Labor Day, Robbed: How Trump Turned the Worker’s Holiday Into a Billionaires’ Bonanza
Eighty-nine thousand factory jobs erased. A trillion dollars redirected upward. Safety inspectors sent home in a record-heat summer. Union rights stripped from a million federal workers. On the holiday built for the American worker, the ledger of Trump’s second term reads like a hostile takeover — and the next two years threaten worse.
Labor Day was born of blood. Congress passed it in 1894, six days after federal troops crushed the Pullman strike and killed more than thirty American workers, as an attempted olive branch to a working class the government had just been asked to shoot. The holiday has always carried a certain uneasy honesty: it exists because working people fought, and often died, to be treated as more than industrial fuel. So when a president spends the run-up to Labor Day 2026 gutting the very agencies that protect workers, stripping bargaining rights from a million federal employees, and signing a tax law that hands the top one percent an average tax cut of nearly $65,000 while raising middle-class taxes by roughly $900, the holiday is not being observed. It is being desecrated.
The AFL-CIO, which represents nearly fifteen million American workers, put it plainly this week. President Liz Shuler used her State of the Unions address to describe the Trump administration as a “government of, by, and for the billionaires,” warning that Republicans have made working people’s lives more expensive and less free. Fred Redmond, the AFL-CIO’s Secretary-Treasurer and a longtime civil rights leader, told TheGrio that Black workers and other workers of color are enduring “the worst attacks in generations.” Paul Ortiz, a labor historian at Cornell, went further, calling this the most anti-worker administration since the Gilded Age. These are not campaign rhetoricians. They are the people whose job it is to measure the damage. They are all saying the same thing.
Below is what the record shows — and what the next two years threaten to bring.
I. Gutting the Watchdogs, One Agency at a Time
The federal agencies that stand between American workers and their employers have not simply been weakened over the past twenty months. They have been dismantled, defunded, and in some cases decapitated. According to the Economic Policy Institute, roughly twenty percent of the Department of Labor’s workforce has been pushed out via buyouts or forced retirements since January 2025, and the administration proposed a further 35 percent cut to the DOL’s budget in its fiscal 2026 request.
The story is worst at the National Labor Relations Board — the agency that adjudicates whether employers can fire workers for organizing. Trump began his second term by firing General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, the most pro-union prosecutor in the Board’s history, and by illegally removing Democratic Board member Gwynne Wilcox, the only Black woman ever to serve on the NLRB. The result: the Board lost its quorum for most of 2025, cases piled up to 591 unresolved matters by January 2026, and 196 staff walked out the door with only seven hires to replace them. Employers who broke labor law, in effect, got a year off.
At OSHA — the agency charged with keeping workers from being maimed or killed on the job — worksite inspections dropped twenty percent in the first six months of the second term. The Biden-era Heat Illness National Emphasis Program, which had driven a thirty-five-fold increase in heat inspections and issued nearly 1,400 hazard alerts, was allowed to lapse on April 8, 2026. In August 2026, as the country baked through another record summer, the Trump OSHA moved to rewrite the proposed federal heat rule business groups had spent two years lobbying to weaken — a rule as basic as requiring water, shade, and rest breaks when the heat index hits 90 degrees.
Then there is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer released a July 2025 jobs report showing only 73,000 new jobs — with 258,000 previously reported jobs revised away — Trump fired her that afternoon, calling the numbers “rigged.” She had been confirmed 86-to-8 by the Senate, including with the vote of then-Senator JD Vance. Her firing was not a personnel decision. It was a warning to every civil servant in every statistical agency: produce inconvenient numbers at your professional peril.
“Black workers and other workers of color are facing the worst attacks in generations from the Trump administration.”
— Fred Redmond, Secretary-Treasurer, AFL-CIO
II. Tariffs and the Blue-Collar Bloodletting
Donald Trump promised, on what he christened “Liberation Day” in April 2025, that his sweeping global tariffs would send jobs and factories “roaring back” into America. What the Bureau of Labor Statistics data actually recorded — before Trump fired the commissioner overseeing that data — was the opposite. The Center for American Progress calculated that from April 2025 to February 2026, the United States lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs, the equivalent of shuttering 2,800 average-size factories. Overall blue-collar employment fell by roughly 190,000 positions in the same period. The libertarian magazine Reason, no organ of the left, ran the numbers under the headline: the data tell a different story.
The tariffs did not simply fail to create jobs. They also raised prices. A Council on Foreign Relations poll in January 2026 found more than sixty-five percent of Americans said tariffs had made everyday goods less affordable. The average household paid an additional $1,700 in tariff-driven costs in the first year of the second term. The steel and aluminum sector — the industries Trump most explicitly claimed to defend — saw imported input prices rise 17 percent, squeezing the very manufacturers he claimed to protect. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, who has long argued that targeted tariffs can be a useful tool, condemned Trump’s chaotic across-the-board approach as an economic wrecking ball rather than a strategy.
The immigration policies have compounded the damage. The Washington Post reported on September 3, 2026 that since Trump took office, the U.S. labor force has shrunk by 1.6 million people — putting Trump on track to become the first president in a century to preside over a smaller labor force at exit than at entry. Employers in construction, agriculture, meatpacking, and elder care are already reporting that they cannot fill positions. The result is not higher American wages. It is farms leaving crops in the fields and construction sites falling behind schedule.
Factory workers who lost jobs between April 2025 and February 2026, according to CAP’s analysis of BLS data. Equivalent to 2,800 shuttered factories.
Fewer federal employees at the start of 2026 than a year earlier, per the Partnership for Public Service. Many were veterans, food inspectors, and safety personnel.
Average annual tax increase in 2026 for middle-income Americans, per the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Meanwhile the top 1% get $1 trillion over a decade.
Growth in U.S. billionaires’ collective fortune in the 16 months after Trump was re-elected, according to Americans For Tax Fairness. Half of it accrued to just 15 people.
Drop in the U.S. labor force since Trump’s inauguration, primarily driven by immigration restrictions, according to a Washington Post analysis. Unprecedented for peacetime.
Additional tariff-driven costs borne by the average U.S. household from February 2025 to January 2026, per the Center for American Progress.
III. The Epstein Class Wins Again
The most revealing single fact of Trump’s second term is not the tariff chaos or the agency purges. It is the arithmetic of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025. According to Americans For Tax Fairness, in the sixteen months after Trump was re-elected, the collective wealth of America’s 974 billionaires grew by $1.96 trillion — a 30.6 percent gain. More than half of that growth accrued to just fifteen people. In the same period, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated, middle-income households will pay an average of $900 more in 2026 taxes than they would have under the prior law, while the top one percent are on track to pay at least a trillion dollars less over the next decade.
The provisions the White House marketed to workers — no tax on tips, no tax on overtime — have proved, on inspection, largely rhetorical. NBC News found that large groups of workers were excluded, including railroad workers and many truck drivers. Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, described the tips and overtime deductions as a temporary bone thrown to workers while the billionaires got their tax cuts made permanent. Sherie Cummings, a casino cocktail waitress and member of that union, had expected a full exemption on the $60,000 in tips she and her husband earned. She got a $25,000 deduction instead. This is a common story.
The moniker that fits this pattern of governance was coined by Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who has used it repeatedly on the Senate floor: the Epstein Class. Speaking of the Trump administration, Ossoff argued this is the “Epstein class” ruling the country — the elites they claim to hate. It is not simply that Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, along with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, appear in the Epstein documents released in 2026. It is the pattern of accountability. When Rep. Ro Khanna went to the House floor in February 2026 to name six wealthy men whose identities had been shielded in the DOJ’s Epstein release, he told PBS NewsHour that Trump’s FBI had scraped survivor statements out of the documents in March. Britain’s monarchy trembled at its Epstein connections. Norway’s prospective queen fell under formal investigation. In the United States, the powerful men closest to Epstein sit in the Cabinet Room.
The Epstein files are not a distraction from the labor story. They are the labor story. A political order that protects the richest men in America from accountability for trafficking children is the same political order that fires the woman keeping the jobs numbers honest, and that lets an OSHA heat program die on the day thousands of construction and warehouse workers report for another shift at 95 degrees.
“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
— Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), on the Trump administration
IV. A Year in Betrayals: The Timeline
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V. Congress: The Ledger of Courage and Cowardice
Congress has not been silent. The Congressional Labor Caucus, 124 House Democrats strong, published a report cataloguing 25 discrete Trump administration actions it deemed anti-worker within the first hundred days of the second term. Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, re-introduced the Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act, joined by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick as a Republican co-sponsor and by Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Senate. On June 9, 2026, the House passed a labor bill accelerating union contract negotiation timelines by a 230-to-191 vote, with twenty Republicans breaking with leadership.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have jointly demanded answers on the Labor Department’s proposed “unemployment.gov” centralization scheme, which they warn will delay benefits for the very workers being pushed out of their jobs. Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June 2026, a proposal to redistribute a share of the AI companies’ equity to the American public whose data trained them. Rep. Summer Lee of Pittsburgh has spoken repeatedly about the AI-industry investments the White House touts, and about who is getting the jobs and who is losing them.
But the Senate has not passed the PRO Act. It has not passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act to restore federal workers’ bargaining rights. Republican leadership in both chambers has largely allowed — and in the case of the heat rule, actively participated in — the dismantling of the very worker protections that Republican voters, according to every reputable poll, tell pollsters they support. Nearly seventy percent of Americans view unions favorably, including majorities in states Trump won by double digits. Congress’s Republican majorities have chosen the donors over the district.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Rep. Andy Levin, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have kept the record straight through hearings, floor speeches, and letters that will matter to future historians even if they do not shift a single vote today. Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi have called explicitly for the removal of the president under the 25th Amendment — a request the Cabinet has, predictably, ignored.
The Removal Mechanism Written for Exactly This Moment
The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, contains a mechanism its drafters described as the constitutional answer to a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Section 4 authorizes the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet, to declare the president incapacitated. The president may contest the finding, at which point Congress decides.
On April 10, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to White House physician Capt. Sean Barbabella demanding an immediate cognitive evaluation of the president, citing his social-media threat to “extinguish a civilization” and other public conduct that had raised alarm across the political spectrum. Four days later, Raskin introduced H.R. — with 50 Democratic co-sponsors — establishing an independent Commission on Presidential Capacity. On April 30, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed entered a statement into the Congressional Record signed by 36 physicians — neurologists, psychiatrists, and cognitive specialists from Harvard, Tufts, Columbia, and George Washington University — declaring the president “mentally unfit” and urging removal “with the greatest urgency.”
Additional lawmakers who have publicly called for invocation of the 25th Amendment include Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of California, Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, who issued a formal call in April 2026 for Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to act.
The practical barriers are severe and honest analysis requires naming them. Section 4 requires Vice President Vance — Trump’s hand-picked loyalist — and a Cabinet composed of donors, ideologues, and family allies to formally declare their own patron incapacitated. That is not going to happen. If Congress ever received such a declaration, a two-thirds vote of both chambers would be needed to sustain removal against Trump’s objection. Neither chamber is remotely close.
But the practical barriers do not negate the constitutional case. The 25th Amendment exists precisely because the Framers of the modern Constitution understood that a democracy which cannot remove a leader who threatens nuclear extinction on social media, and who spends his Easter mornings unleashing profanity on the internet, is a democracy that has abandoned the concept of self-government. The record must be built — the letters, the physician statements, the floor speeches, the commission bills — so that when history judges this administration, it does not also judge a Congress that failed to name what it saw.
VI. What the Next Two Years Hold
The direction of travel is not a matter of speculation. It is written down. The Trump administration’s 2026 Regulatory Agenda, published in July, promises a final rule in October 2026 to reclassify millions of workers as independent contractors — stripping them of overtime protections, unemployment insurance, and the right to unionize. A separate proposal, scheduled for September, would expand the hours 14- and 15-year-old workers can log, part of a broader push in seventeen states to weaken child labor law. The tip credit against the federal minimum wage is up for a friendly rewrite. The joint employer standard — the rule that determined whether McDonald’s corporate is on the hook when a franchisee steals wages — will be rewritten to favor corporate.
The Medicaid work requirements take effect December 31, 2026, and full 80-hours-a-month verification arrives January 1, 2027. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 7.8 million people will lose Medicaid coverage, part of a larger 11.8 million who will become uninsured over the decade. SNAP work requirements have already expanded, with most recipients required to demonstrate compliance by March 2026. The workers Trump promised to lift up will spend the second half of his term losing their health insurance, their food assistance, and — if they work in extreme heat — the federal protection of a water break.
Meanwhile, the administration’s June 2026 executive order created “Schedule P/C,” converting career federal workers into at-will employees who can be fired for political reasons — a mechanism that, once perfected, will convert the federal workforce into a machine of one-party loyalty. Trump’s NLRB, now with a three-member Republican majority after the confirmation of James Macy in April 2026, will spend 2026 and 2027 methodically overturning the Biden-era decisions in Stericycle and Cemex that made it modestly easier for workers to organize. The next two years are the harvest that follows this year’s sowing.
There is a midterm election in November. There is a presidential election in 2028. In between, there is a labor movement — 15 million strong in the AFL-CIO alone — that has grown its ranks to the highest total in 16 years despite this administration’s hostility. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports rising strain on working families. The Culinary Workers Union, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, the flight attendants, the nurses, the graduate workers, and the Starbucks baristas are still organizing. The story is not yet written.
Editorial Conclusion
Labor Day 2026 finds the American worker robbed — of 89,000 factory jobs, of a functioning safety inspectorate, of the trillion dollars the wealthy took from the tax code, of the union rights a million federal workers held a year ago, of the honest jobs numbers a Senate-confirmed statistician was fired for producing.
This is not a policy disagreement. It is a transfer of power from the many to the few, executed in plain sight, on the holiday built to honor the many. The workers of this country do not owe this president gratitude for a bone thrown at their tips and denial of their overtime. They owe him no more silence.
The Constitution provides mechanisms — impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the ballot — for a republic that has been captured by the class it was meant to constrain. History will remember which lawmakers used them, and which watched. So must voters, in November 2026, and every day between now and the end of Donald Trump’s second term.
Sources & References
- TheGrio Black workers face new challenges as Trump labor policies reshape workplace protections (Sep 4, 2026)
- Washington Post Trump’s immigration policy is killing the labor force (Sep 3, 2026)
- Roll Call At the Races: Labor Day reds and blues (Sep 3, 2026)
- Economic Policy Institute Trump’s attacks on the Department of Labor will hurt wages and working conditions
- American Prospect Trump’s NLRB Doesn’t Want to Investigate Worker Complaints (Apr 15, 2026)
- New Republic How Trump Is Wrecking the Agency That Protects Workers’ Labor Rights (Jun 2026)
- The Week Why are Republicans undoing worker heat protections? (Aug 5, 2026)
- New Republic Trump Quietly Weakened Heat Rules Just in Time for a Broiling Summer (May 28, 2026)
- Ogletree Deakins OSHA’s Heat Program to Expire While Heat Standard Stalls (Jun 10, 2026)
- Center for American Progress Trump’s Tariffs Have Cost the Equivalent of 2,800 Factories Nationwide (Mar 17, 2026)
- Reason On ‘Liberation Day,’ Trump promised a manufacturing boom. The data tell a different story. (Apr 2, 2026)
- TIME Trump’s Year of Government Cuts — and What Lies Ahead (Jan 2026)
- ITEP Year One of Trump-Republican Tax Policy: The Consequences (Apr 15, 2026)
- Americans For Tax Fairness This Tax Day America’s Billionaires Are Growing Even Richer (May 4, 2026)
- NBC News How Trump’s tax law boosts the wealthy and leaves behind some workers he promised to help (May 11, 2026)
- In These Times The Epstein Class Are the Warped Elites They Pretend to Hate (Mar 2, 2026)
- PBS NewsHour Epstein files scrubbed to protect ‘elite, powerful men,’ Rep. Khanna says (Feb 10, 2026)
- House Judiciary Democrats Ranking Member Raskin Demands White House Physician Evaluate Trump’s Cognitive Fitness (Apr 10, 2026)
- The Hill Concerns Grow Over Trump’s Mental Fitness for Presidency (Jun 10, 2026)
- Rep. Krishnamoorthi Krishnamoorthi Calls for President Trump’s Removal Under 25th Amendment (Apr 7, 2026)
- AFL-CIO In First Year of Second Term, Trump Governed for and by Billionaire CEOs (Jan 20, 2026)
- AFL-CIO One Year Since Trump’s Union-Busting Executive Order (Mar 27, 2026)
- Congressional Labor Caucus Democrats Outline Trump’s ‘Anti-Worker’ Policies
- CNN Business Trump fires BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer over jobs numbers (Aug 1, 2025)
- Center for American Progress One Year After ‘Liberation Day,’ American Workers Are Feeling the Negative Effects (Mar 17, 2026)
- SHRM White House Signals Workplace Rule Changes for Rest of 2026 (Jul 14, 2026)
- Deseret News A medical check for the commander-in-chief? Democrats introduce Trump fitness bill (Apr 14, 2026)
- EPI State lawmakers continued to weaken child labor protections in 2026 (Jun 2, 2026)
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