Whatever Happened to Trump’s “Golden Age” for American Workers?

Although Donald Trump’s Department of Labor announced in April 2025 that “Trump’s Golden Age puts American workers first,” that contention is contradicted by the facts.

Indeed, Trump has taken the lead in reducing workers’ incomes. One of his key actions along these lines occurred on March 14, 2025, when he issued an executive order that scrapped a Biden-era regulation raising the minimum wage for employees of private companies with federal contracts. Some 327,300 workers had benefited from Biden’s measure, which produced an average wage increase of $5,228 per year. With Trump’s reversal of policy, they became ripe for pay cuts of up to 25 percent.

America’s farmworkers, too―many of them desperately poor―are now experiencing pay cuts caused by the Trump administration’s H-2A visa program, which is bringing hundreds of thousands of foreign agricultural workers to the United States under new, lower-wage federal guidelines. The United Farm Workers estimates that this will cost U.S. farm workers $2.64 billion in wages per year.

As in the past, Trump and his Republican Party have blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage―a paltry $7.25 per hour―despite the fact that it has not been raised since 2009 and, thanks to inflation, has lost 30 percent of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official U.S. government poverty level.

Furthermore, the Trump administration is promoting subminimum wages for millions of American workers. Although the Biden administration had abolished the previous subminimum wage floor for workers with disabilities by bringing them up to the federal minimum wage level, the Trump Labor Department has restored the subminimum wage. In addition, the Trump administration is proposing to strip 3.7 million home-care workers of their current federal minimum wage guarantee.

Trump’s Labor Department has also scrapped the Biden plan to expand overtime pay rights to 4.3 million workers who had previously lost eligibility for it thanks to inflation. And it is promoting plans to classify many workers as independent contractors, thereby depriving such workers of key labor rights, including minimum wages and overtime pay.

Not surprisingly, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on December 18, 2025 that, from November 2024 to November 2025, the annual growth of the real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) of American workers had fallen to 0.8 percent.

Trump’s policies have also fostered unemployment.

Probably the best-known example of this is the Trump administration’s chaotic purge, led by billionaire Elon Musk, of 317,000 federal workers without any sort of clear rationale or due process. On top of this, however, it has shut down massive construction projects, especially in the renewable energy industry. Trump’s recent order to halt the huge wind farms off the East Coast is predicted to cause the firing of thousands of workers.

Ironically, as two economic analysts reported in mid-December 2025, “key sectors of the economy that are central to Trump’s agenda have contracted, with payrolls in manufacturing, mining, logging and professional business services all falling over the last year.” Despite Trump’s repeated claims to be reviving U.S. manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.

Consequently, U.S. unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4 percent, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6 percent. This is the highest unemployment level in four years, leaving 7.8 million workers unemployed―700,000 more than a year before.

Worker safety and health have also been seriously undermined by the Trump administration. According to the latest AFL-CIO study, workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year, with millions more injured or sickened. Although the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to enforce health and safety standards, the Trump administration cut its workplace inspections by 30 percent, thereby reducing inspections of each site to one every 266 years.

Similarly, Trump has nearly destroyed the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which provides research on workplace safety standards, by reducing its staffing from 1,400 employees to 150 and slashing its budget by 80 percent.

Through executive action, the Trump administration eliminated specific measures taken to protect workers. This process included blocking a Biden rule to control heat conditions in workplaces, where 600 workers die from heat-related causes and nearly 25,000 others are injured every year. Moreover, in the spring of 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not enforce a Biden rule to protect miners from dangerous silica exposure and moved to close 34 Mine Safety and Health Administration district offices. Although a public uproar led to a reversal of the office closures, the administration then proposed weakening those offices’ ability to impose mine safety requirements and, also, weakened workplace safety penalties for businesses.

In addition, Trump appointed corporate executives to head relevant federal agencies, gutted Equal Employment Opportunity guidelines, and, in March 2025, issued an executive order that terminated collective bargaining rights for more than a million federal government workers. This last measure, the largest single union-busting action in American history, ended union representation and protections for one out of every 14 unionized workers in the United States.

In a special AFL-CIO report, issued on December 22, 2025, the labor federation’s president, Liz Shuler, and secretary-treasurer, Fred Redmond, declared: “Since Inauguration Day . . . the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people,” and “every day has brought a new challenge and attack: On federal workers. On our unions and collective bargaining rights. On the agencies that stand up for us and the essential services we rely on. . . . On our democracy itself.”

Although Trump’s second term in office might have provided a “Golden Age” for the President and his fellow billionaires, it has produced harsh and challenging times for American workers.

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