Trump’s War on Workers | The Nation

Campaigning for president, Donald Trump assured workers that he would fight for them. “You’re going to have the American Dream back,” he said at his campaign rallies. “We’re going to be in the golden age.” His spokesperson now boasts that under Trump, workers already enjoy “increased job opportunities, better wages, and more bargaining power.” Trump promises his tariffs will produce a renaissance of American manufacturing. Hs unpopular Republican budget bill—which slashes Medicaid and health care to fund tax breaks for the rich—is peddled as providing “working family tax cuts.”

Buried beneath the daily barrage of bluster is a systematic, multifront war on workers and their unions. Trump brandished his true colors when he paraded billionaires around him for his inauguration. Both Trump and the Republican party remain wedded to the trickle-down shibboleths of the executive suite: tax breaks for the rich and corporations, deregulation, and rigging the system against working people.

Ahead of Labor Day weekend, as Trump once more masquerades as a champion of workers, it is worth summarizing how extensive this assault has been in his first months in office.

Trump targeted federal workers from the start, scorning them as “crooked and dishonest.” His Office of Management and Budget director, the right-wing zealot Russell Vought, announced his goal was to have them “viewed as villains” and “put in trauma.”

Trump unleashed Elon Musk and his DOGE operatives to fire workers and shutter programs, trampling the law in the process. Trump brags that over 300,000 will have been fired or chased out by the end of the year. Trump’s Office of Personnel Management aims to install a spoils system, ordering that civil servants pledge loyalty to White House policies.

Unions—workers organizing and bargaining at the workplace—are central to how workers fare in our economy. Unionized workers enjoy better wages, working conditions and benefits. Widespread union membership counterbalances corporate power and lifts the wages of nonunion employees too. Not coincidentally, worker organizing rights have been under attack for decades—sadly, today only one in 10 workers has union representation.

Trump immediately set out to reduce that number. In his first days in office, he stripped 50,000 TSA workers of their union rights. In March, he moved to cancel the union rights of more than a million federal employees, in what Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin called “by far the largest single action of union-busting in American history.”

Trump’s assault—an extreme version of what Ronald Reagan did when he infamously fired striking PATCO workers in 1981—now faces legal challenges. It affects career federal workers who work in every state helping veterans, supporting farmers, protecting our food supply, responding to disasters, and completing other critical tasks. More than 80 percent work outside DC, and nearly one-third are veterans.

“This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association,” warned AFGE president Everett Kelley.

Trump then moved on to paralyze the National Labor Relations Board, the sole recourse for private-sector workers seeking to assert their rights under labor law, including the right to organize for better hours, wages, and working conditions. The board is tasked with protecting not only union workers but everyone who joins coworkers to improve their working conditions. Employees can’t directly sue their bosses for violating their organizing rights; they must instead file an Unfair Labor Practice charge for investigation by a regional NLRB office. The NLRB also plays a key role in the formation of new unions by conducting workplace elections—and, at least in theory, policing management’s conduct during those elections.

In his second week in office, Trump moved to disembowel the NLRB, firing member Gwynne Wilcox, along with NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. It was the first time a board member had been fired in history, and it not only violated the text of the National Labor Relations Act; it left the board without a quorum to make decisions. Corporations have seized on this development to delay and deny union certification, exemplified by lawyers for Jeff Bezos’s Amazon arguing that a landmark vote by Philadelphia Whole Foods workers to join UFCW is moot.

While Trump defended his action in court, his ally Elon Musk pursued his suit against the NLRB—Space X v. NLRB—arguing that the board itself is unconstitutional. In what soon became a pattern, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to proceed with his firing of Wilcox, and on August 19, the Fifth Circuit ruled the NLRB is likely unconstitutional in its current structure.

Attacking Wages and Benefits

Even as he challenges the foundations of labor law, Trump has struck directly at worker wages and benefits.

Trump’s Department of Labor is abandoning defense of the Biden rule that expanded the right to overtime pay for 4.3 million workers. The DOL also announced plans to stop enforcing a Biden-era rule that made it harder for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors, potentially costing workers thousands of dollars each year.

In addition, Trump’s spending bill—which lowers taxes on the rich while cutting health and food support for low-wage workers—represents an unprecedented transfer of wealth from working families to corporations and billionaires. The cumulative result of the act, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will be to reduce the income of the bottom 20 percent of families by an estimated 4 percent. In a May letter to Congress, the AFL-CIO calculated that Trump’s Medicaid cuts alone will lead to the loss of 880,000 jobs and increase overall healthcare costs for working families when providers begin passing their unreimbursed costs to employers, Taft-Hartley funds, and other payers.

Healthcare providers called the cuts an unsustainable blow for some of the smaller hospitals that communities rely on for critical care. “It’s very clear that Medicaid cuts will result in rural hospital closures,” warned Alan Morgan, the CEO of the National Rural Health Association.

Instead of using taxpayers’ money to empower workers, Trump has moved to strip protections from government contract workers. In March, he rescinded an executive order that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors, cutting these workers’ wages anywhere from 25 to 60 percent.

Although the median pay for home healthcare and personal aides was less than $17 an hour in 2024, Trump proposed to deprive millions of care workers—the vast majority women and disproportionately age 55 and older— of minimum-wage and overtime protections, setting them up for deep cuts in pay.

Employment for people with disabilities steadily increased under the Biden administration, which took steps to end the sub-minimum wage for workers with disabilities. Trump immediately moved to withdraw that rule, enabling employers to continue to pay workers with disabilities even less than the federal minimum wage.

Trump’s Gestapo-style worksite raids are terrorizing immigrant workers, detaining and deporting restaurant and hotel staff; farm, food processing and construction workers; day laborers; and even meal delivery drivers. Meanwhile his policies make it harder to get and maintain work permits, visas, and green cards, leaving millions of immigrant workers even more vulnerable to predatory employment practices.

Worker Safety and Health

An estimated 140,587 US workers died from hazardous working conditions in 2023, according to a new AFL-CIO report, while 5.2–7.8 million workers get hurt or sick on the job each year. Even as life expectancy declines among the working-age population, Trump has moved to weaken worker protections dramatically.

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration, tasked with enforcing workplace health and safety standards, has historically been understaffed. Under Biden, it would have taken OSHA 185 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction once. Trump’s budget calls for a 30 percent reduction in inspections, making it once in every 266 years.

Trump also gutted the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, provides research on workplace safety standards, reducing its workforce from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80 percent. Trump has even used executive orders to strike down specific measures to protect workers, including stalling the proposed Biden rule to regulate heat conditions in the workplace. Each year, 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 are injured.

In April, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule, 40 years in the making, to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure. And his administration weakened the ability of the Mine Safety and Health Administration to impose safety requirements related to roof falls and mine explosions.

Equal Employment Opportunity

In his obsession to obliterate diversity, equity, and inclusion, Trump is gutting civil rights protections for workers. In his first weeks in office, he fired two EEOC commissioners and the agency’s general counsel. He defunded the agency tasked with ensuring that federal contractors comply with equal employment opportunity laws and rescinded the executive order enforcing antidiscrimination protections. And his administration has threatened to go after corporations that voluntarily continue DEI protections—with some 60 percent jumping to eliminate mention of such programs in their annual reports.

Collateral Damage

In addition to these direct attacks on workers, their unions, wages, and rights, working people are being harmed by a broad range of Trump policies. For example, the administration moved to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protected consumers from various bank frauds and predation, effectively ending, as Matt Stoller reported, “any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products,” opening the door to rampant fraud and cheating. The administration’s cuts of staff, resources, and authority at the Environmental Protection Agency will leave workers and their families exposed to more polluted water and air.

Even as Trump boasts of his American “revival,” early returns are bleak for workers. Wages aren’t keeping up with prices, and job growth has slowed. Health insurance costs in the Affordable Care marketplace will spike an estimated 18 percent next year. Household electric bills are up 10 percent, largely thanks to Trump’s attacks on renewable energy. Predatory monopoly pricing will spread with companies essentially given a free pass from anti-trust enforcement. Student loan burdens will leave millions of workers in default, leading to the garnishing of wages.

Trump’s attacks on workers are not an accident—they’re the plan. Employers are being empowered to act lawlessly toward their workers. Unions are being stripped of the legal structure that protected their existence. Immigrant workers are abused, hunted, and deported. Women and minorities will suffer from discrimination at rates not seen since the civil rights revolution. Workers’ families are shouldering higher costs for food, healthcare, and energy. Corruption and financial fraud will spread.

This assault, not part of Trump’s supposed mandate, is not popular. Seventy percent of Americans support unions, Most Americans have even turned against Trump’s immigration raids. Not surprisingly, as Trump’s assault on workers escalates so too do his increasingly frenetic efforts to distract, dissemble, and divert. He shamelessly lies about his intentions and his triumphs, blaming others for what goes wrong while preening himself, the cockroach billionaire, as the worker’s champion.

One thing is clear: Neither the Congress nor the courts will save working people. Once more, workers themselves must rise and turn the tide together.

In this moment of crisis, we need a unified, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.

We’re starting to see one take shape in the streets and at ballot boxes across the country: from New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign focused on affordability, to communities protecting their neighbors from ICE, to the senators opposing arms shipments to Israel.

The Democratic Party has an urgent choice to make: Will it embrace a politics that is principled and popular, or will it continue to insist on losing elections with the out-of-touch elites and consultants that got us here?

At The Nation, we know which side we’re on. Every day, we make the case for a more democratic and equal world by championing progressive leaders, lifting up movements fighting for justice, and exposing the oligarchs and corporations profiting at the expense of us all. Our independent journalism informs and empowers progressives across the country and helps bring this politics to new readers ready to join the fight.

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Thank you for helping us take on Trump and build the just society we know is possible.

Sincerely,

Bhaskar Sunkara
President, The Nation