How Trump Has Lowered the Wages of American Workers - By Lawrence Wittner

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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The author is Leftist, and he does what all Leftists do, spout The Message. The Message is the daily talking points distributed to media talking heads, commentators, and polemicists. The Message is not intended to inform, explain, or clarify. Its sole purpose is to facilitate The Agenda. 

The Agenda is the dismantling of the American system. The reader should keep this in mind.

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On June 6, 2025, Donald Trump's White House staff issued an upbeat statement proclaiming that what it called the "Trump Effect" was creating "higher pay for American workers." The reality, though, is that Trump, during his second term in office, has deliberately reduced the wages of millions of workers and, amid substantial inflation, frozen the wages of millions more. (Typical Leftist. Loose, unverifiable accusations combined with a slight amount of fact to make it sound plausible.

Now one might wonder, does the President really have the power to reduce or freeze peoples' pay, whether "deliberately" or not? What possible motive would Trump have to take such actions? Why would he alienate people, particularly his supporters? Who would benefit by such an action?

We concede that it's certainly true that inflation has persisted from the high levels of the Biden administration, but it has been trending down over the last few years:

However, because the author is a partisan, he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge historical trends or other factors, especially if those factors are not politically advantageous.) 

In March 2025, kicking off his assault (Hyperbole.)

on workers' wages, Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order that had increased the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers who are employed in government services. These 400,000 workers included janitors in federal buildings, food service workers, cashiers in gift shops and national parks, and security guards. Thanks to Trump's action, the minimum wage for these workers fell from $17.75 to $13.30 an hour, a 25 percent pay cut. (Isn't it interesting that the author characterizes the reduction of the minimum wage as a pay cut? Lost in the argument is Trump isn't employing these people, companies are. The government is simply sticking its big paw into the economy and forcing its will upon the private sector. Trump is simply removing that paw.

Notice also that the author has no interest in finding out what these employers are actually paying their people. It's quite possible that no one was affected by Trump's action because they were already earning a wage higher than $17.75/hr. 

Further, why was Biden so cheap? Why didn't he increase it to $35.99 per hour? Or $59.22 per hour? Or $1000 per hour? 

Lastly, Let's speculate for a moment. If this requirement is levied on government contractors, where does the money come from? Well, the contractor includes all his expenses into the bid, including employee wages. So that means the government pays for the wage increase it mandates.

Dumb.)

Workers directly employed by the federal government received particularly harsh treatment. Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration, through a combination of firings, bad-mouthing, and pressures toward early retirement, inspired a mass exodus of over 300,000 federal workers from their jobs and incomes. (Excellent. We stand and applaud Trump for cutting the bloated government and moving out useless government employees. 

Implicit in the author's thinking is that there is no reason for the government to eliminate workers. Every single government worker is needed. Every single one is highly productive and doing a needed task. None of them are deadbeats, grifters, irrelevant, redundant, or fraudsters.)

Furthermore, Trump deprived more than a million federal workers (a large majority of union-represented federal employees) of their right to collective bargaining, which, among other things, severely limited their ability to secure higher wages. (More good news.)

In this context, Trump froze the wages of most federal employees for two years in a row. Raising their pay, he said, would be "irresponsible." (You don't need to keep trying to convince us.)

During 2026, the Trump administration took additional action to lower the wages of American workers. It adopted policies that deprive workers of wage, salary, and overtime protections by facilitating their misclassification as independent contractors rather than as employees. (The provided link does not connect the Trump administration to this. In fact, there is no way the government can force someone to misclassify their employment status.

Further, people want to be independent contractors. They don't want the burdens and hassles of answering to a boss. The author thinks that "wage, salary, and overtime protections" are attractive and desired by people who are self-employed, but they are not.)

The administration also rescinded another Biden-era regulation that made overtime pay available to increased numbers of salaried workers. (This link seems to be the source of much of the author's material, copied and pasted, some of it verbatim. That would be plagiarism, sir.)

Consequently, 4.3 million salaried employees no longer qualify for the time-and-a-half pay for overtime work, a policy established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

If the Trump administration were at all interested in securing "higher pay for American workers," it would certainly do something about the disgracefully low federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. (Again the incurious author bypasses the opportunity to analyze. Only about 1.1% of US workers earn the minimum wage, mostly teenagers and entry level employees. In other words, raising the minimum wage would have little effect.)

Stuck at that level since 2009, the minimum wage has lost much of its value thanks to inflation. (By 2025, a full-time employee at the minimum wage level earned only $15,080 for a year's work, placing the employee below the U.S. government's official poverty line. Had the minimum wage been indexed to inflation in the late 1960s, it would be over $12.50 per hour today. But Trump has never sought to raise the federal minimum wage, and at times has even suggested eliminating it. (The minimum wage hasn't been raised since 2009. Obama was president, followed by Trump, then Biden, and Trump again. So where is the author's complaint about Obama and Biden doing nothing about the minimum wage?

This is what we mean about agenda-based writing.)

Certainly, he and his party have been the major obstacles to repeated Democratic attempts to raise it substantially since 2009. (We again applaud. We hope the Republicans stand firm on this.

But again we note that Biden and Obama occupied the Oval office, both having ample opportunity to increase the minimum wage. That did not happen.)

Another indication of Trump's disdain for the federal minimum wage is his administration's effort to exclude millions of American workers from even this pathetic $7.25 per hour guarantee. In 2025, the administration proposed removing more than 3 million home care workers for the elderly from federal minimum wage (as well as overtime pay) protection. It also widened the opportunity for corporations to pay disabled workers less than the minimum wage. Thanks to such exemptions, disabled workers in some states earn only about $4 an hour. (The author seems to think that the mere fact of existence entitles a person to get big paychecks. The author apparently does not understand that people perform work in exchange for their pay. The more valuable the work, the more the work pays. That's why ditch diggers earn less money than brain surgeons.

The author wants to eliminate merit, expertise, and experience in the name of, what, fairness? Equity? But then, what motivation would there be, apart from the possibility to obtain commensurate rewards, to expend the time an effort to obtain high level skills?)

Although Trump enjoyed considerable success in using the federal government to implement a wage reduction policy, he was occasionally defeated. For example, in 2025, Trump's Labor Department slashed the wage level for farm workers admitted to the United States under the H2-A agricultural guest worker program. By establishing a cheap foreign labor pool, this action adversely affected American farm workers' wages, which declined by up to $7 an hour, resulting in a $2.46 billion annual transfer of income from workers to employers. (Irony Alert. The Left has been actively encouraging cheap labor to come into the US illegally, and even defends it on a racist basis [who will pick our vegetables and clean our pools?])

In August 2026, however, in response to a major lawsuit brought by the United Farm Workers and other pro-worker organizations and individuals, a U.S. district court ruled that the Trump administration policy was illegal.

In addition, the consequences of maintaining the federal minimum wage at its ridiculously low level were offset to some degree by many states and localities, largely governed by Democrats, which instituted-- or already had in place-- higher minimum wage rates of their own. (From that link: 

Which state has the highest minimum wage?                                                    As of September 2026, the highest minimum wages in the US are:

• Washington, D.C.: $18.40 per hour
• Washington State: $17.13 per hour
• New York: $17.00 (New York City, Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties; $16.00 for the rest of the state)
• Connecticut: $16.94 per hour
• California: $16.90 per hour (with fast-food workers earning $20.00 per hour)

So we have a question for the author: How much money does it take to live in San Francisco, NY City, or Seattle? Does $16 or $18 per hour cover the cost? No? Then why don't these noble Democratic governors do something about it?)

Thus, although 20 states, mostly governed by Republicans, stuck with the federal rate of $7.25 per hour, workers in much of the country benefitted from higher minimum wage rates. (Oh, so individual states can do as they please regarding increasing the minimum wage? Then it's not Trump's fault?)

Furthermore, many U.S. workers secured pay raises through union contracts or union campaigns or because employers were anxious to maintain workforces adequate to meet their own needs. (That third item didn't involve unions. So those employers, without the coercion of government or unions, freely decided to pay their workers more? Hmmm, why might that be? Oh. These workers supply particular value to the employer and as such are entitled to compensation commensurate with their value.

That would be market forces, boys and girls.)

Overall, however, the combination of the Trump administration's reductions and wage freezes, in the context of substantial inflation brought on by Trump's tariffs and wars, have led to a decline in the "real wages-- " wages adjusted for the cost of living-- of American workers.

As the New York Times reported in mid-August 2026, during July consumer prices outpaced workers' earnings, which meant that "for the fourth month in a row, Americans' real wages-- how many sandwiches, haircuts, and gallons of gas they can buy with an hour's pay-- actually fell." (Four months constitutes a crisis...)

The University of Michigan's measure of consumer sentiment for August 2026 found that only 8 percent of people surveyed expected their income growth to exceed inflation over the next year. (What did their survey find during the Biden years, or the Carter years?)

Although that's an inconvenient fact for Republicans in the run-up to the forthcoming midterm elections, when "affordability" has become a key issue, it's a logical result of the Trump administration's policies.

Even as Donald Trump has used his control of the federal government to make himself and his family richer, he has employed it to make American workers poorer. (Trump's wealth dropped by $300,000,000 last year. Does the author want to try again, maybe to get it right this time?)

Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).