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As summer winds down and we mark the Labor Day holiday, it’s an apt time to assess the wellbeing of American workers. Despite claims of America’s economic superiority, there are worrying signs on the horizon.
As was reported earlier this month, the number of new jobs created in the U.S. in July was lower than expected. The revision in jobs numbers wasn’t unusual — there were many such downward revisions during the Biden administration. What was unusual was President Donald Trump’s response to the numbers. He claimed the numbers were wrong and quickly fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a conservative, long-time critic of the bureau.
Trump can put out numbers that suggest employment and the economy are rosy, but that doesn’t change the reality for America’s struggling to pay their rising bills. It just means we can’t trust numbers from the Trump administration.
Worse, the Trump administration has proposed dozens of rollbacks of labor protections that could lead to lower wages, less job security and more dangerous working conditions for millions of American workers, especially women and people of color.
The proposed changes would allow home health care workers, those who help our elderly and disabled family members and neighbors with daily living, to be paid below the federal minimum wage — which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for more than a decade and a half — and exempt them from overtime requirements. State laws, like Maine’s, would still apply.
The Labor Department also proposed to reinstate a sub-minimum wage for workers with disabilities and to rescind farm worker protections.
Other proposed changes call for the easing of federal safety regulations to protect workers from dangerous chemicals and other workplace hazards.
These changes will unnecessarily put workers at risk while reducing the compensation for some. These are significant steps backward.
While trying to worsen working conditions, the Trump administration has also raised costs for Americans.
Despite the president’s claims that the tariffs his administration has imposed on imports from numerous countries have helped the economy, economists have reiterated that these levies are mostly paid for by Americans. American consumers will pay two-thirds of the tariffs costs, as U.S. companies raise prices, according to a recent report from economists at Goldman Sachs. This is essentially a new tax on Americans.
The most recent analysis from The Budget Lab at Yale University found that the tariffs imposed so far will raise prices in the U.S. by 1.8 percent. That translates to the equivalent of an average per household income loss of $2,400 this year.
The lab’s report also warns that the tariffs and their economic consequences will depress growth in the country’s gross domestic product, stall job growth and increase unemployment.
All of these actions are weighing on Americans. Consumer confidence, a measure of peoples’ attitudes about the economy, fell this month. Many of those surveyed voiced concerns about tariffs and jobs. And while the consumer confidence index remains above recession levels, economists warn, and Americans fear, that a recession could be coming.
We don’t mean to be the proverbial rain on your Labor Day picnic. But, the future does not look bright for American workers.
