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workers rights
An Injury to Immigrant Workers Is an Injury to All Workers
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
Feb 08, 2026
In late 2025, federal immigration authorities detained a non-union janitor who’d accused contractors for Minnesota’s Ramsey County of wage theft.
The worker is now in deportation proceedings. But his courage helped win policy changes in Ramsey County, and his fierce advocacy in a similar wage theft case in nearby Hennepin County also paid off: More than 70 subcontracted workers for Hennepin County received nearly $400,000 in back pay in December 2025.
When someone who fights for workers is detained, “it sends a chill,” Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, told me. “When the workers who are stepping up to try and reveal violations are silenced, the standard comes down for the whole industry.”
The Trump administration claims that its assault on immigrants will protect American workers. But its masked, armed federal agents are creating hostile environments for all workers, not just immigrants.
“They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
In Minneapolis, federal agents abducted an educator trying to ensure safe dismissal at a high school. In Southern California, they chased a day laborer at a Home Depot onto a freeway, where he was hit and killed by a vehicle. In Chicago, they detained a childcare worker as children watched.
Agents have even directly harassed striking workers.
On December 16, Juanita Robinson was out on the picket line in Chicago when armed federal agents—including border chief Gregory Bovino—approached and demanded identification. The group “interrogated and laughed at our members while they were on the picket line,” according to a press statement from Teamsters Local 705.
“It was scary when they pulled up on us,” said Robinson, who was born in Chicago but calls her immigrant coworkers family. “We’re out there trying to make ends meet, and y’all abusing us,” she said of the agents. “They treated us like animals. And it’s not some immigrants who are affected—it’s everybody.”
The scholarly research backs Robinson up.
By studying “Secure Communities,” a federal program that resulted in the deportation of nearly half a million people from 2008 to 2014, scholars found that upticks in immigration enforcement are associated with increased minimum wage violations and more dangerous workplaces for all workers.
“If I complain to the Wage and Hour Division that I’m not getting paid minimum wage, it might mean that my wages get restored,” said Matt Johnson, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “But it also might affect my coworkers, who were facing similar violations. So when one worker becomes more reluctant to complain,” he told me, it ultimately affects “the rest of the labor market.”
Research also shows that immigration crackdowns actually reduce jobs for US-born workers. Chloe East, an economics professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, says that’s because immigrants and US-born workers “complement” each other rather than compete directly.
For example, in order for a restaurant “to hire waiters, waitresses, hosts, and hostesses, which are jobs typically taken by US-born people, they also have to be able to hire cooks and dishwashers, jobs more often taken by immigrants,” she explained. When they “can’t find anybody to do the dishwashing, they may have to reduce their hiring overall.”
The effect ripples out. “When many people are all of a sudden removed from a local area because of detention or deportation, or afraid to leave their homes to get haircuts and eat at restaurants,” she explained, that hurts the economy “for everybody, including US-born workers.”
The GOP’s so-called ”Big Beautiful Bill” gave the Trump administration an unprecedented $170 billion over and above existing funding to carry out abuses like these. That enormous sum comes directly at the expense of programs that were cut, like Medicaid and SNAP, and could end up hurting all workers and their communities.
They’re trying to “break the unity that we have to have to be able to actually get raises and health insurance and retirement,” Nummacher told me. “Working people have never been able to win these things without being organized.”
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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.
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Tacoma Activists Offer a Model for Building People Power
With mainstream US politics offering at the moment only Trumpian neofascism and tepid, corporate-friendly Democratic progressivism, a group of left-wing activists in Tacoma, Washington are showing the potential for mobilizing ordinary Americans on behalf of economic justice.
Dec 27, 2025
Tacoma, Washington is a city of about 222,000 persons, 35 miles southwest of Seattle along Interstate 5. It, and the broader Pierce County of which it is the largest city, are typical of many areas of the United States: majority white but with visible communities of color—including many first generation immigrants—and a largely working class population heavily dependent on low-wage, mostly non-union, service sector employment.
As is the case with the vast majority of Americans, most Tacoma residents are only intermittently interested in politics, concentrating on the day to day struggle of living paycheck to paycheck. Politics in the city is dominated by business interests, with elected representatives running the cliched gamut from tepid centrist progressives to right-wing Republicans.
Housing Justice
Recently, the Tacoma chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 367 have successfully mobilized ordinary people to fight for greater housing security, affordability, and pro-worker politics. Several years ago, for example, both organizations launched Tacoma 4 All (T4A), an organization whose activism succeeded in securing from the city’s voters in November 2023 the passage of what has been informally called the Tenants Bill of Rights—its formal legal title is the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC). The main features of the LFC were a $10 cap on late rental fees, a moratorium on rental evictions within the city during winter months, and a limit on rent increases at 5% annually. If landlords chose to raise the rent by more than 5% per year (and the tenant did not accept the rent increase), they were required to provide the tenant with relocation assistance.
T4A’s grassroots power has been on display in recent months during Tacoma City Council meetings as the organization has mobilized Tacoma residents—in what Tacoma’s business-friendly Democratic Mayor Victoria Woodards called "unprecedented" numbers for the December 9 meeting—to speak out during the meetings in support of the LFC. At the meetings, working class person after working class person has arisen to give testimony as to how the measures' regulations—particularly the winter month eviction moratorium—have given them desperately needed breathing space when temporary financial difficulties have made it impossible for them to pay rent. Such grassroots mobilization helped keep most of the LFC intact when the Tacoma City Council voted during the December 9 meeting on Council Member Sarah Rumbaugh’s proposal to make the LFC more landlord friendly.
The situation of ordinary Tacomans is a microcosm of broader economic injustices facing Washington state (and the United States as a whole).
The popular mobilization helped defeat some of Rumbaugh’s worst proposals, but other landlord-friendly revisions made it into the final revised LFC legislation, which the council approved by a 7-2 margin. The winter eviction moratorium was reduced from five months to four months; the $10 late fee cap was replaced by a charge of 1.5% of monthly rent; residents of nonprofit-owned buildings and Tacoma Housing Authority properties were removed from LFC winter eviction moratorium protections, as were “small landlords,” those defined as owning four or fewer properties in Tacoma and implied as being mom-and-pop landlords but who, in reality, are often large corporations, including private equity firms.
Worker’s Rights
Tacoma DSA, T4A and, UFCW 367 have also sought to mobilize ordinary Tacomans to expand workers’ rights. By late June 2025, the three organizations had collected 10,000 signatures (twice the required number) for a Worker’s Bill of Rights Initiative to be put before Tacoma voters. The proposed measure would increase Tacoma’s minimum wage with relative rapidity to $20 an hour (it now sits at $16.66 an hour, equivalent to Washington state’s minimum wage); implement fair scheduling regulations (requiring Tacoma employers to give workers adequate advanced notice of shift schedule changes); and improve worker safety conditions.
Since last summer—and although the proposed ballot initiative gained the required number of validated signatures—the Tacoma city government has successfully sued in court to delay the placement of the Worker’s Bill of Rights on voters’ ballots. The majority of the Tacoma City Council has requested these delays on the grounds that more time is needed to study the measure and have expressed the fear that it could derail business investment in the city. In the meantime, the struggle continues with T4A, Tacoma DSA, and Local 367 continuing the fight in the courts and at the grassroots to finally get the Worker’s Bill of Rights before Tacoma voters.
As Tacoma city officials fret over the Workers Bill of Rights as potentially creating a less favorable investment climate in the city by raising worker wages, it is crucial to consider some important context. Tacoma residents are struggling with stagnating wages and increasingly unaffordable rent. The situation of ordinary Tacomans is a microcosm of broader economic injustices facing Washington state (and the United States as a whole). The New York Times reported in April that “between 2001 to 2023, median residential rents in Washington state rose by 43%, adjusted for inflation” while state renter income grew by only 26% during the same time period.
Empowering Ordinary People
What is remarkable about the social justice activism that I’ve outlined above is that it has featured a determination to use the push for relatively modest progressive reform as a mechanism to empower and raise the political consciousness of ordinary people in potentially more radical directions.
For example, since the passage of the Landlord Fairness Code (LFC) in 2023, T4A activists have been frequently visiting Tacoma’s apartment complexes, informing tenants of their rights under the LFC, engaging in dialogue with residents about the ownership by predatory private equity firms of rental properties, and offering pro bono legal assistance for tenants having problems with landlords. T4A structures membership meetings to have organizational policy democratically determined by the group’s paying members. Meanwhile, earlier this month, T4A helped launch Tacoma’s first tenant union at one of the city’s privately owned apartment complexes. T4A, Tacoma DSA, and Local 367 are in the beginning stages of attempting to extend their organizing model from Tacoma into the rest of Pierce County.
It is the model of groups like T4A in patiently dialoguing with ordinary people over a long period of time and seeking to slowly but surely build popular power through organizing and consciousness raising that has the best chance of eventually replacing political rule by MAGA neofacists and neoliberal Democrats with the true economic and political empowerment of ordinary people.
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