Zone residents. In 2023, Nashville Soccer Club had hired 180 employees, 80 of whom were residents of Promise Zones (SUN 2023).

CBAs in the South and throughout the country are securing similar commitments to local and targeted hiring in clean energy and manufacturing investments. In Alabama, the New Flyer CBA commits the company to ensuring that at least 45% of new hires and 20% of promotions are members of “Historically Disadvantaged Groups” (Sabin 2022).4 In Massachusetts, a new offshore wind terminal entered into a CBA with the City of Salem—setting targets for hiring of local workers, workers of color, and women workers (Sabin 2024). The CBA for Maine Aqua Ventis, an offshore wind facility, includes local hiring opportunities for residents of Monhegan, Maine (Sabin 2017). 

These types of agreements help ensure that local residents benefit from large investments in their communities, particularly when policymakers have invested public dollars in the form of tax breaks or corporate subsidies to support a new facility. Ensuring local workers are prioritized in training programs and hiring processes for newly created jobs also helps community members stay in the area when housing costs are driven up by a large new manufacturing investment. And in the longer term, providing pathways for local workers to benefit directly from these investments strengthens the labor and community alliances needed to hold developers and corporations accountable over time.

Equitable workforce development through apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships

In addition to local hire policies, which help create equitable pathways for local workers to secure good jobs at a manufacturing site, construction and manufacturing projects require a skilled workforce to operate safely and productively. A robust ecosystem of registered apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs can help ensure both that employers find the skilled workers they need in a large new manufacturing facility, and that local workers can access pathways to newly created jobs.

Registered apprenticeship programs are training programs vetted by federal or state agencies to ensure use of high-quality, best-practice training standards and approved curriculum aligned with skills needed to succeed in a particular occupation. Registered apprenticeships combine paid on-the-job and classroom training and result in a recognized, portable credential certifying that a worker has the skills and experience necessary for a specific occupation. Pre-apprenticeship programs (also known as apprenticeship readiness programs) recruit and prepare participants for registered apprenticeships—often partnering with community organizations—to open pathways to apprenticeship for women, Black and brown youth, immigrants, workers with disabilities, or others historically excluded from skilled trades occupations. The best practice is for these apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships to be joint programs between unions and employers, providing high-quality instruction tailored to industry needs and training that leads to placement in a high-quality job with wages, conditions, and benefits negotiated into a union contract. Often, a vital building block for successful manufacturing apprenticeship programs is the establishment of a unionized workforce at a facility.

Unlike lower-quality workforce development programs, registered apprenticeships pay workers fairly for their labor during their training—and in joint apprenticeship programs, the wages and benefits of apprentices are negotiated into a union contract and typically include scheduled increases as apprentices progress through the training program. Registered apprentices (across joint and non-joint programs) typically see their earnings increase 49% between the year before they enter the program and the year after completing it (Walton, Gardiner, and Barnow 2022). These increases in earnings are greater than for similar workers who do not enter the apprenticeship during the same time period (Katz et al. 2022). Apprenticeships can also be particularly attractive to workers because they are debt-free. Most apprentices (60%) consider debt avoidance the most important reason for choosing to enroll in an apprenticeship (Walton, Gardiner, and Barnow 2022).

Apprenticeships can be a powerful tool for increasing the diversity of construction and other industry workforces. While participation of women and workers of color in apprenticeships has grown in recent years, this growth has been painfully slow for decades (CEA 2024). Research finds that union-based (joint) apprenticeship programs have been more successful than other types of apprenticeships at increasing diversity in the construction industry (Ormiston and Bilginsoy 2024). Joint apprenticeships enroll a higher share of women, Black workers, and Hispanic workers than non-joint programs, and have higher program completion rates for all workers, including for women and workers of color. Community benefits agreements can secure commitments and partnerships that equitably grow this pipeline of workers and set enforceable local and targeted hiring goals which in turn spur diversification of construction and manufacturing apprenticeship programs.

For instance, the New Flyer CBA creates a partnership between the company and coalition partners to develop pre-apprenticeship and technical training programs that expand access to manufacturing jobs for workers with low incomes and from disadvantaged groups (Sabin 2022). For these programs to succeed, community groups and educational institutions must have an active role in shaping the programs and connecting workers to these opportunities. The development of a growing skilled workforce and a robust, high-quality workforce development ecosystem can in turn be a strong incentive for bringing more facilities to an area over time. In 2015, Polaris stated that a significant factor in its decision to choose Huntsville, Alabama, for a new production facility was the area’s skilled workforce (Polaris 2015). As more workers participate in high-quality training programs that lead to union jobs, the organized workforce of the region will grow, strengthening labor-community coalitions the next time there is an opportunity to shape new development in the region.

Child care

Child care is an essential but extremely costly expense for many working families across the South. Average annual infant care costs in the South range from $6,868 in Mississippi to $14,277 in Virginia.5 The Department of Health and Human Services recommends that 7% or less of family income go toward infant child care costs, but typical Southern families spend significantly more. In Alabama, infant care costs are 9.8% of median family income, while in Oklahoma the share is 15.4% (EPI 2025b).

Increasing access to high-quality, affordable child care not only makes work more accessible to parents (and especially to women, who on average continue to assume disproportionate care responsibilities), but is a powerful investment in children’s development that can help narrow class and racial inequalities (Morrisey 2020). In addition, child care workers tend to work for very low wages and experience poverty at greater rates than the typical worker.

A large manufacturing investment in a locality might produce a significant number of jobs, and in turn increase the demand of workers and their families to live nearby. This is likely to increase the need for child care services in the region. However, data show that child care employment has not kept up with manufacturing growth in Southern counties. Table 3 compares counties with high manufacturing density, where manufacturing employment makes up more than the national average (9% in 2009), with those with lower manufacturing employment density (EPI 2025c).

Table 3

Between 2009 and 2024, manufacturing employment in high-manufacturing-density counties in the South grew 15.9%, achieving faster growth than similar counties in the U.S. overall (12.1%). However, over the same period, child care employment only grew 4.5% in Southern high-manufacturing-density counties, far below the national rate of 14.2%. Child care employment growth in the South for low-manufacturing-density counties (22.3%) is also below the national level (28.5%). The South systematically underinvests in child care, despite its importance to a healthy economy in the region.

CBAs and PLAs have been used to secure both the construction of physical child care spaces and financial support for actual services. The Nashville Soccer CBA reserved 4,000 square feet for the development of a child care center (SUN 2020). In 2001, the CBA for the North Hollywood Commons mixed-use development project in Southern California secured a commitment to an on-site child care center. Fifty child care spaces at the center were reserved for low- and moderate-income families (Sabin 2001). In the Boston area, unions have secured Project Labor Agreements that seek to address the unique child care needs of the construction industry. The PLA for the Winthrop Center in Boston established a child care access fund to research, develop, and implement alternative child care models within the construction industry, with a particular focus on assisting single mothers with child care while supporting their career (NEREJ 2019).

These types of investments are vital supports for working families, particularly mothers, seeking to balance professional and care work. Combined with union neutrality for the child care workers at these facilities, commitments to providing child care can further elevate worker power in the region and help large new facilities recruit and retain the skilled, experienced workforces they need to succeed.

Affordable housing

Without strategies to address the housing needs of a community impacted by a new manufacturing investment, local residents can experience increased economic precarity or forced displacement. The local housing impacts of a large industrial investment can be complex. A significant manufacturing investment can make a local community more attractive as workers move into the area to be close to their place of work. Manufacturing investments are also likely to be paired with prospective real estate investments in anticipation of future development around the original project. State and local governments might use eminent domain and other purchasing mechanisms to secure land for roads and other new infrastructure. These dynamics can increase housing costs for residents, particularly renters who are most vulnerable to the impacts of housing speculation and prospective rent increases. For instance, the BlueOval development in West Tennessee is already reported to have increased property prices and housing rents (TCG 2023). Homeowners, particularly those with fixed incomes, can also be more burdened with housing costs as higher demand in the area increases property tax valuations (Payne 2019).

On the other hand, extreme proximity to an industrial site can expose residents to environmental hazards and noise pollution, and may be considered unsightly, which decreases property values (Currie et al. 2016; Upton and Talpur 2024). The exact distribution of these changes in demand for housing across a community will depend on the type of industry and any other types of development included in the project.

Industrial investments like manufacturing facilities tend to take place in rural and semirural areas, in part because land is relatively inexpensive (Wiley 2015). While the counties with a higher share of manufacturing employment tend to have lower housing costs than urban areas, housing affordability remains a significant issue for workers. On average, across high-manufacturing-density counties in the South, a two-adult, two-child household must cover more than $14,000 a year in housing costs.6 A large share of renters in high-manufacturing-density counties in the South still are cost-burdened by housing, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, utilities, and other housing costs. As shown in Figure F, across the Southern states, the share of cost-burdened households in high-manufacturing-density counties ranges from 28% in Arkansas to 47% in Florida. More than 2 in 5 (42%) of Texas renters in these counties are also housing cost-burdened.

Figure F

A strong CBA will secure commitments to build a certain number of affordable housing units or dedicate a share of housing at the site as affordable. The Nashville Stadium CBA created agreements that at least 12% of residential units in the development would be affordable and that 20% of those units would be three-bedroom units to accommodate families (SUN 2020). The Staples Center CBA in Los Angeles, California, was another successful example of strong affordable housing benefits. The 2001 agreement for the development of an expanded convention center, theater, and surrounding housing, hotel, and retail space secured commitments that 20% of housing units would be affordable. The developer also agreed to provide $650,000 in interest-free loans to nonprofit affordable housing developers in the local community (WRI 2001).

Even in situations where a labor-community coalition is unable to reach a final CBA with a company, coalition organizing around community demands can still deliver meaningful affordable housing victories. Between 2002 and 2006, a labor-community coalition in Denver pressured Cherokee Investment Partners to provide community benefits as part of their redevelopment of the site of the Gates Rubber Company. The coalition leveraged zoning changes necessary for the project and a potential subsidy package from the city to extract benefits including an affordable housing plan for hundreds of rental and for-sale affordable housing units (Ingram and Hong 2011; PowerSwitch Action 2025).

In 2005, the labor-community coalition organized by Georgia STAND-UP was able to attach community benefits to an Atlanta city ordinance allocating $2 billion in public funding for the Atlanta Beltline transit-oriented development project. The city resolution shaped by the coalition established an affordable housing trust fund and a goal of developing 5,600 affordable housing units (PowerSwitch Action 2025). As of 2024, more than 4,100 affordable units have been created as part of the project (Atlanta Beltline, Inc. 2024).

Labor-community coalitions can also pursue other land-use commitments beyond the development of affordable housing. The BlueOval Good Neighbors coalition in West Tennessee has demanded commitments to protect land for farmers in the area. The development of the Ford factory has pushed Tennessee’s Department of Transportation to pursue land for new roadways through purchase and eminent domain. The area targeted for new roadways is a majority Black farming community, and several farmers are engaged in lawsuits with the state over the state’s meager compensation offers for their land (Wadhwani 2023). The coalition has demanded that farmers be offered replacement land in exchange for their sold land, as well as the creation of a 10,000-acre community land trust (BlueOval Good Neighbors n.d.).

Creating or protecting affordable housing is essential for protecting the communities that are necessary for any effective labor-community coalition. Large developments can cause instability within the community as new residents arrive, and existing residents are buffeted by rising housing costs. Because of historic and ongoing racial discrimination in housing policy, labor policy, and real estate practices, the costs of these changes are most likely to impact Black and Hispanic workers. Black families and other workers of color are the most likely to be cost-burdened by housing (JCHS 2024). Creating housing for workers and families to remain in the area is vital for continued collective action to secure benefits from developers and hold those developers accountable for their promises.

Environmental standards, funding, and monitoring

Large-scale manufacturing projects often have significant environmental impacts, both during construction and once they are in operation. Air, noise, and groundwater pollution; harm to wildlife habitats; and residents’ exposure to toxic byproducts are just a few examples of common concerns, and these consequences can be severe when projects are approved without sufficient environmental consideration. The consequences of large manufacturing projects often disproportionately harm communities of color and low-wealth areas throughout the South (Brouk 2024). For decades, poor and Black residents in the region have been exposed to toxic chemicals, pollution, and other environmental dangers at alarming rates (Bergman 2019).

In 2021, the Tennessee governor approved the construction of a General Motors lithium battery supplier in the city of Spring Hill, on the banks of the Duck River. Though the project was seen as an economic success, the plant’s operation has taken a toll on the fragile river ecosystem. The lithium battery factory is not the only strain—just eight companies along the river drain tens of millions of gallons of water daily (Wadhwani 2024). This enormous water usage has lowered river water levels, threatened biodiversity, and harmed local tourism and recreation. Advocates for the river’s health blame the state’s prioritization of manufacturing expansion without regard to the long-term environmental or economic consequences for local residents or other existing local industries.

CBAs are a tool that may help community-labor coalitions address the environmental impacts of data centers in the South. Data centers are booming across the United States, but particularly in Southern states like Georgia, Texas, and Virginia (Walker and Goldsmith 2026). New centers are heavy users of water and energy, create noise and air pollution, and are driving up electricity costs nationwide both by increasing demand for energy and requiring utilities to invest in new infrastructure paid for by all ratepayers (Merchant and Guerra 2025; Bizo et al. 2021; AI NOW 2025; Reed 2025). For example, in Virginia, electric bills were on track to increase as much as 25% in 2025 because of data centers (Penn and Weise 2025).

Growing community concerns surrounding data centers could create leverage for labor-community coalitions to pursue CBAs and other community benefits strategies. In 2025, community opposition blocked or delayed $64 billion in data center projects across the nation (Data Center Watch 2025). As community resistance to data centers continues to grow, more developers may recognize the need to come to the table with local coalitions to negotiate binding commitments on environmental and economic outcomes to secure project approvals. A handful of localities have begun to create agreements with data center developers regulating water use and securing commitments to green energy use (Turner Lee and West 2026).

Past development projects provide examples of how communities have used CBAs to secure long-term commitments to clean energy transition and protection of local natural resources in a multitude of ways, from mandating that any new construction must meet specific sustainability standards to requiring companies to contribute a set dollar amount to a city’s renewable energy transition fund. In Virginia, the City of Richmond Resort Casino CBA ensured the developing and operating company would design and construct all project buildings to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver standards and would use previously existing pavement where possible (WRI 2021). The agreement also required the developer to attempt to reduce the urban heat island effect by planting shade trees along sidewalks and using other landscaping methods (WRI 2021). These agreements can mitigate additional environmental harm in areas that have already been polluted. A CBA between the Town of Waterloo, New York, and Seneca Meadows, Inc. regarding a landfill expansion commits the waste management company to pay for the development of new public water lines and other potable water infrastructure if existing public water wells become contaminated (WRI 2005).

CBAs can also be used to expand the positive impact of an already climate-friendly project. In New York, a CBA with an offshore windfarm developer stipulates that the company must contribute $2 million to the town of East Hampton’s Ocean Industries Sustainability Program (WRI 2018). Additionally, Deepwater Wind South Fork, LLC must spend $200,000 to establish an Energy Sustainability and Resilience Fund to support East Hampton’s transition to 100% renewable energy (WRI 2018). CBAs with environmentally focused companies provide valuable opportunities for communities looking to address climate change, especially where state governments have failed to invest in environmental programs.

A CBA can achieve a variety of climate and environmental commitments from a company but is also a strong starting point for building local capacity to monitor resource use, pollution, and other environmental priorities. A strong coalition of community, labor, and environmental groups can play essential roles in implementing and enforcing CBA commitments in contexts where understaffed government agencies have limited ability to monitor or investigate pollution and other environmental harms. Instead, workers and community members are often the first to report harmful practices and safety concerns. A strong CBA can provide opportunities for labor and environmental groups to work together to monitor and protect worker and community health, natural resources, and ecosystems.

Conclusion

For decades, Southern economic policies shaped by dominant business and corporate interests have resulted in poor working conditions and failed to ensure that profits generated by publicly subsidized development are shared with local workers and communities. Confronting the deep, long-standing imbalances of power that have entrenched this failed economic development model will require significant organizing and coalition-building to increase the collective power of workers and community members to shape different outcomes from the latest Southern manufacturing boom. Building new forms of worker and community power will be equally necessary to counter escalating authoritarian actions of the Trump administration, which closely parallel many features of the failed Southern economic development model that by design prioritizes corporations over workers and communities.

Our analysis shows that community benefits agreements could be powerful tools for Southern labor and community groups building the shared power necessary to reshape local and eventually regional economies. When strong coalitions of labor, environmental, faith-based, and other grassroots community organizations are able to build the necessary power to bring a company or developer to the table to negotiate an enforceable agreement, such coalitions can secure measurable economic benefits like higher wages, respect for workers’ rights to unionize, local or targeted hiring, protection of natural resources, or more affordable housing. Such economic gains are beneficial in themselves, but they also raise expectations, build local capacity to pursue additional gains, and demonstrate to the community at large that local residents can shape their own economic futures, and that these types of victories are achievable in the face of the Southern status quo.

While the urgent project of upending the Southern economic development model will require vigorous and persistent organizing across many sectors and geographies, community benefits agreements are one key strategy for turning manufacturing jobs into good jobs, ensuring long-term local economic gains from new industrial investments, and even renewing democracy in contexts where it has long been suppressed. Forming strong, long-lasting labor-community coalitions is essential to winning concrete gains for local workers as well as reshaping the political fabric of Southern communities and increasing working people’s influence over broader state or regional economic policy decisions. Winning and implementing any strong CBA requires the formation of an empowered labor-community coalition, which ideally endures and gains greater strength, experience, and influence over time. Just as the economic benefits of unionization extend far beyond an individual workplace, establishing a strong CBA coalition can create broader positive impacts across a community or region—delivering higher-quality jobs; more equitable tax systems; stronger public services; and healthier, more inclusive political systems.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the AFL-CIO Center for Transformational Organizing for their partnership and invaluable contributions in the production of this report. The authors are also grateful to Athena Last and Ian Elder at Jobs to Move America and Ben Beach at PowerSwitch Action for their expert feedback.

Appendix

Appendix Table 1

Notes

1. Clean energy manufacturing includes manufacturing of batteries, electric vehicles, mineral products, solar energy products, and wind energy products.

2. Workers in Southern states experience lower wages than in other regions even after adjusting for cost-of-living differences (Childers 2023).

3. The facilities covered by these agreements included plants in Alabama, California, Kentucky, Minnesota, New York, and Wisconsin.

4. This category includes workers who are Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color; women; LGBTQ+ persons; systems-impacted people (formerly incarcerated people); persons emancipated from the foster care system; residents of Anniston, Alabama, lacking GED or high school diploma; and veterans.

5. Southern states excluding D.C., Delaware, and Maryland.

6. EPI analysis of Family Budget Calculator and Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data.

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Key takeaways:

• The U.S. is the only OECD country that does not provide a national paid family and medical leave program, leaving it to states to ensure workers are protected when they need to take time off from work to care for themselves or a family member. 
• Some states—including eight across the South—have adopted voluntary private insurance models of paid leave that allow private insurance companies to sell insurance policies directly to employers and/or workers themselves. 
• But this approach provides less coverage, covers fewer workers, widens already large disparities in access, and is likely to be more expensive than comprehensive state paid family and medical leave (PFML) plans. 
• Other states should follow the model of proven success from 13 states and Washington, D.C. that have implemented comprehensive PFML programs. 

Comprehensive, universal Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) programs are powerful tools to safeguard and improve the economic well-being and overall health of workers and their families. Research shows that PFML improves health for both mothers and infants, reduces poverty and economic insecurity for low-income families, and increases labor force participation rates for mothers for up to five years after the birth of their child. In states that do not have a PFML program, workers lose an estimated $34.3 billion annually in wages due to leave-related absences from work, including $18.8 billion lost by women. 

PFML programs also benefit employers and the broader economy, in part by improving recruitment of talented workers, especially among small businesses, reducing turnover, and increasing worker productivity. The National Partnership for Women and Families estimates that U.S. women’s lower labor force participation—due in part to a lack of paid leave—has cost the broader U.S. economy more than $6.7 trillion in economic activity over the last decade. This is economic activity the U.S. economy would have experienced if American women’s labor force participation rates were the same as those of women in Canada.

Despite PFML’s clear benefits, the U.S. is the only OECD country that does not provide a national paid family and medical leave program—leaving it to states to ensure workers are protected when they need to take time off from work to care for themselves or a family member. 

Lawmakers in 13 states and D.C. have met this responsibility by passing comprehensive paid family and medical leave programs that guarantee coverage. Lawmakers in 10 other states have chosen weaker, much less effective voluntary approaches that defer to employers, leaving many workers uncovered. Vermont and New Hampshire, for example, have implemented public-private voluntary paid leave models where the state contracts with private insurance companies to provide paid leave for public-sector workers and private-sector employers may opt in voluntarily.1 

Across the South, Alabama (2023), Arkansas (2023), Florida (2023), Kentucky (2024), South Carolina (2024), Tennessee (2023), Texas (2023), and Virginia (2022) have adopted voluntary private insurance models of paid leave that allow private insurance companies to sell insurance policies directly to employers and/or workers themselves. 

While the private insurance model has been embraced by the insurance industry—the National Conference of Insurance Legislators adopted a voluntary paid family leave model bill in 2022 at its annual meeting—it fails workers and families. Not only do these programs fail to require employers to provide any coverage to their workforce, but the relevant laws in these states also typically provide few, if any, requirements for what types of leave are covered, the duration of coverage, or wage replacement rates.

This approach to paid family and medical leave provides less coverage, provides it for fewer workers, increases already large disparities in access, and is likely to be more expensive than comprehensive state PFML plans. 

Less coverage 

State PFML programs typically provide workers with 8–12 weeks of paid, job-protected leave to bond with a new child (birth, adoption, or foster), to care for themselves or a family member with a serious illness or injury, or for military caregiving and exigency leave. Wage replacement rates are typically at 90% or higher, at least for low-wage workers, in most states with a paid leave program, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Maine and Maryland will also pay out at this rate when they begin paying benefits later in 2026. 

Because voluntary models do not require employers to provide coverage for their workers, there is no guarantee that they will. And when employers do purchase paid leave insurance for their workforce, they are unlikely to provide the same level of coverage as comprehensive state programs. The amount of leave provided, the wage replacement rate, and even what life events are covered depend on the employer and/or the insurance company. The New Hampshire plan, which does provide details on requirements for paid leave coverage, only requires 6 weeks of paid leave with wage replacement of just 60%. 

Finally, in direct contrast to comprehensive, universal state paid leave programs, it is unclear how voluntary insurance models of paid leave could provide a job guarantee for workers taking paid leave. In the public-private model offered in New Hampshire, workers are not provided with job protection but may qualify for protection under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), so long as they meet the requirements of FMLA (i.e., they must work at a firm with 50+ employees, and must have worked for the employer for 1,250 hours over the preceding 12 months). 

Covering fewer workers

An estimated 46.2 million workers—almost one-third (32%) of the private-sector workforce in the U.S.—are eligible for coverage under one of the 14 PFML programs in the country. That leaves tens of millions of workers without a guarantee of paid time off when they need to provide for their family’s needs. This reflects, in large part, the lack of a federal universal, comprehensive PFML program and the failure of most states to implement such a plan. Unfortunately, when participation is voluntary, many employers are unlikely to offer this benefit to their workers. 

For example, in the New Hampshire voluntary program, public-sector workers are automatically covered, and private employers and individual workers can voluntarily participate. After three years, just 2.3% of private-sector workers are covered by this PFML plan through their employer. And in the eight states that authorize private insurance paid leave, researchers are unable to determine whether employers are actually purchasing insurance coverage for their workers, but it appears that few insurance companies are even selling policies in these states. It is therefore not surprising that fewer than 1 in 4 workers are covered by PFML through their employer in most of these states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In contrast, the 14 state PFML programs cover 93% of all workers in their jurisdictions. 

Increasing disparities

It is not just that fewer workers are covered by voluntary paid leave models, but coverage rates vary dramatically by income, occupation, race and ethnicity, and other characteristics. According to the Department of Labor, 95% of the lowest-wage workers—mostly women and workers of color—lack access to paid family leave. Many of these workers are in occupations with low access to paid leave, including jobs in leisure and hospitality (8%), accommodation and food service (7%), and transportation and warehouse work (9%). 

American Indian/Alaska Native (18%) and Black (23%) workers have some of the lowest PFML coverage, while Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (55%) and Hispanic (41%) workers have some of the highest coverage rates. Racial differences reflect, in part, differences in where workers live. For example, more than half of the Black population lives in one of the 16 Southern states or the District of Columbia, where only two states and D.C. have a state paid leave program.

Higher costs

In states where PFML is voluntary, there is little transparency, especially related to costs. We know from the private health insurance model, however, that introducing a profit motive into the provision of care is a terrible way for policymakers to provide workers with the protection they need at affordable costs. A profit-seeking insurance company is going to look for ways to reduce its costs and maximize profits; this inevitably means seeking to reduce payouts, whether through claim denials or other means. There is no scenario in which the profit-seeking model results in both high-quality, comprehensive leave coverage and low costs for workers, employers, or the public. 

In New Hampshire, for example, only one insurance company bid for a contract to provide paid leave benefits, and its estimated rates were generally higher than the payroll contributions in states with PFML programs. 

Further, an insurance industry stakeholder expressed concern about the lack of incentives for private employers to participate in these plans. In both the New Hampshire and Vermont cases, they reported that the models were unsustainable because most employers did not participate in the plans and individual workers whose costs are capped by the state plans would only participate when they anticipated needing coverage—meaning that the insurance pools would never be adequately financed. 

A better model exists

In recent years, challenges facing workers with care responsibilities have rightfully garnered greater public attention, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many policymakers have taken notice. Unfortunately, in some states—frequently those that have long opposed strong worker protections, a robust safety net, and workplace regulations—lawmakers have opted for voluntary models of paid family and medical leave that are fundamentally flawed. 

Voluntary models allow businesses to decide whether their workers should be paid when they need to take time to care for themselves or their families. Without mandatory coverage, too many workers will not have access to the leave they need, and this is especially the case for those workers who need paid leave the most. 

Instead, we should follow the model of proven success from 13 states and D.C. that have implemented comprehensive PFML programs, including some that have improved programs over time, incorporating lessons and best practices from other states. These programs provide more inclusive coverage for personal illness or injury, bonding with a child, caring for an ill or injured family member, and military deployment.

Universal programs also provide coverage for more workers, including employees, both full- and part-time, both public- and private-sector workers, and in some cases, independent contractors are allowed to opt in. The best programs provide workers with 12 weeks of job-protected leave—i.e., workers are guaranteed their same job or a substantially similar job with comparable pay and benefits when they return from leave and have wage replacement rates of at least 80% of the state median and 100% for low-wage workers. 

These programs have been proven to expand access at a reasonable cost and with a broad range of benefits for workers, businesses, and states overall.

These are benefits that voluntary private insurance models have failed to provide in part because the goal of private insurance is to make a profit, not to ensure the overall well-being of workers and families or their communities. 

1. Lawmakers in New Hampshire introduced a new bill in February 2026 that will extend paid family leave to a full comprehensive state paid leave program, if it is enacted.

Further, the Republican-led One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) that passed last year will sharply cut Medicaid and SNAP over the next decade by well over $1 trillion combined.

The combination of these trends—low-road employers paying insufficient wages and big upcoming cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—has led to a flurry of policy proposals at the state level to address them. One proposal—employer assessment fees (EAFs)—appears at first glance to address both problems by imposing a tax on firms that employ workers who receive Medicaid or SNAP, with the tax often calculated as the number of workers receiving these benefits multiplied by the average cost of those benefits. But EAFs are not the optimal solution to either problem and might cause undesirable collateral damage.

Here’s why:

• Medicaid and SNAP do not make it easier for employers to offer lower wages. In fact, they likely raise the wages needed to attract workers—and that’s a good thing.
  • This is not universal across all safety net and income support programs. Some of these, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), do see some of their benefits likely bypass workers and captured by low-wage employers.
• If you make Medicaid-receiving workers more expensive to employ, then employers will try to employ fewer of them and/or lower their market wages. And if the tax is proportional to the average cost of benefits like Medicaid, this incentive is large.
• Employer assessments fees are generally a large tax imposed on a small base. But revenue is maximized when tax bases are broad.
• The targets of EAFs can be more effectively reached with other policies.
  • Raising minimum wages and passing legislation to strengthen workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively are alternative policies for forcing employers to pay more.
  • Broad-based taxes are alternative polices for raising revenue.
    • Higher corporate income taxes or employer-side payroll taxes would be more progressive alternatives for taxing employers.
    • Another alternative would be to penalize firms that don’t offer employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) to workers. This is not a huge base, but it is by definition wider than those who receive Medicaid (which is just a subset of all workers not receiving ESI through the firm.)

Below, we expand on these points.

Medicaid and SNAP do not make it easier for employers to offer lower wages

A concern is often expressed that Medicaid and SNAP “subsidize” low-wage employers by making it easier for them to offer lower wages. Intuitively, thinking that Medicaid and SNAP subsidize low-wage employers actually gives these employers far too much credit for caring about the living standards of their workers. Higher pay is not given out of the goodness of employers’ hearts—it happens when policy or market conditions change. Medicaid and SNAP do not change labor market conditions in any way that lowers workers’ pay, and when these programs are cut in coming years, low-wage employers are not going to think “we need to raise our wages to help these employees who are seeing cuts to other income sources.” They will instead raise wages only if policy mandates they do or if market conditions change.

In reality, Medicaid and SNAP actually boost lower-wage workers’ meager leverage to demand higher pay by making periods of non-work less miserable. This slightly improved fallback position for low-wage workers keeps them from being forced as quickly by material deprivation into accepting any possible wage offer from employers. Policy changes that reduce how many workers receive Medicaid or SNAP will put further downward pressure on wages. We should support policies that expand the number of workers who have their wages supplemented by safety net programs, not policies that penalize and stigmatize using benefits.

This wage-boosting effect is not universal among all public income support programs. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), for example, pays more as workers supply more hours to the paid labor market. This boost to labor supply puts some downward pressure on market wages and can lead to some of the EITC benefits bypassing workers and being captured by employers (unless it is complemented by strong minimum wages.)

Making workers who receive safety net benefits more expensive will reduce demand for them

If you make workers who receive safety net benefits more expensive for employers to keep on payroll, then you increase the incentive for these employers to hire fewer of them or offer them lower wages.

Supporters of EAFs could argue this logic could be employed against any effort that made workers more expensive, like minimum wages. But minimum wages apply to all workers, and employers by definition cannot lower wages to absorb the higher costs minimum wages impose. Fully substituting away from workers whose pay has been lifted by minimum wages and toward other inputs essentially means employers would have to make costly investments in plant, capital, equipment, and processes.

Conversely, only a small fraction of workers receives safety net benefits. Absent binding minimum wages, employers can lower their market-based pay to recoup the EAFs (at least until they run into the relevant minimum wage in the labor market.) Trying to substitute away from workers who receive safety net benefits toward workers who are less likely to receive these benefits is more doable for employers than substituting away from all lower-wage labor.

These employer efforts to figure out who on their payroll is likely to trigger an EAF could lead to collateral damage. Workers from groups that are more likely to receive safety net benefits might be discriminated against across-the-board, regardless of whether or not they are actually enrolled in Medicaid or SNAP. Basically, EAFs mean that populations who are more likely to use benefits—like low-income single moms—would face even greater barriers in the labor market. Workers of color are also overrepresented among the families who use SNAP and Medicaid.

Further, the direct benefits of broad-based minimum wages to workers are large—all low-wage workers get a raise if their pay was lower than the new minimum. The direct benefits to any worker from an EAF is nonexistent—their pay does not rise, and they are not more likely to receive employer benefits.

The indirect benefits of EAFs are simply the revenue they raise, and if this revenue can be raised in less costly ways, then EAFs are not optimal.

EAFs are a large tax on a small base

Workers who receive Medicaid benefits constitute roughly 10% of the overall workforce (and their share of total hours is significantly less than this). This is a relatively small base for a tax. But the size of proposed EAFs is often quite large, sometimes as large as the average Medicaid benefit. This benefit can reach more than $9,000 annually in many states. For a full-time, year-round worker making $15 an hour, this constitutes a tax on employers equivalent to 30% of that worker’s entire earnings.

Large taxes on small bases often lead to behavioral responses that erode the revenue gained from the tax. The large value of the tax incentivizes this avoidance behavior, and the small base allows substitution away from workers who trigger the tax. This means that EAFs would raise—at best—a highly uncertain amount of revenue and could well end up raising small amounts.

Sometimes, behavioral responses to taxes that reduce the revenue they raise are socially useful. For example, when cigarette taxes lead to reduced smoking or even when workers facing higher taxes are able to voluntarily substitute more leisure for work. But the behavioral response to EAFs that lowers the revenue gained from them also directly inflicts harm on low-wage workers.

There are better alternatives for the policy goals of EAFs

The recent pushes to use EAFs come from very good impulses: the desire to force employers to pay more and stop defecting on the social contract, and the desire to raise revenue so that states can buffer their residents from the terrible coming effects of the OBBB.

But there are better alternatives to achieve these goals. To raise wages, higher minimum wages are an obvious first step. A second step is policy changes that better enable willing workers to form unions and bargain collectively, even in the face of steep employer resistance. Policymaker inaction has largely destroyed the fundamental right of association in much of the U.S. labor market. Reversing this would, in the long run, solve many of the problems of employer behavior that EAFs are trying to target.

There are also better sources to raise reliable revenue to buffer residents from the OBBB’s steep cuts. If the desired target for these revenue increases is employers, higher corporate income taxes or higher employer-side payroll taxes (for all workers) could be used. Another revenue source specifically targeted at low-road employers could be increasing penalties for firms based on the number of their employees who are not covered by employer-sponsored health insurance through the workplace. This is not a huge tax base, but it is by definition larger than just employers with workers receiving Medicaid, as it would also include workers with no coverage at all. Further, this tax would incentivize the provision of ESI to more workers, a good thing in itself.

This FAQ answers key questions about the “no tax on overtime” policy and what it means for working people.

What is happening?

At a time when working-class families are already facing a weakened job market, high prices, and general economic uncertainty due to erratic federal policy, Republicans in Congress seem committed to worsening their economic anxieties. The enhanced ACA premium tax credits, instituted with the American Rescue Plan (ARPA) and extended through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), were not extended through the Republican-led reconciliation budget. These credits have led to the largest increase in health insurance coverage since the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and saved enrollees on average $705 annually in 2024.

Working-class families across the country will feel the implications of this policy failure as health insurance premiums rise (Groundwork Collaborative 2025). However, Black families, who face higher rates of poverty and uninsurance even under “normal” circumstances, are positioned to be hit especially hard by the loss of the enhanced subsidies. The loss of the premium tax credits is also set to economically drain the cities where lots of Black families live, especially those cities in states that neglected to expand health coverage through the ACA (Ortaliza 2025).

This analysis will focus on 10 major metro areas: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Impact on Black families across 10 major metro areas

The Affordable Care Act, largely through its Medicaid expansion in 2014, set in motion a decade-long trend of falling rates of uninsurance throughout the country (Ortaliza, McGough, and Cox 2025; Hill et al. 2025). However, some states, particularly those throughout the South where the majority of Black Americans live and work, refused to expand Medicaid through the ACA (Childers 2023). Southern states’ refusal to expand access to Medicaid has meant lower coverage rates in those states and that a large share of Black Americans fall into what is known as the health insurance “coverage gap”; that is, they qualify for neither Medicaid nor traditional ACA subsidies (Lukens and Harker 2024). Even outside the coverage gap, many individuals who do qualify for ACA subsidies remain uninsured due to cost and enrollment difficulties.

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits do not eliminate racial disparities in health insurance coverage, nor do they close the coverage gap faced by Black Americans. However, the tax credits do make insurance more affordable, and thus practically more accessible, for those individuals who qualify. This increase in accessibility has led to the largest increase in Marketplace enrollment since the Medicaid expansion, with outsized increases among low-income individuals and in states that did not expand Medicaid. The loss of the tax credits would reverse hard-won progress made in reducing racial disparities in uninsurance rates (Buettgens et al. 2025).

Table 1

Figure A

Younger and healthier individuals are more likely to forgo coverage when faced with a sharp increase in the price of insurance compared with those who are less healthy and for whom coverage is less optional (Monaghan 2014). The expiration of the tax credits will therefore likely bring a knock-on increase in premiums as younger enrollees forgo coverage, since insurance premiums are cheaper for everyone when there is a large pool of healthier enrollees.

The remaining enrollees in the insurance pool of each metro area will also see premiums, and thus their health care spending, increase. Given that the states where larger shares of the Black population live are those set to be hit hardest by increased rates of uninsurance, we anticipate that the impact on consumption in metro areas in those states will be more severe.

Table 2

Access to health care in the United States is largely mediated by health insurance coverage. As a result, losing coverage in most cases means losing access to adequate and necessary care. Indeed, though access to health insurance does not guarantee affordability, uninsured adults are nearly twice as likely to report some difficulty in affording health care compared with those with insurance, with three-quarters either skipping or postponing needed care due to cost (Sparks et al. 2025).

Over time, a lack of access to adequate health care contributes to excess mortality. Black Americans are more likely to be uninsured, more likely to face difficulties in affording health care, and are thus more likely to postpone or skip care due to cost. To the extent that the expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits does lead to reduced health care access, it will likely also lead to excess mortality (Sommers, Long, and Baicker 2014).

Table 3

The loss of the enhanced premium tax credits will have knock-on economic costs, in addition to the public health costs resulting from excess mortality and increased health care costs for remaining marketplace enrollees. We assume a multiplier of 1.8 for health care spending, meaning that every lost dollar in premium tax credits reduces economic activity in a given metro area by $1.80 (estimates range from a multiplier of 1.5 to 2; see methodology section). Metro areas with large Black populations in states that lack Medicaid expansion will face significant losses in economic activity from this reduction in federal spending.

Table 4

Metro areas with large Black populations will also suffer significant productivity losses due to diminished worker health, assuming a productivity loss of $1,650 per newly uninsured Black worker. Finally, we assume employers in these metro areas will pay an additional $4,000 annually due to increased costs associated with each newly uninsured Black worker. Each of these impacts is felt most acutely in places where losing the enhanced premium tax credits is most costly—that is, those MSAs with the largest Black populations facing precarity in their coverage status.

Table 5

Why is this happening?

The Republican reconciliation bill passed last summer gives a clear distillation of conservative priorities: They prioritize the well-being of the wealthiest households and corporations over that of working-class families (Acemoglu et al. 2025). As such, the new budget contains several provisions that provide disproportionate tax relief to the wealthiest households, at the expense of social programs designed to benefit working- and middle-class families.

Allowing the premium tax credits to expire also repeats an unfortunate pattern associated with pandemic-era expansionary policy aimed at easing economic conditions for American families. Through several provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act (namely the expansion of the Child Tax Credit), the scourges of poverty, child poverty, and child hunger were all drastically reduced in 2021 (Gould 2022). When those expansionary provisions were allowed to expire in 2022, these measures snapped back to their previously higher levels, erasing the progress that was made (Cid-Martinez and Zipperer 2023; Moore and Maye 2023). The ARPA and IRA policies provide clear evidence that policy can be used to effectively reduce poverty, hunger, and uninsurance rates in ways that close racial disparities; it is a matter of prioritization, not practicality.

Why does this matter for public health?

The loss of the premium subsidies will almost certainly lead to a reduction in insurance rates, concentrated amongst those with the least ability to pay. Even for those with more income, having to face increasing health care costs amid a broader affordability crisis will also likely lead those families to go uninsured at the margin. This reduction in insurance will lead to a reduction in families’ access to adequate and timely care. Writ large, reduced access to preventative, adequate, and timely care leads to a less healthy population overall. Moreover, when more individuals and families access health care on an emergency rather than preventative basis, it puts greater strain on the entire health care system, contributing to overcrowding in emergency departments and longer wait times, and reducing the quality of care possible for a broader population (Sartini 2022).

Whether health care is a necessary or luxury good within an economy is partially shaped by the extent to which health care is publicly subsidized (Khan and Mahumud 2015). This is because the income elasticity of demand for health care changes with income. With public support, many more individuals and families can purchase health services as they become necessary than would otherwise. In the absence of public support, and at lower income levels, many view health care much more as an optional purchase when weighed against other pressing costs like shelter and food. Structural changes to the social provision of health care, like allowing subsidies to expire, lead to direct changes in consumption of health services by families, and much more so by working- and middle-class families.

Why does this matter for racial health disparities?

Even among the working class, Black families are more likely to be uninsured compared with white families. Black families are more likely to live in states that did not accept the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, and they are less likely to work for employers that provide insurance coverage. Black families will therefore be impacted more heavily by policies that reduce access to insurance at the margin. This matters because, again, Black families are more likely than their white counterparts to forgo or delay access to adequate health care for financial reasons. Losing access to the enhanced tax credits will result in increased health costs, loss of coverage, diminished health, and excess deaths, concentrated amongst the most disadvantaged. This is in keeping with the Trump administration’s stance that racial equity is not a policy goal worth pursuing.

What will this mean economically for workers and their families?

Families facing economic precarity—those for whom even a relatively small negative economic shock could lead to a crisis—stand to lose the most from the expiration of the ACA premium tax credits. More families are in a precarious financial position than live below the poverty line, and the ongoing affordability crisis being exacerbated by erratic and harmful economic policy decisions increases that number. Black and brown families are more likely to be in the position in which losing the subsidies would be impactful because they are more likely to lack financial assets, even after earning a college degree and escaping income poverty.

The cities where Black workers and families reside will also face a negative shock due to the loss of the subsidies, resulting from lost worker productivity and a drop in revenue, as those families shift more of their spending toward maintaining health insurance and less on other locally purchased consumer goods. Reduced economic activity from Black workers and families will have a broader impact on economic growth and activity throughout these cities.

What should we do about it?

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits are a prime example of a policy used to address the income side of the affordability crisis. The credits work as an income transfer from the federal government to families, making purchasing health insurance more affordable; enhancing the credits allowed more families to access timely and adequate health care. Allowing those enhanced credits to expire imposes a major cost on American families and their local economies, especially those in states where Medicaid was not expanded through the ACA.

But temporary tax credits are weak policy tools for addressing structural affordability crises. When the credits inevitably expire and those federal dollars are taken away, families will face the same issues of affordability; only now their consumption will have adjusted around having the credits. The new “increase” in the cost of health insurance means families must decide whether to risk going without coverage or reduce spending elsewhere— a tough choice with no good outcomes for local economies. 

A better policy strategy for addressing an affordability or accessibility problem with health insurance is to make structural changes to the program ( i.e., permanent changes that expand affordability and accessibility). In this case, extending the premium subsidies to become standard policy would be the strategy that creates the least harm for workers and their families.

Extending the tax credit subsidies would still leave millions of Americans and their families without access to health insurance, and thus facing diminished access to timely and affordable health care. The ACA, even in the expanded form adopted by many states throughout the country, is an imperfect system for achieving the goals of health equity. Moving our health care system in the direction of single-payer health insurance in which access to affordable and high-quality health care is given as a right not contingent on wealth, income, or employment is the strategy most consistent with reducing economic and health disparities across race and improving our overall economic and public health.

Allowing the ACA premium tax credits to expire would make it harder for American families to access health care, worsen an ongoing affordability crisis, and have a knock-on negative impact on local economies. Black workers and their families would feel these shocks most acutely because even under normal circumstances, Black families are less likely to live in states with expanded access to Medicaid, less likely to work in jobs that provide access to health insurance, and more likely to forgo or delay health care due to financial challenges.

The Trump administration has continually shown its disdain for the pursuit of equity as a policy goal through dismantling institutions committed to reducing disparities, rescinding executive orders and federal commitments to set higher standards for equity, and failing to maintain policies that brought us closer to those goals. The pursuit of equity in this moment requires us to hold fast to the progress we have made thus far, both so that we limit the suffering of as many American workers and families as possible, and so that when we do have the opportunity to build toward further progress, those families will be in the best position to help us do so.

Methodology

This analysis uses publicly available data and fixed parameter assumptions alongside author calculations to produce annual, metro-level estimates for Black coverage losses and related economic impacts for 10 metropolitan areas. Demographic and labor market statistics are derived from 2023 IPUMS American Community Survey microdata and aggregated from the county to the metropolitan level using Census Core-Based Statistical Area definitions (Ruggles et al. 2025). Coverage data is derived from the 2024 CMS OEP county-level public use file for states using the federally facilitated Marketplace (CMS 2025). For states operating state-based exchanges in which county-level Marketplace data are unavailable, enrollment and subsidy totals are derived from Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) state-level estimates and allocated to metropolitan areas based on Marketplace-eligible population shares calculated from ACS microdata (KFF 2025). Projected coverage losses are derived from Commonwealth Fund estimates of coverage loss at the state level and allocated to metropolitan areas based on each metro’s share of state Marketplace enrollment (Ku et al. 2025). Parameter assumptions for economic activity and public health multipliers are drawn from literature listed in the references, including estimates of lost economic activity from reduced health care spending, productivity losses and employer costs associated with uninsurance, and preventable mortality linked to coverage loss (Chernew 2016; Ortaliza 2025; Sommers, Long, and Baicker 2014; EBRI 2000; O’Brien 2003).

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Peter Diamond, Oliver Hart, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz. 2025. “An Open Letter From Six Nobel Laureate Economists: The Upside-Down Priorities of the House Budget.” Economic Policy Institute, June 2, 2025. 

Buettgens, Matthew, Michael Simpson, Jason Levitis, Fernando Hernandez-Lepe, and Jessica Banthin. 2025. 4.8 Million People Will Lose Coverage in 2026 If Enhanced Premium Tax Credits Expire. Urban Institute and the Commonwealth Fund, September 2025.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). 2025. 2024 “OEP County-Level Public Use File” [data set], 2024 Marketplace Open Enrollment Period Public Use Files. Last modified March 3, 2025. 

Chernew, Michael E. 2016. “The Economics of Medicaid Expansion” (blog post). Health Affairs Forefront, March 21, 2016.

Childers, Chandra. 2023. Rooted in Racism and Economic Exploitation: The Failed Southern Economic Development Model. Economic Policy Institute, October 11, 2023. 

Cid-Martinez, Ismael, and Ben Zipperer. 2023. “The End of Key U.S. Public Assistance Measures Pushed Millions of People into Poverty in 2022.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), September 12, 2023.

Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). 2000. The Economic Costs of the Uninsured: Implications for Business and Government. EBRI Policy Forum held in Washington, D.C., May 3, 2000.

Gould, Elise. 2022. “Child Tax Credit Expansions Were Instrumental in Reducing Poverty Rates to Historic Lows in 2021.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), September 22, 2022.

Groundwork Collaborative. 2025. “Another Trump Price Hike for Working Class Americans as Health Insurance Premiums Set to Spike Up to 600% This Fall.” Innovative Research (blog post), October 1, 2025.

Hill, Latoya, Nambi Ndugga, Samantha Artiga, and Anthony Damico. 2025. Health Coverage by Race and Ethnicity, 2010–2023. KFF, February 2025.

KFF. 2025. “Marketplace Enrollment, 2014–2025” (web page). Accessed January 16, 2026.

Khan, Jahangir A.M., and Rashidul Alam Mahumud. 2015. “Is Healthcare a ‘Necessity’ or ‘Luxury’? An Empirical Evidence From Public and Private Sector Analyses of South-East Asian Countries?” Health Economics Review 5, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13561-014-0038-y.

Ku, Leighton, Taylor Gorak, Kendal Orgera, Kristine Namhee Kwon, Maddie Krips, and Joseph J. Cordes. 2025. Expiring ACA Premium Tax Credits Could Lead to Nearly 340,000 Jobs Lost Across the U.S. in 2026. The Commonwealth Fund (issue brief), October 16, 2025.

Lukens, Gideon, and Laura Harker. 2024. Closing Medicaid Coverage Gap Would Help Diverse Groups and Reduce Inequities. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, July 2024.

Monaghan, Maureen. 2014. “The Affordable Care Act and Implications for Young Adult Health.” Translational Behavioral Medicine 2014, no. 2 (June): 170–174. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13142-013-0245-9.

Moore, Kyle K., and Adewale A. Maye. 2023. “Despite a Strong Labor Market, the Choice to Allow Pandemic-Era Public Assistance Programs to Expire Increased Poverty Across All Racial Groups in 2022.” Working Economics Blog (Economic Policy Institute), September 18, 2023.

O’Brien, Ellen. 2003. “Employers’ Benefits from Workers’ Health Insurance.” Milbank Quarterly 81, no. 1: 5–43. doi: 10.1111/1468-0009.00037. 

Ortaliza, Jared. 2025. “An Additional 8.2 Million People Are Expected to Be Uninsured from Changes in the ACA Marketplaces.” Quick Takes (KFF), June 10, 2025.

Ortaliza, Jared, Matt McGough, and Cynthia Cox. 2025. The Affordable Care Act 101. KFF, October 2025.

Ruggles, Steven, Sarah Flood, Matthew Sobek, Daniel Backman, Grace Cooper, Julia A. Rivera Drew, Stephanie Richards, Renae Rodgers, Jonathan Schroeder, and Kari C.W. Williams. 2025. IPUMS USA: Version 16.0 . Minneapolis, M.N.: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V16.0.

Sartini, Marina, Alessio Carbone, Alice Demartini, Luana Giribone, Martino Oliva, Anna Maria Spagnolo, Paolo Cremonesi, Francesco Canale, and Maria Luisa Cristina. “Overcrowding in Emergency Department: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions—A Narrative Review.” Healthcare (Basel) 10, no. 9 (Aug 25, 2022): 1625. doi: 10.3390/healthcare10091625. PMID: 36141237; PMCID: PMC9498666.

Sommers, Benjamin D., Sharon K. Long, and Katherine Baicker. 2014. “Changes in Mortality After Massachusetts Health Care Reform: A Quasi-Experimental Study.” Annals of Internal Medicine 106, no. 9: 585–593. https://doi.org/10.7326/M13-2275.

Sparks, Grace, Lunna Lopes, Alex Montero, Marley Presiado, and Liz Hamel. 2025. Americans’ Challenges with Health Care Costs. KFF, December 2025.

When workers join together in a union and collectively bargain with their employer, they can improve their pay, benefits, and working conditions. Union contracts provide workers with:

• Higher wages: Workers covered by a union contract earn, on average, 12.8% more in wages than those of nonunionized peers with comparable characteristics. When union density is high, nonunionized workers benefit too, because nonunion employers must raise wages to retain and attract workers they need.
• Reduced racial wage gaps: Black workers represented by a union are paid 12.6% more than their nonunionized Black peers, and Hispanic workers represented by a union are paid 16.4% more than their nonunionized Hispanic peers.
• Higher wages for women: Wages for women represented by a union are, on average, 9.8% higher than those of nonunionized women with comparable characteristics.
• Reduced income inequality: By directly raising wages for union members and indirectly lifting pay for nonunionized workers, unions play a crucial role in raising wages for working people and narrowing income inequality.

• Healthier and safer workplaces: Union workers are more likely to have access to employer-sponsored health care and paid sick leave compared with their nonunion counterparts. Further, unions foster safer workplaces by empowering workers to bring up unsafe working conditions without fear of retaliation.
• Secure retirement: Unionized workers are more likely to have access to employer-sponsored retirement plans (94% compared with 72% of nonunion workers). Further, union employers are more likely to contribute toward retirement plans compared to nonunion employers.

Unions do more than give workers a voice at work—high union density also shapes the strength and the health of our communities. For example, states with high union density experience:

Higher wages and income

• Higher minimum wages: The average minimum wage of high-union-density states is $13.70, compared with an average minimum wage of $9.30 in low-union-density states.
• Higher incomes: Median household incomes in high-union-density states are more than $12,000 higher, on average, than median incomes in low-union-density states.
• Greater access to retirement security: States with smaller declines in union density experienced smaller reductions in employer-provided retirement plans.

Healthier communities and stronger social insurances

• Greater access to health insurance: The share of people without any form of health insurance was 5.7% in states with higher union densities, compared with 9% in states with lower union densities.
• Greater access to paid sick leave: 70.6% of states with the highest union density have enacted paid sick leave legislation, compared with just 11.8% of low-union-density states.
• Greater access to unemployment insurance: Unemployed workers are twice as likely to receive unemployment benefits in high-union-density states than in low-union-density states.
• More spending on education: States with higher rates of unionization spend $22,777 per pupil on education, compared with $15,568 per pupil in low-union-density states. Further, states with higher unionization rates are less likely to have universal voucher programs.
• Safeguarding reproductive freedom: States with abortion protections have an average union density twice as high as that of states with varying degrees of abortion restrictions and bans.

Stronger democracy

• Fewer voting restriction laws: Since 2021, low-union-density states have passed 44 voter restriction laws, whereas high-union-density states passed six such laws. Further, 70% of states with the highest union density had not passed any voter restrictions between 2021 and 2024, while less than a quarter of medium-union-density states and low-union-density states can claim this distinction.

The evidence is clear: When unions are strong, workers have more power and communities thrive. Building union density is not just a worker or workplace issue, but it is also a mechanism to uplift families and communities. In the face of rising inequality and authoritarianism, unions organize, educate, and mobilize working people to defend voting rights, push back against disinformation, and expand civic participation. Rebuilding worker power by strengthening unions is not just good policy—it is a democratic imperative in the face of authoritarian backsliding.

While acknowledging that these legislative achievements led to “some very wonderful things,” President Trump recently mischaracterized this historic period as one in which white people “were very badly treated” amid “reverse discrimination.” The president’s unfounded remarks explain why this administration has directly attacked more than half a century of progress toward racial and economic justice. 

Here are six ways the Trump-Vance administration worked to undermine Dr. King’s legacy and curtail economic justice for people of color in 2025:

1. Making it easier for employers to discriminate by undermining the effectiveness of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for historically marginalized workers, and by gutting the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). 
2. Hindering equal access to education by dismantling the Department of Education and pushing policies that could limit diversity in higher education, a critical pathway to economic mobility.
3. Effectively eliminating the Minority Business Development Agency, the only economic development agency created to help minority-owned businesses overcome social, economic, and legal discrimination.
4. Cutting spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) amid persistently high rates of poverty for children of color and rising food insecurity.
5. Slashing funding for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), programs that disproportionately help families and children of color access health care.
6. Undermining health equity through massive cuts to the country’s public health infrastructure, setting the stage for the next health crisis.

The emboldened assertion of white supremacy in our political economy demands a renewed commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of racial and economic justice. In a 1966 essay, Dr. King described economic justice and security as rightful aims in the transition from equality to opportunity. Contrary to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of pervasive discrimination against white people, both equality and opportunity continue to elude people of color at far greater rates as evidenced by disparate and suboptimal outcomes in employment, earnings, wealth, and even health. Moreover, none of those indicators suggest that white people have been disadvantaged by civil rights enforcement. The immortal words of Coretta Scott King capture the true spirit and impact of the civil rights era and expose Trump’s error and hypocrisy: “Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”

This analysis was produced in partnership with Groundwork Collaborative.

More than 170,000 Black adults in 10 major metro areas would lose health care coverage in 2026 if the ACA credits expire, with the largest losses in Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Miami. Losing insurance wipes away a basic source of security for working families and reverses gains made under the ACA, which disproportionately reduced uninsured rates for Black adults​​—narrowing longstanding racial coverage gaps. 

Our analysis shows that coverage loss is only the first shock. Families who lose insurance and families who remain covered both face significant new burdens, and the costs are substantial across the 10 metropolitan areas.

• Allowing the ACA credits to expire would lead to more than 200 preventable Black deaths each year. These deaths stem directly from the loss of affordable coverage and reduced access to timely care. 
• Black families would pay $740 million more in annual premium costs. Black families who are able to keep their health insurance would be squeezed by higher health care costs, further straining already tight household budgets.
• Local economies in major metros with large Black populations would lose more than $1.9 billion each year. Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas metros would lose the most economic activity as federal subsidies disappear and household spending contracts because families must redirect more of their income toward higher premiums and away from spending on local goods and services. 

Table 1

Allowing the ACA premium tax credits to expire would make it harder for U.S. families to access health care, worsen an ongoing affordability crisis, and negatively impact local economies. These shocks would be felt acutely by Black workers and their families because they reflect longstanding structural inequities that influence who has access to affordable health care. Black workers are less likely to hold jobs that provide employer-provided health insurance, more likely to live in states that did not expand Medicaid, and more likely to skip or delay medical care due to costs. Moreover, ending the tax credits would reduce economic activity and lower productivity in the cities where Black families live.

The pursuit of equity in this moment requires us to hold fast to the gains we have made thus far, both to limit the suffering of as many U.S. families as possible and to help us build toward further progress. Acting to extend the ACA premium tax credits until such a time that health costs can be significantly reduced is smart, responsible, and race-conscious economic and public health policy.

Note

1. Pre-Trump economic conditions were examined in these 10 metro areas in EPI’s “A tale of 10 cities” report, which discusses various threats imposed by the Trump administration’s historic rollback of federal, civil, and workers’ rights protections. The underlying methodology combines Census microdata, federal Marketplace enrollment data, and state-level projections of coverage loss. The forthcoming report will provide complete technical details.

The Trump administration has consistently prioritized aggressive and arbitrary immigration enforcement, with the ultimate goal of deporting 1 million people every year of his term—regardless of their contributions to their communities and the U.S. economy. While the Department of Homeland Security’s pace currently falls short, increased enforcement would curtail business operations and reduce employer demand for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers. Over four years, 1 million annual deportations could cause total employment in the United States to fall by 5.9 million jobs, with particularly severe losses in construction and child care industries.

The direct care sector is also highly vulnerable to these enforcement actions. Amanda Kreider and Rachel Werner’s recent research indicates that job losses will significantly affect workers who provide long-term care in home- and community-based settings. The direct care sector—which includes home health aides, personal care aides, orderlies, psychiatric aides, and some nursing assistants—relies heavily on immigrant labor. Immigrants constitute nearly 30% of the direct care workforce, compared with 20% of overall employment. Among home health aides who assist with daily living and healthcare tasks, four in 10 workers are immigrants.

Kreider and Werner found that previous increases in immigration enforcement caused the direct care sector to shrink. If these patterns hold under the current enforcement regime, four million deportations over four years could cause direct care employment to fall by 394,000 (see Figure A).

Figure A

The majority of this employment decline—274,000 jobs—will result from the loss of immigrant workers. However, in addition to removing a supply of labor, deportations also make the labor market more precarious for immigrant workers. When immigrants face heightened risk of arrest, detention, or deportation, their ability to change jobs becomes severely constrained. With reduced labor market leverage, employers can worsen working conditions and suppress wages for all workers in the sector, not just those directly affected by deportations.

Contrary to the misconception that deportations will increase job opportunities for U.S-born workers, existing research consistently demonstrates that increased immigration enforcement reduces the employment for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers. Deteriorating pay and conditions for direct care workers would make U.S.-born workers unlikely to step in to replace the shortfall of immigrant workers, consistent with what studies have found when immigration enforcement decreased the size of the construction and child care sectors. In direct care, about 30% of the employment decline—the equivalent of around 120,000 jobs—will affect U.S.-born workers.

While employment reductions will be widespread, they will hit certain states particularly hard due to the geographic concentration of noncitizen immigrants in the direct care sector (see Table 1). New York faces especially severe challenges. Immigrants comprise two-thirds of the state’s direct care workforce, and more than one-third of all noncitizens working in direct care nationwide live in New York. If the Trump administration achieves its deportation goals, New York’s direct care sector could shrink by 45%.

Table 1

These large employment losses would translate directly into reduced availability of direct care services. Kreider and Werner found that past escalations of immigration enforcement led to substantial increases in the number of older adults living without any help at home. Among the Medicaid population, formal nonfamily caregiving declined while family-based caregiving increased, reflecting the contraction of the formal direct care sector.

This shift from formal to family-based care suggests that job losses in the direct care sector will have large spillover effects across the economy, greatly increasing their potential harm to even U.S.-born workers. As direct care supply becomes constrained due to deportations, some family members may need to leave their jobs or reduce their work hours to assume new caretaking responsibilities. Indeed, other research has shown that increases in immigration enforcement caused U.S.-born mothers to work fewer hours due to declining availability of household services like cleaning and child care. Family members may well be forced to choose between their careers and caring for aging and disabled relatives.

The Trump administration’s deportation agenda threatens to trigger a cascading crisis in senior and disability care that will harm families across the economic spectrum. Even in the absence of deportations, caretaking needs will accelerate as the older population grows tremendously, especially in the next five years. If the direct care workforce contracts by nearly 400,000 workers due to deportations, millions of older adults and people with disabilities will be left without the professional assistance they need to remain safely in their homes. Rather than creating jobs for U.S.-born workers as proponents claim, mass deportations eliminate employment opportunities for citizens and immigrants alike while dismantling a care infrastructure that seniors, people with disabilities, and families depend on.