By Lawrence S. Wittner 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, despite substantial inflation, frozen the wages of millions more. In March 2025, kicking off his assault on workers’ wages, Trump rescinded a Biden administration executive order that had increased the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers who are employed in government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. 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. 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. 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.” 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 The administration also rescinded another Biden-era regulation that made overtime pay available to increased numbers of salaried workers. 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. 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. Certainly, he and his party have been the major obstacles to repeated Democratic attempts to raise it substantially since 2009. 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 three 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.” The University of Michigan’s measure of consumer sentiment for August 2026 found that only eight percent of people surveyed expected their income growth to exceed inflation over the next year. 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. Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press The post How Trump Has Lowered the Wages of American Workers appeared first on The Westside Gazette.
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