Ep 122 - The War on Workers

Sep 9

8 min read

Donald Trump loves a hard hat.

Few politicians have worked harder to associate themselves with the imagery of blue-collar America: factory floors, steel mills, coal mines, construction sites, truck drivers, welders and machinists. Put Trump in front of a row of workers wearing reflective vests and you've got the visual shorthand for an entire political identity: This is the president of the working man.

Trump loves the hard hat and the factory photo op—but his labor policies tell a very different story about who really comes first.

And there's a reason that message works. Plenty of American communities have watched factories close, jobs disappear and once-vibrant downtowns hollow out. When Trump promises to bring manufacturing home, punish companies that move production overseas and usher in a new American industrial renaissance, he is speaking to something very real. If his policies bring good jobs back to communities that desperately need them, that's worth celebrating.

But creating a job and being good to the person who does that job are not the same thing.

That's where Trump's working-class sales pitch starts running into trouble. Because once you stop looking at the hard hats behind the podium and start looking at what his administration has actually done on wages, overtime, worker classification, workplace safety and collective bargaining, a very different picture begins to emerge.

Consider workers employed by federal contractors. Under Joe Biden, many new and renewed federal contracts were subject to a minimum wage that had risen to $17.75 an hour by 2025. Trump revoked that requirement in March 2025. That did not suddenly allow every federal contractor to pay the federal minimum wage; other wage laws and protections still apply, including an older contractor minimum for certain contracts. But Trump nevertheless made a choice: preserve a higher wage floor for covered workers or give contractors greater flexibility over labor costs. He chose the latter.

Then there is the increasingly important question of who counts as an employee at all. Employees generally receive protections under federal wage-and-hour law that independent contractors do not. And there are millions of legitimate independent contractors who genuinely are their own bosses. But there is an obvious difference between a plumber with dozens of customers who sets his own prices and a worker whose livelihood depends upon one company that dictates the terms of the relationship.

The Biden administration adopted a rule in 2024 using multiple factors to determine the economic reality of that relationship. The Trump Labor Department subsequently instructed its investigators not to use that rule's analysis in enforcement investigations, and in 2026 proposed replacing it with a different framework. The administration argues its approach will provide businesses and workers with greater clarity and preserve the flexibility of independent work. That's a legitimate goal. But there's another question worth asking: when does “flexibility” mean the worker gets freedom—and when does it mean the company gets freedom from responsibilities it would have toward an employee?

Overtime presents another revealing test. The Biden administration attempted to substantially increase the salary threshold below which many salaried workers would automatically qualify for overtime. A federal judge struck that rule down before Trump returned to office, so blaming Trump for killing it would be dishonest. But his administration has continued applying the much lower threshold established in 2019. For the assistant manager earning around $40,000 a year and routinely putting in fifty-hour weeks, the distinction isn't academic. It's ten hours of somebody's life. The question is who gets the value of them.

Some of the most consequential changes involve workers most Americans rarely think about until their own family desperately needs one. Home-care workers help elderly and disabled people bathe, dress, eat, use the bathroom and remain in their homes rather than institutions. Since 2015, most direct-care workers employed by third-party agencies have been entitled to federal minimum-wage and overtime protections. The Trump Labor Department has proposed returning toward older rules that would allow agencies greater use of exemptions from those protections, and it has changed how the existing rule is enforced while that proposal proceeds.

There is a genuine policy problem underneath this. Home care is expensive. Medicaid budgets are strained. Agencies struggle to hire enough workers. Families struggle to afford care. Somebody has to pay. But somehow, when policymakers go looking for savings, they keep arriving at the woman helping somebody onto the toilet at seven o'clock in the morning and asking whether maybe we could save some money on her overtime.

Making care cheaper by weakening the wage protections of the person providing it doesn't eliminate the cost. It moves the cost onto someone with less power to absorb it.

The same principle applies to workplace safety. Yes, some government regulations are bureaucratic nonsense. Businesses can face duplicative requirements, obsolete rules and paperwork that accomplishes very little. A serious government should eliminate those things. But “regulatory burden” is an awfully convenient phrase because it can describe both a useless form and the rule requiring somebody to make sure a trench doesn't collapse on top of a worker.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has continued inspections and enforcement under Trump; it has not disappeared. But OSHA conducted fewer inspections in fiscal 2025 than in fiscal 2024, while the administration has pursued a broad deregulatory agenda intended to reduce compliance costs and give employers greater flexibility. In mining, implementation of a Biden-era rule designed to reduce workers' exposure to dangerous silica dust has been tangled in litigation, stays and delays.

Again, the important question isn't whether every regulation should survive forever. It shouldn't. The question is what happens to the risk when a protection disappears. Because eliminating a safety requirement doesn't eliminate the hazard. Sometimes it simply transfers more of that risk from the company paying for the precaution to the worker who gets hurt when something goes wrong.

Then we get to unions—and the issue becomes even more explicitly about power.

One worker asking the boss for a raise has whatever leverage that one worker possesses. A thousand workers asking together have the leverage of a thousand people. Strip away all the slogans, politics and century of ideological warfare surrounding organized labor and that's the basic idea behind collective bargaining. Workers negotiate together because management already does.

Trump has taken sweeping action against collective bargaining in the federal workforce, excluding employees across large portions of government from the normal federal labor-relations system under presidential national-security authority. His administration argues that collective bargaining can interfere with rapid personnel decisions and presidential management of agencies performing sensitive national-security functions. Trump has also targeted late-Biden collective-bargaining agreements that his administration says were deliberately designed to constrain the incoming president.

Those arguments shouldn't simply be dismissed. Neither should criticism of unions themselves. Unions can become bureaucratic. They can defend employees who deserve discipline. Their work rules can become excessive, and their political activity can anger workers who don't share those politics. Unions are institutions run by human beings, which means they can be flawed like every other institution run by human beings.

But eliminating collective bargaining doesn't eliminate power. It redistributes it. If employees lose the ability to negotiate collectively, management gains relative power. You can believe that is sometimes necessary. You cannot credibly pretend it didn't happen.

And all of this brings us back to Trump's promised manufacturing renaissance. Suppose he's right. Suppose tariffs, investment incentives and other policies really do bring factories back to the United States. Suppose a struggling town gets five hundred new jobs. Fantastic. Give him the credit.

Then come back on Monday morning after the ribbon has been cut and ask some more questions. What does the job pay? What happens after forty hours? Is the worker actually an employee? How strong are the safety protections? Can workers bargain together? Who has leverage when something goes wrong?

Jobs are one question. Worker power is another.

There's also something peculiar about Trump's ability to sell himself as the avatar of the American working man. Based on his documented biography, Donald Trump has never lived anything resembling the ordinary working-class life he so frequently invokes. He didn't spend years punching a clock at a factory, driving a truck for wages or wondering whether this week's overtime would cover next month's electric bill. He graduated from college and entered his wealthy father's real-estate business.

That doesn't disqualify him from caring about workers. People are capable of understanding experiences they haven't personally lived. That's what empathy is for. But it does mean Trump's identification with working people is a political claim, not a product of personal experience. And political claims deserve to have their receipts checked.

When we do that, a pattern emerges. Contractors receive greater flexibility over wages. Businesses may receive greater flexibility over worker classification. Employers retain more room regarding overtime. Home-care agencies may receive relief from labor costs. Management gains power when collective bargaining is restricted. Deregulation can reduce costs for businesses while shifting some of the corresponding risk elsewhere.

None of that means helping businesses is inherently bad. Businesses create jobs. Investment matters. Regulatory costs matter. Flexibility matters. A company that cannot afford to operate isn't going to employ anybody. There are circumstances where reducing a business's costs really can produce benefits for workers.

But that's not the same thing as putting workers first. It's a theory that helping employers will ultimately help workers too. Sometimes it may. Sometimes it won't. Either way, we should call it what it is.

So bring back the factories. Build things in America. Put people to work. I will happily cheer for every community that gets another chance because a plant opened instead of closed.

Just don't expect the hard hat to settle the argument.

If you want to know whether a politician is really fighting for the little guy, don't look at who's standing behind him at the rally. Don't count the workers on the stage. Don't judge the photo op. Wait until the cameras leave.

Then look at the paycheck. Look at the overtime. Look at the safety rules. Look at whether workers can stand together. Look at who has the power to say no. Look at who receives the benefit when things go right—and who carries the cost when they don't.

Because that's where you'll find the answer.

Not at the rally.

In the paperwork.