Chapter 6: Trump-Era Labor Policies: Historical Echoes of Exploitation
When Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration swiftly aligned with decades of anti-labor orthodoxy, rolling back worker protections under the banner of deregulation and “pro-business” reform. In many ways, the Trump-era labor policies were a stark throwback – undermining rights and safeguards in a fashion that, intentionally or not, echoed the labor exploitation patterns of earlier eras. From scaling back civil rights enforcement to easing the rules on wage laws, the changes mirrored past practices where the law stood on the side of owners, not workers. And, consistent with that history, the burden of these rollbacks often fell most heavily on Black and brown workers.
One of the Trump administration’s first targets was the apparatus of federal civil rights enforcement in the workplace. Under previous administrations (Republican and Democrat alike), agencies like the EEOC had maintained a degree of independence and continuity in fighting employment discrimination. But Trump took unprecedented steps: within weeks of taking office, he fired the independent EEOC commissioners (appointees whose terms hadn’t expired) and moved to install his own picks[8]. This move broke a 50-plus-year precedent of respecting the EEOC’s bipartisan structure[9]. Civil rights advocates warned that it would “leave millions of hardworking Americans vulnerable to illegal workplace discrimination”[10] – particularly Black workers, who file a large share of EEOC complaints. In tandem, Trump rescinded executive orders and policies designed to promote diversity and protect workers. For example, he revoked a 60-year-old executive order prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors[5], signaling to companies that the government would be lax on enforcement. The administration also pushed an order banning certain diversity training (mischaracterized as “critical race theory sessions”), which had a chilling effect on employers’ efforts to address bias. As Rep. Grace Meng put it, Trump’s team “rolled back critical protections, opening the door for workplaces to violate the law and discriminate against their workers”[6]. The effect was to turn back the clock to a time when the federal government looked the other way at racial bias in employment – conjuring memories of the post-Reconstruction retreat, when authorities refused to safeguard Black people’s rights.
In the realm of wages and hours, the Trump administration’s approach was similarly regressive. Consider the matter of overtime pay. In 2016, the Obama Labor Department had issued a new rule raising the salary threshold under which workers automatically qualify for overtime pay (time-and-a-half for hours over 40 per week). The threshold was set to double, which would have extended overtime protection to an estimated 4 million more workers – including many lower-income managers in retail and fast food (jobs disproportionately held by people of color). Businesses (and Republican-led states) sued to block it, and the rule was stalled in court. When Trump came in, his DOL scrapped the Obama rule and eventually put in place a watered-down version, setting the threshold far lower. The result: millions fewer workers entitled to overtime, meaning more people working 50- or 60-hour weeks with no extra pay. This particularly affects Black workers who are often in junior manager roles that pay just above the old threshold – effectively making them salaried/exempt workers who can be overworked without additional compensation. The principle at stake – whether a fair day’s work should earn a fair day’s pay or whether employers can work someone to exhaustion for peanuts – harks back to age-old labor fights. By siding with the latter, Trump’s policy channeled the spirit of the Gilded Age, when labor had minimal rights.
Even more consequential was the issue of independent contractor classification. Late in Trump’s term, the DOL issued rules making it easier for companies to classify workers as contractors rather than employees. This sounds technical, but it has big implications: an “independent contractor” is not protected by wage laws, overtime rules, union rights, unemployment insurance, or employer benefit obligations. The Trump rule set a lenient test that, in effect, encouraged gig-style employment arrangements. Industries from trucking to home care to high-tech rejoiced – they gained more leeway to hire workers without strings attached (and without paying payroll taxes or providing benefits). But for workers, it meant vulnerability. The scenario is akin to sharecropping or day labor in earlier times: workers shoulder the risk and cost, employers reap the benefit without accountability. It’s telling that the Biden administration moved to reverse this rule, precisely because the DOL recognized that misclassification “exempt[s] more workers from the protections” of labor standards. Trump’s insistence on this front – which was cheered by gig economy giants – effectively gave a 21st-century stamp of approval to a form of labor exploitation that disproportionately affects minorities. For instance, surveys show a significant percentage of Uber and Lyft drivers in big cities are people of color or immigrants. By denying them employee status, the administration’s policy sustained a workforce with no minimum wage guarantee, no health insurance, no retirement plan, and no right to organize – a precariousness all too familiar to Black workers historically.
.jpg=w352-h352-p-k-no-nu "Joint-Employer Rule Reversal, 2020")
Additionally, the Trump administration took a lax approach to enforcing existing labor laws. Reports showed that agencies like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) saw decreases in inspections and penalties. Wage and Hour Division investigators were not expanded despite rampant issues like wage theft (which again hits low-wage, often Black and Latino workers hardest). And in a more subtle move, Trump’s Justice and Labor Departments shifted away from using “disparate impact” analysis in discrimination cases – meaning they were less inclined to pursue cases where a policy wasn’t overtly racist but had discriminatory outcomes. This is a direct affront to how civil rights law had evolved to catch structural bias.
One cannot ignore Trump’s appointments to the judiciary and the Supreme Court, which have long-term effects on labor. The 2018 Janus decision (though the case was already in motion before Trump, his Justice Department supported the anti-union side) has significantly undercut public-sector unions by ending fair-share fees. Another case, Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (2018), with Trump-appointed Justice Gorsuch writing the majority, upheld the use of individual arbitration agreements that prevent workers from banding together in class-action lawsuits over workplace disputes. This decision hurts all workers, but especially low-wage workers who might only have practical means to challenge violations (like wage theft or discrimination) through collective legal action.
All these policy shifts reflect a familiar prioritization: the freedom of capital over the freedom of labor. In Trump’s rhetoric, this was framed as liberating businesses from “burdensome regulations” – not unlike how Southern planters once decried “interference” with how they managed their labor force. The practical effect, however, was to remove safeguards that somewhat leveled the playing field for marginalized workers.
For Black workers, the Trump era’s resonance with the past is pronounced. Recall how after Reconstruction, the federal government’s withdrawal led to unchecked abuses in the South; under Trump, the retreat of federal enforcement threatened to do the same in workplaces nationwide. Recall how sharecroppers lacked legal recourse against exploitation; today, non-unionized, “independent” contractors find themselves in a similar spot. And recall how white supremacist politicians in the 19th and 20th centuries argued that too much protection or equality for Black labor would undermine the social order; one hears an echo in modern arguments that raising the minimum wage or enforcing diversity initiatives is “bad for business” or “political correctness” run amok.
To be sure, not everything in the labor arena moved backwards in the 2017–2021 period. Late in Trump’s term and into the pandemic, some bipartisan support emerged for measures like criminal justice reform (the First Step Act in 2018) which, while modest, acknowledged the over-incarceration problem. And despite federal inaction on minimum wage, many states (including some conservative ones) raised their wage floors via ballot initiatives – a sign that popular pressure for fairness transcended partisanship to a degree. But at the federal level, the Department of Labor under Trump was largely viewed as siding with employers. It’s telling that one of Trump’s appointed Labor Secretaries was Eugene Scalia (son of the late Justice Scalia), a lawyer known for representing corporate interests against labor regulations. The fox was, in many ways, guarding the henhouse.
In the final analysis, Trump-era labor policies reasserted an age-old idea: that labor is a cost to be controlled, not people to be protected. This idea has always had racial dimensions in America. It’s the notion that those at the bottom (historically Black slaves or Chinese railroad workers or Mexican farmhands, today often immigrants and people of color in service jobs) are to be squeezed for productivity at the lowest price, and that the law should facilitate this, not impede it. While the justifications change – “competitiveness,” “flexibility,” “states’ rights,” etc. – the outcome remains: increased vulnerability for the most vulnerable workers.
© 2025 Michael Smith | ReflectiveMVS.com • Please cite and share responsibly.
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