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TRUMP DIDN’T LIFT UP THE WORKING CLASS. HE STEPPED ON ITS NECK  
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Lawrence S. Wittner
May 21, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ The former president now seeking reelection had plenty of
opportunities to raise wages or offer better worker protections. We
know exactly what he did instead. _

, Saul Loeb

 

Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of
the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in
workers’ wages
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the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive
branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages
of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.

Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In
July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at
$7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers
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holding two or more jobs to support their families―the
Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Raise the
Wage Act
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If enacted, the legislation would have gradually increased the federal
minimum wage to $15 per hour over a six-year period. But, instead of
supporting the legislation or proposing an alternative, the Trump
White House announced that, if the Senate passed the House bill, Trump
would veto it. Consequently, the measure died in the
Republican-controlled Senate. According to the AFL-CIO, the
legislation would have raised the pay of 40 million American workers
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That same year, Trump’s Department of Labor succeeded in rolling
back planned wage increases for millions of workers by restricting
eligibility for overtime pay
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In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the Labor
Department had issued a rule substantially raising the income level
below which workers were paid time and a half for work done beyond 40
hours per week. But the Trump Labor Department, seizing on a delay in
implementation occasioned by a judicial decision, lowered the level by
more than $20,000, thus depriving 8.2 million American workers of the
right to overtime pay secured under Obama.

In August 2018, Trump canceled a scheduled 2 percent pay raise
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for millions of civilian federal employees, leading to criticism even
from some Republicans. This action, plus other administration assaults
on the rights
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of public employees, led to a massive flight of workers from
government service
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the fall of 2019, there were 45,000 vacancies in the Department of
Veterans Affairs alone. To fill these vacancies, the Trump
administration hired large numbers of temp workers at low wages and
with minimal benefits.

Yet another administration policy that undercut workers’ wages
emerged with the Trump Labor Department’s issuance of a
“joint-employer” rule.
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The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been fashioned to ensure that
businesses using staffing companies or subcontractors would be
accountable for complying with basic workplace protections. Even so,
the Trump administration’s joint-employer rule substantially limited
liability for wage and hour violations, thereby making it harder for
workers to hold all parties accountable. As a result, U.S. workers
lost an estimated $1 billion annually thanks to subcontracting or wage
theft by employers.

Of course, not all Trump administration attempts at holding down wages
succeeded. In 2017, the Trump Labor Department proposed
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that employers could simply pocket workers’ tips, as long as the
workers were paid the minimum wage. Economists estimated that this
policy would lead to the loss of $5.8 billion per year in tips for
workers, 80 percent of whom were women. But after the discovery
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that Trump’s Secretary of Labor had gone to great lengths to hide
his department’s findings about how harmful the new policy would be,
Congress stepped in and amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to
prohibit employers from seizing the tips of their employees.

Another Trump administration failure occurred in connection with
reducing the wages of farmworkers, some of the most exploited,
lowest-paid workers in the United States. In mid-2019, the Labor
Department proposed a new regulation
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rules of the H-2A visa program, used by agricultural employers to hire
migrant farmworkers for seasonal work―for example, by President
Trump’s wineries. As one of the rules changes would lower wage rates
for H-2A farmworkers and, consequently, for their U.S. counterparts,
the United Farm Workers challenged it in federal court
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and, ultimately, prevailed.

Although the “real wages” (after adjusting for inflation) of
American workers did rise during Trump’s presidency, the rise was
minimal. According to a 2020 Congressional report
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during Trump’s first three years in office, workers’ “real
average hourly earnings increased by an average of just 0.9
percent.” Admittedly, there was a very substantial jump in real
average earnings in the fourth year. But this jump reflected the fact
that, in 2020, a disproportionate number of low-wage workers lost
their jobs thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and, therefore, were not
included in wage calculations.

And even these minimal wage gains usually reflected factors other than
administration actions. Responding to the failure of the federal
government to ensure adequate wages for workers, many states and
cities
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enacted minimum wage raises, fueling wage growth for the most
poorly-paid. Indeed, a study by the National Employment Law Project
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found that the median wage for low-wage workers climbed much more
sharply in states that raised their pay floors than in states that
didn’t. In addition, a surge in strike activity
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by teachers and by unionized workers at major U.S. companies during
2018 and 2019 increased wages for yet another portion of the
nation’s workforce.

Overall, then, far from sparking a wage boom, the policies of Trump
and his administration depressed the wages of American workers.

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Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History Emeritus at
SUNY/Albany who has written extensively on peace movements, foreign
policy, and economic inequality. He is the author of "Confronting the
Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement"
(2009).

* Trump Administration and Labor; Farm Workers; National Employment
Law Foundation;
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