SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
farmworkers
Whatever Happened to Trump’s 'Golden Age' for American Workers?
Trump administration policies have lowered wages, reduced employment, and made work less safe.
Dec 29, 2025
Although President 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 former President Joe 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%.
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 US 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% of its purchasing power. By 2025, this wage had fallen below the official US government poverty level.
“Since Inauguration Day... the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on working people."
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 US 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%.
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 US manufacturing through tariffs, 58,000 US manufacturing jobs were lost between April (when the administration announced its “Liberation Day” tariffs) and September 2025.
Consequently, US unemployment, which, during the Biden presidency, had bottomed out at 3.4%, had by November 2025 (the last month for which government statistics are available) risen to 4.6%. 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%, 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%.
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 1 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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Reveals Biden Lurks in White House, Raising Grocery Prices
Officials concluded he had to be hiding somewhere in the East Wing, hence the desperate effort to root him out with bulldozers.
Dec 20, 2025
At the end of his address to the nation on the economy, while fact-checkers were taking a break to avoid carpal-tunnel syndrome, President Donald Trump revealed the real cause of the nation’s economic problems: Joe Biden never actually left the White House, and as the enemy within, has stealthily made the decisions that have caused prices to rise during Trump’s first year back in office.
“Biden is a master of disguises,” Trump explained. “Some days he pretended to be Steve Miller, countermanding my orders to deport only the worst of the worse and directing Kristi Noem to deport every farmworker she could find in order to raise the prices of groceries. Then he was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, urging the Fed to lower interest rates in order to overheat the economy."
“Then he was Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, an old fossil fuel guy, undermining renewable energy in order to cause electricity shortages to raise energy prices."
“One day he even snuck into the oval office while I was taking a much needed nap. He removed the sharpie from my hand and used it to increase tariffs on everything Americans buy from overseas, raising prices since Americans pay the tariffs on imports. He even raised coffee and banana tariffs.”
In a giant security failure, the Secret Service had failed to check whether Biden was actually on the departing helicopter when he supposedly left the White House last January. And FBI head Kash Patel admitted he still could not locate former and now-de-facto-acting President Biden. But officials concluded he had to be hiding somewhere in the East Wing, hence the desperate effort to root him out with bulldozers.
“We had to destroy the White House in order to save it,” observed President Trump during a waking moment. “Just wait until next year. Prices on everything are going to come down, and they’ll go down fast, starting on day 366.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
ICE Raids Against Farmworkers Expose the Pretense of Border Security
When the state hunts its most essential—and most exploited—workers to meet deportation quotas, the myth of border security collapses.
Dec 14, 2025
The targeting of farmworkers by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lays bare the true intent and interests motivating the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy agenda. It also exposes the fundamental contradictions that shape the US political economy. The nature of the state’s abductions, caging, and deportations of those doing the backbreaking work of harvesting fields, is not only revealed by the fact that those detained are not “criminals.” It is the paradox, in which farm sustainers—pillars of the food system whose livelihoods feed communities within and beyond our borders—are being systematically expelled.
While ICE raids rage on in neighborhoods across the country, they are also notably taking place in the very heart of the food system: in labor camps and homes, fields and orchards, packing sheds, outside of schools and labor centers, and across small towns whose economies depend entirely on the people the state targets. ICE is taking advantage of the fact that farmworker communities are often rural and structurally marginalized.
A state that capitalizes against workers it labels as essential in times of crisis yet simultaneously categorizes as “illegal”—especially the moment deportation quotas prove profitable—shows how racial capitalism depends on legal precarity to function. In the agrifood system in particular, the precarity of farmworkers has underpinned how corporations and landowners increase their margins, while keeping the cost of food artificially low.
As activist and award-winning author, Harsha Walia, argues in Border and Rule, borders function not merely to exclude, but to produce a workforce that can be exploited precisely because its existence has been criminalized. The US government, whose imperialist record of consequential trade policies and debt agreements, exporting dumping under in the name of trade or "aid," imposition of sanctions, and military interventions in or with foreign nations, has made significant contributions to producing crises of migration. At the same time, the state determines the rights and protections those same migrants might have—migrants it requires as a key labor force. For migrant farmworkers in particular, this vulnerability and legal precarity is even more stark given the historical double standards within agriculture. Farmworkers are routinely carved out of basic labor protections, including being denied overtime rights and robust health and safety regulations. Their disposability is not accidental; it is legislated and maintained with the underlying political and economic assumption that those who are forced to look for work across borders can, or even should, remain unprotected and exploited.
To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it.
So, even as US farmworkers are those whose skill and sweat stabilizes and maintains US agriculture—a foundation of public health and our economy—under President Donald Trump’s deportation siege, they find themselves under regular threat because of their supposed legal status.
According to US Department of Agriculture data, over 40% of US farmworkers are undocumented migrants. In California, that percentage is even higher, with estimates ranging from nearly half to upwards of 70%. This means that the state that grows approximately half of the US vegetables and over 75% of the country’s fruits and nuts is an easy target for ICE raids. Residents of Kern County, which has the highest concentration of agricultural workers in the state, recently witnessed the opening of California’s newest and largest migrant detention facility this fall. This facility is another signal to farmworkers that the state’s surveillance and criminalization of their community is becoming an inescapable part of daily life.
Additionally, in early October, the Department of Labor announced a new rule that slashes the wages of H-2A workers between $5 to $7 per hour, thereby transferring $2.46 billion dollars in wages from workers to employers each year. Crucially, US agriculture has become increasingly dependent on the H-2A program to address chronic labor shortages, as it permits eligible employers to recruit foreign workers for temporary agricultural jobs. The administration’s decision therefore not only undermines the wage protections intended to make the H-2A program a lawful and regulated alternative to undocumented labor, but also exposes its willingness to undercut the very workforce the program is purported to support. A coalition of California attorneys general led a letter noting the various consequences of the new rule, which they claim “abandons reliable farm-specific data,” and exacerbates "the roots of farmworker poverty for both H-2A workers and domestic farmworkers alike." United Farm Workers (UFW) has also launched a lawsuit intended to reverse the administration’s decision, which they claim reflects, “one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in US agricultural history.”
In essence, the administration’s pursuit of farmworker communities serves no legitimate economic or social goal. Instead, it enacts government scapegoating: the creation of a rhetorical problem (“illegal workers”) and the violent pursuit of that manufactured threat in order to justify the ever-expanding profitability of the border-security apparatus. It is an exercise of racialized state theater, and a manifestation of a food system left to the logic of deregulation and cheap, disposable labor—labor the border itself ensures under the guise of protecting national security or state sovereignty. Reports from the federal Department of Labor indicate that ICE’s siege is already contributing to labor shortages and supply consequences, as farmworkers are too afraid to leave their homes. Farmer organizations have also expressed solidarity with farmworkers, noting their importance in keeping the food economy afloat.
The fear and suffering imposed on farmworkers should neither be reduced to the specter of a labor shortage. It is a fear that fractures community life, determines whether someone seeks medical care, and dictates whether a child goes to school. In the aftermath of raids, it leaves mothers, fathers, children, and their families terrorized and often unaccounted for. It also compounds the daily struggles of working in systems that maintain unsafe labor conditions and unfair wages, such as mounting food insecurity and chronic health issues.
These communities are not peripheral cogs in some vast, anonymous agricultural machine. They are the harvesters of our food. To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it. It does not reflect lawfulness or the interests of "public safety."
While the going after farmworker communities in such a concentrated manner might be relatively new to the Trump administration, farmworkers’ long-standing legal precarity and fight for basic protections—while holding up such a huge portion of the food economy—is not. If targeting workers whose status is defined not by the role they play in feeding the nation or sustaining the economy, but by their documentation, does not underscore the structural flaws inherent in our entire economic system, it at least reveals the insincerity of Trump’s war on im/migrants and the choreography of the militarized border project. As ICE raids against farmworkers continue nationwide, the entire pretense of border security reveals itself as utterly transparent.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular