Happy Labor Day! (Well, almost.) There’s no better time to assess President Donald Trump’s labor market and labor policies in advance of November’s midterm elections.
Let’s start with the labor market. It’s shrinking, and it’s weak.
The weakness doesn’t show up in the unemployment numbers. Unemployment is 4.1 percent, almost exactly the same as in January 2025 (4.0 percent), when Trump was sworn in. Lower unemployment would be better, but most economists think you needn’t start worrying until unemployment rises above 5 percent.
The problem is job creation. It’s way down. In January 2025, the economy created 143,000 jobs, approximating the robust monthly average over the previous 12 months under President Joe Biden. By contrast, the number of jobs created in July 2026, the most recent data available, nets out below zero, which is to say the economy lost 23,000 jobs. That’s worse than the recent trend under Trump, and the recent trend has also been weak. The average number of jobs created over the previous 12 months was 34,000. Anything below 100,000 is bad.
How can unemployment be low when the economy is only barely able to create jobs? Because the number of people looking for work is shrinking. The main reasons for that are Baby Boomer retirements, which are at what demographers call “peak 65,” and a steep decline in immigration. According to the Census, immigration fell from 2.7 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2023, to 1.3 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2024, then down again to an estimated 321,000 in the 12 months following July 1, 2025.
The United States no longer wants to admit immigrants except maybe if they’re highly-educated and therefore able to put Kamala Harris voters out of work. That may qualify you for an H-1B temporary visa or an EB-1 “Einstein visa,” both of which are reserved for individuals of exceptional talent (or, in the case of fashion models, exceptional hotness; in her youth the Slovenia-born First Lady scored one of each). Otherwise, you’re probably out of luck.
Measured according to numbers (though not according to human suffering) Trump’s crackdown on immigration has been a much more significant nativist policy than Trump’s mass deportations. Trump has kept out about twice as many foreign-born people as he’s kicked out, and maybe more. The theory is that reducing the number of foreign-born workers will increase employment for native-born workers. Trump’s immigration czar, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is conducting a brutal human experiment to prove this hypothesis correct. But the findings (assuming Herr Doktor Miller ever looks at them) must be a terrible disappointment, because employment for native-born Americans has been going down.
Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, observed last month that since Trump took office, employment among native-born workers has fallen while employment among foreign-born workers has risen. When Trump re-entered the White House, employment for Team Furr’ner was actually lower than for Team ‘Murrcan. But Trump and Miller reversed that. During the past year employment among foreign-born workers has been higher than for native-born workers. That’s probably because the White House’s xenophobic policies increase demand for those foreign-born workers who remain in the United States (and are therefore available to perform jobs that native-born workers, it turns out, really don’t want).
If you are a Trump partisan and hope to find ideological solace in a more robust manufacturing sector, you’re out of luck. The United States has lost 62,000 manufacturing jobs under Trump. Manufacturing employment is rising right now, but it fell so steeply in 2025 that Trump still logs a net loss. The best you can say about Trump’s second-term record is that it’s better than his first-term record, when Trump managed to lose 200,000 manufacturing jobs, mostly through the spectacular mismanagement of the Covid epidemic that lost him the 2020 election (but which journalists agreed to forget about in 2024; see my October 2024 piece, “How the Press Memory-Holed Trump’s Pandemic Train Wreck”). During the presidency of “Sleepy Joe,” as Trump likes to call him, the United States gained more than 775,000 manufacturing jobs.
But wages are up, right? Yes, but they’re rising at a slower pace than when Trump entered office. Nominal wage growth (excluding inflation) was about 4 percent in January 2025, and real wage growth (i.e., including inflation) was about 1 percent. Today, nominal wage growth is about 3 percent and there’s no real wage growth at all; inflation is outrunning wage gains by 0.2 percent. Remember how Trump won the election by saying Biden presided over “the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country”? Inflation averaged 2.9 percent in 2024. Today it’s 3.4 percent, thanks to Trump’s inability to end the war he started with Iran. Three months ago, the most recent government report pegged inflation at an even higher 4.2 percent and Trump declared: “I love the inflation.” He is not a well man.
Trump’s economy is setting records for labor, but these are nothing to brag about. According to Myles McCormick of the Financial Times, pre-tax corporate earnings in the second quarter of 2026 represented the largest share of national income (18 percent) since the aftermath of World War II, while employee wages and benefits fell to their lowest level (60 percent) since the 1950s.
Meanwhile, according to Stuart Anderson and Mark Regets of the nonprofit National Foundation for American Policy, writing in The Washington Post, “Trump is on track to become the first president in a century to oversee a U.S. labor force that will be smaller when he leaves office than when he entered.” Already the number of people either employed or looking for a job is down by 1.6 million. The only previous president Anderson and Regets can identify whose labor force shrank on his watch was Abraham Lincoln, who had to contend with workers leaving their jobs to fight in the Civil War. Since 1948, write Anderson and Regets, 40 percent of economic expansion has been attributable to expansion in the labor supply.
So much for the labor market. Let’s move on to Trump’s labor policies, which perhaps I should call Trump’s Deliberate Labor Policies, or DLPs, to distinguish them from Trump’s Inadvertent Labor Policies, or ILPs, as discussed thus far. Trump’s DLPs are even worse than his ILPs.
I’ve reported in earlier dispatches about Trump’s attempt to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. The NLRB is the agency that regulates management-labor relations, a topic that ought to interest the public at a time when democratic socialism is on the march. But the press finds the NLRB so very tedious that, excepting for Bloomberg Law, no news organization of any size pays it any heed. (Neither, for the most part, do the Democratic Socialists of America, in whose platform the word “union” appears only four times, compared to six for “police.”)
Public indifference gives the NLRB carte blanche to rubber-stamp violations of labor law. A July study by the nonprofit Center for American Progress tracking the first 15 months of the Trump administration found that the NLRB was 14.2 percentage points more likely to dismiss union complaints of unfair labor practices than during the last year of the Biden administration. The NLRB was also 10.7 percentage points more likely to dismiss worker complaints of unfair labor practices. These decisions were all made at the regional level, since Trump denied the five-member Washington-based board a quorum until this past December.
With board vacancies now reduced to one and three Republican appointees to one Democrat, we can expect much worse going forward. In an August 26 memorandum NLRB’s General Counsel Crystal Carey, who acts as a sort of prosecutor for the agency, identified seven pro-worker precedents she’s already seeking to overturn, including one Biden-era ruling that prohibits management from inserting sweeping confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses into severance agreements, and another Biden-era ruling barring management from calling “captive audience” mandatory anti-union meetings during organizing drives.
In the memo, Carey informed the board that she will also target six additional pro-worker precedents, including one Biden-era ruling requiring an employer who commits an election-related unfair labor practice to immediately recognize and bargain with a union if it’s previously demonstrated majority support by collecting union authorization cards (“card check”), and another Biden-era ruling expanding monetary remedies available to workers. (The latter led contradictory rulings in appellate courts awaiting resolution by the Supreme Court.) In addition, Carey, who before she came to the board represented Amazon as a law client, has delivered two pro-management settlements that screw Amazon drivers, about which I wrote earlier this week.
At the Labor Department, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, has expanded the number of companies eligible for penalty reductions of as much as 70 percent by loosening its definition of “small business” to include, according to September 2 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections by AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Rebecca Reindel, billion-dollar corporations. As the former TNR editor Michael Kinsley has observed, it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy that small businesses are owned by small people.
According to Reindel, Trump’s Labor Department has issued more than 60 proposals that weaken protections for workers, including a proposed reinterpretation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s “General Duty Clause” barring OSHA from prohibiting, restricting, or penalizing “inherently risky activities that are intrinsic to professional, athletic, and entertainment occupations.” This proposal drew an immediate legal challenge from 16 state attorneys general and labor departments. Another OSHA strategy is to try harder not to find out about safety violations in the first place. Under Trump, OSHA worksite inspections have dropped more than 20 percent.
The NLRB and Labor Department aren’t the only federal agencies screwing workers under Trump. The Agriculture Department, for example, has moved to accelerate maximum line speeds at poultry and pork plants—in the case of chickens, from the current maximum of 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute—and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed increasing permissible radiation exposure for workers at nuclear plants, because sure, why not? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is doing its bit by rescinding a Biden-era guidance document on sexual harassment.
One could go on. Most of this mess you can blame on Trump, but the weakness of organized labor makes it harder than it should be to fight back. The percentage of American workers who belong to unions (10 percent) is half what it was in 1983 (20 percent), when labor was already in decline. For private-sector (as opposed to government) workers, the percentage is an even more dismal 5.9 percent. On the bright side, the numeric increase in union members last year was a somewhat encouraging 411,000, according to a new report by the nonprofit Illinois Economic Policy Institute, or IEPI. This was the biggest one-year increase since 2008. Sadly, though, as a percentage of the working population, it was statistically insignificant.
The argument for joining a union remains strong. According to the IEPI report, unions increase average wages by 8 percent nationally. Union membership is also associated with a higher home ownership rate, lower Medicaid enrollment, lower food-stamp enrollment, and a higher marriage rate. Why social conservatives don’t love unions is a mystery. In “right-to-work” states (i.e., the 26 states where union strength is weakened because workers in union shops needn’t pay dues or their equivalent to the union that negotiates their salary and benefits) workers earn 8 percent less, corrected for cost-of-living differences, than in non-right-to-work states. Sparing yourself the annoyance of paying union dues therefore turns out to be penny wise and pound foolish. Even so, Trump has said he supports right-to-work.
The stage is set for a union revival. According to a Gallup poll released September 1, the percentage of Americans who would like to see unions acquire greater influence has risen from a low of 25 percent in 2009 to an all-time high of 47 percent. Public approval for unions is even higher, rising from an all-time low of 48 percent in 2009 to 71 percent, its highest level since 1959. Union approval is just one percentage point lower than it was in 1936, at the height of the New Deal.
Even Republicans like unions; a 52 percent majority told Gallup it approves of them. House Speaker Mike Johnson has had to contend in at least two instances with House Republicans breaking ranks to side with Democrats in pushing through pro-labor bills that subsequently died in the Senate. But in that Gallup poll, Republicans said they didn’t want unions to acquire greater influence; only 19 percent were on board with that. And House Republicans remain sufficiently squeamish about even the word “labor” that whenever they regain a majority they change the name of the Education and Labor committee to the Education and the Workforce committee. Republican ambivalence about unions, combined with the Trump administration’s miserable record on unions, workers’ rights, worker safety, and the broad labor market, provide Democrats with an excellent midterm opportunity to recapture working-class votes. Let’s hope they take it.