Trump's Labor Policies Contradict Pro-Worker Rhetoric, Critics Say

Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to champion US workers. Shortly before Labor Day last year, he said: “Every policy of the Trump administration is designed to lift up the American worker and “promote great-paying blue-collar jobs”. But in the year since last Labor Day, Trump has taken many actions that have hurt US workers and unions, with some labor experts saying they’ve been stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been.

In the months after Trump returned to office, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) cut workplace inspections by 20%, compared with Joe Biden’s last year in office. Even though Trump campaigned as a champion of coal miners, his administration has repeatedly delayed implementation of a rule to limit silica dust, which has afflicted and killed many coal miners with black lung. The United Mine Workers union has urgently called for “immediate enforcement” of the stalled silica dust rule.

With regard to wages, workers haven’t been doing so well under Trump. While the White House boasts that wages have risen, the problem for workers is that prices – pushed up by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war – have risen faster than wages over the past year, helping fuel the affordability crisis. In a move that will cut pay for many low-wage workers, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3 million often low-paid homecare workers who take care of seniors and the disabled.

Despite several court rulings to slow or stop this anti-union effort, Trump has pushed aggressively ahead with his unprecedented campaign to strip 1 million federal employees of their ability to bargain collectively – a move that Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, called, “the largest single act of union-busting in our history”. Trump has moved to end collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers at the Transportation Security Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.

In another unprecedented move, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, the pro-union chair of the National Labor Relations Board – the first time a president has fired an NLRB member. Trump has since named numerous pro-business officials to the labor board.

“Trump’s actions make him by far the most anti-union president in our modern history,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a leading progressive voice in the labor movement, said in an interview. “His administration has been massively anti-worker, anti-union and anti-working class.”

White House officials take sharp issue with critics who say Trump is anti-worker. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump will always put American workers first, which is why he signed the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, secured trillions in investments into our country, and negotiated historic trade deals to reshore our manufacturing industry and protect American jobs. Thanks to President Trump, American workers are prioritized over illegal aliens and foreign-born workers once again.”

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, said she was stunned by some of Trump’s anti-worker actions, especially by his order last year chopping the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their employees, to $13.30 an hour from $17.75. That move caused some workers to lose over $9,000 a year in pay.

This year, Trump rescinded a Biden-era regulation that made overtime pay available to more salaried workers. As a result, 4.3 million workers will no longer qualify for time-and-a-half overtime. (Two federal courts in Texas had ruled against Biden’s overtime regulation.) In his years as president, Trump has never pushed to raise the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, which has greatly eroded in value since it last increased in 2009.

“The Trump administration is systematically weakening policies and institutions that give workers a voice, that give workers protections and that hold employers accountable,” Shierholz said. “He’s been doing that from day one, and since then it has absolutely continued and accelerated. You see attacks on every kind of worker protection from safety and health to wage and hour protections. Policy after policy after policy goes directly against the interests of workers.”

Trump has helped some groups of workers by getting Congress to enact no tax on tips and a significant cut in taxes on overtime pay. The White House boasts that Trump also helped cuts taxes for working families, but Trump’s critics say those cuts overwhelmingly favor the ultra-wealthy, while giving just modest cuts to workers.

President Biden had proposed a landmark regulation to protect workers against extreme heat, but the Trump administration, pushed hard by corporate America, is seeking to seriously weaken Biden’s effort to require rest breaks for workers and access to water and shade when it is very hot. The Trump administration also wants to undo Biden’s plans to codify extreme heat as a workplace hazard.

This past February, after intense lobbying by corporations, the Trump administration moved to scrap a Biden-era rule and make it far easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors, be they construction workers or Uber drivers. This move will significantly lower many employers’ labor costs by removing any obligation to pay minimum wage and overtime and to contribute to those workers’ Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance benefits.

Although Trump boasts that the US economy is in the best shape ever, monthly job growth under Trump is down significantly compared with Biden. Young workers are having a hard time finding jobs, while Trump has been an outspoken cheerleader for AI and datacenters, which are fueling huge fears about many jobs disappearing. Trump promised to use tariffs and other means to make American manufacturing great again. But ever since Trump returned to office, the US has lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs, partly because of all the chaos and uncertainty Trump’s tariffs created, although in the past few months there have been modest gains in factory jobs.

The Trump administration has shown hostility to unions in a way that shocked many Americans. As part of an investigation into opposition to ICE’s operations in Minnesota, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security got hold of financial records from two leading unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, saying that this was part of an inquiry into “domestic terrorism financing”.

Further showing how much Trump officials dislike and distrust organized labor, Trump’s prosecutors even told a grand jury that the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation, representing 15 million American workers and retirees, and several unions were part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the efforts of ICE agents in Minnesota.

“It’s terrible that they’re going after labor activists and unions in Minnesota for merely standing up for their neighbors,” Nelson said. “It’s outrageous that this administration called union members who are fighting for their neighbors ‘domestic terrorists’.”