For this Labor Day, the Donald Trump administration has draped an enormous banner outside the US labor department with his portrait and the words “American Workers First.”
Trump was elected on promises, since repeatedly pledged, that he would fight for workers and forgotten Americans. But many labor advocates say that Trump has consistently put corporate interests first in his second term as he has taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous.
Despite his vow to help coal miners, Trump halted enforcement of a regulation that protects miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics. Angering labor leaders, Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.
“It’s a big betrayal,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, said. “We knew it would be bad, but we had no idea how rapidly he would be doing these things. He is stripping away regulations that protect workers. His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious. He talks a good game of being for working people, but he’s doing the absolute opposite.”
“This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires,” Shuler added.
Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage the construction of factories that make renewable-energy products. In moves that will harm some of the nation’s most vulnerable workers, the Trump administration has proposed ending minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers. It has also killed a Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.
“There is a huge disconnect between Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric and the policies he’s putting in place. The gulf is enormous,” said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank. “In his second term, he’s been absolutely, brazenly anti-worker.”
“I keep thinking about his taking away the Biden-era increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors. It’s unbelievably brazen,” Shierholz continued. (Trump ended the requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.) “The minimum wage is incredibly popular. He just took away the minimum wage from hundreds of thousands of workers. That blew my mind.” As a result, many full-time workers will see their pay drop by more than $9,200 a year.
The administration disputes all these criticisms. “The American worker has been left behind by the Democrat party for years, but President Trump has championed an agenda that puts the American worker first,” said Taylor Rogers, White House assistant press secretary.
Trump has “unleashed an economic boom”, she said. Inflation is cooling, native-born Americans are benefiting from private-sector job gains and blue-collar wages are rising fast. “Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans are once again the party of the American worker,” said Rogers.
Many labor experts say Trump is even more anti-union than Ronald Reagan, often called the most anti-union president of modern times. Reagan fired 11,345 air traffic controllers who went on strike, but the AFL-CIO’s Shuler said that “pales in comparison” to Trump’s ending collective bargaining for 1 million federal workers. “That’s the largest single act of union-busting in our history,” she said.
“He is worse than Reagan when it comes to his approach to unions,” said Julie Su, who was acting labor secretary under Biden. “We saw what Reagan did in the 1980s. That began a long decline in unionization. This president wants to make America non-union again. He’s certainly trying to make the government non-union again.”
Shierholz said the “absolute scale of crushing unions” under Trump is “on a whole different scale from what we saw under Reagan. Trump is saying it’s absolutely open season on union folks. He took an absolute chainsaw to the federal workforce. He’s giving the green light to the private sector and local government to do the same.”
Justin Chen, president of an American Federation of Government Employees council representing 8,000 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers across the US, is angry that Trump halted collective bargaining for EPA employees, voided most of their union contracts and fired probationary workers. “Whatever he said about fighting for workers was a complete lie,” Chen said. “He treats federal employees with a great deal of disdain, not as civil servants valuable to make our government and economy run.”
Many labor advocates say Trump’s signature policies, including tariffs and deportations, are hurting US workers. Trump’s tariffs are pushing up prices and slowing economic growth, economists say. Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax cut will harm millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage. As for Trump’s deportation campaign, many workers say it’s undermining their employers’ businesses and forcing them to work harder because they have to do the work of their departed co-workers.
In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president Shuler said on Wednesday: “The state of working people in this country is they’re under attack.” She added: “We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.” Shuler said unions will hold close to 1,000 rallies and other events this Labor Day across the US to kick off a year of mobilization.
Jenny Smith, a home-care worker in Champaign, Illinois, said Trump’s plan to end overtime and minimum-wage protections for home-care workers shows contempt for struggling, low-wage workers. “Trump doesn’t know what it means to go to work day after day to earn a living,” she said. “If you take away these wage protections, it will take money out of these workers’ pockets. The majority of these workers are Black, brown and single mothers. You’re taking from their children’s mouths.”
Smith voiced dismay that Trump hasn’t made good on his promise to reduce prices. “I’m very disappointed that prices aren’t going down,” she said. “I just bought a dozen eggs for $6.”
She added: “I don’t think he cares about us, but he does care about the billionaires.”
Trump has taken numerous steps that will weaken safety protections for workers. He is cutting staffing by 12% at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha). His administration has proposed eliminating a requirement for adequate lighting on construction sites. It is reducing the fines that small businesses pay for violating safety rules. It has proposed blocking the government’s mine-safety district managers from ordering upgrades in mine ventilation and safety. It has slowed action on Biden’s effort to protect workers from high temperatures.
Trump also froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.
“Silicosis has become a major killer among coal miners, but the Trump administration is trying to make silicosis great again,” said David Michaels, a professor of public health at George Washington University who headed Osha under Barack Obama. “The Trump administration has taken several steps that are devastating to the safety and health of the nation’s workers. Osha, which is under-resourced and underpowered, has become significantly smaller as a result of the Trump and Doge [Trump’s unofficial ‘department of government efficiency’] cuts.”
Michaels warned that Trump’s cuts to Osha penalties will reduce incentives for companies to ensure safe conditions.
Administration officials point to the Trump-backed “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” as clearly pro-worker. But Yale’s Budget Lab notes that only 4% of workers in the bottom half by income are in tipped jobs, while almost 40% of tipped workers earn so little they don’t pay federal income taxes.
Moreover, the no-tax-on-overtime provision will reduce income taxes far less than most workers realize. The deduction applies only to the “half” in “time-and-a-half” overtime pay. If a worker earns $20 an hour and their overtime rate is $30, that worker can deduct only the $10 premium for each overtime hour, not the full $30.
Shierholz said that if Trump were serious about helping workers, “he would raise the minimum wage, make overtime pay double pay and do away with the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. That would truly help workers, but that’s not what he’s doing. He’s doing as little as possible to help workers, while helping employers.”
While Trump says his deportations will create job opportunities for US-born workers, Shierholz’s economic institute forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9m lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. “If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs,” Shierholz said. “Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers.”
Corey Mahoney, a 35-year-old cargo handler at John F Kennedy international airport in New York, said Trump’s policies have whipsawed workers at his warehouse. “The tariff situation has slowed down work, and many people lost their jobs,” he said. When Trump ended protected status for many Venezuelans and other immigrants, some of his Venezuelan co-workers left or were deported. “Some of the people I was working with tried to come to work, but they weren’t allowed,” he said. “We were left with less people, and we had to work twice as hard. It’s unfair.”
“Trump is in an alternative universe thinking everything is good,” Mahoney said. “He doesn’t realize that normal people who are just trying to make a living aren’t happy with what he’s doing.”
