Proper evaluation should ignore the speculation and media circus that surrounds President-elect Trump and instead focus on policy actions and measures of economic well-being. Here are six key things to look at when judging whether Trump delivers for the working class.
Does Trump repeal key Biden pro-worker executive actions?
The Biden-Harris administration issued numerous executive orders and administrative rules to support noncollege workers, including efforts to make overtime more readily available, reduce misclassification of employees, encourage project labor agreements, ban noncompete clauses, and make it easier to unionize. Indeed, the Biden administration took more than 70 actions to support unions, in addition to all the decisions and rules made by his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that made it easier to unionize, which helped lead to increased win rates in union elections. The Biden administration also pursued numerous efforts to ensure that government spending—especially spending through industrial policy legislation such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act—supports good jobs for noncollege workers. Project 2025—a far-right authoritarian playbook for a conservative administration—advocates for repeal of most of President Joe Biden’s pro-worker executive actions. Will President-elect Trump repeal or undermine these executive actions?
Do new executive actions benefit workers or corporations?
The Trump administration will also have the opportunity to issue new executive orders and rules that could benefit or harm the working class. Project 2025 contains proposals for administrative actions that would hurt noncollege workers, such as reducing overtime eligibility, weakening prevailing wage standards, undermining the registered apprenticeship system, and making it more difficult for federal and private sector workers to unionize. In contrast, Project 2025 contains only a handful of executive actions that could benefit the working class, such as promoting NLRB actions to more rapidly reinstate workers illegally fired for organizing activities. Which type of actions will prevail in the incoming administration?
President-elect Trump has promised to use administrative actions to impose significant tariffs, but there is a chance these tariffs are implemented in ways that harm American workers. Will these tariffs be part of a targeted strategy to encourage high-quality domestic jobs in key sectors, or will tariffs—and the reactions of trading partners to them—undermine workers in the short and long term because they are focused on achieving other goals, such as raising revenue?
Will legislation benefit noncollege workers?
For at least the next two years, President-elect Trump’s party will control both houses of Congress, creating a major opportunity to pursue his legislative agenda. Though Trump has given little indication of his plans for legislating on workplace issues, if he wants to pass laws that directly benefit the working class, he could, for example, support a minimum wage increase or even labor law reform such as the PRO Act or the draft proposal announced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). Alternatively, promoting right-to-work legislation, which Trump has previously supported, would harm workers, as would repealing laws such as the Davis-Bacon standards in the Inflation Reduction Act. Which direction—if any—will the Trump administration take on worker legislation?
On the policies Trump has made clear that he will legislate—taxes and immigration—will the policies be more favorable to workers or to corporations? What share of tax cuts will go to workers without a college degree? Will it be more, or less, than corporations and high-income earners receive? Research is mixed on whether restricting immigration is helpful to native workers, but it is clear that weak rules for guestworkers undermine wage standards. Will immigration reforms fix the problem of low pay for guest workers? Will tax and immigration bills be the only major legislation and come at the expense of policy that is clearly pro-worker, such as labor law reform?
Will judges have a pro-worker record?
While nominees for cabinet agencies and other administrative positions can have influence, judges are uniquely powerful, and their decisions can have long-lasting legacies. Judicial nominees during President Trump’s first term—including those to the U.S. Supreme Court—issued many anti-worker and anti-labor decisions. A Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden-Harris administration rule that would have made an additional 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay; the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Janus v. AFSCME effectively made the entire public sector right to work; and the Supreme Court has overturned decisions and made independent rulemaking more difficult at the NLRB. Will President Trump’s second-term judicial nominees have a record of supporting corporations or workers?
Does union membership and collective bargaining coverage for workers without a college degree increase as a share of the workforce?
Unions have many positive benefits for workers, including higher wages, better benefits, increased job stability, greater wealth, and improved mobility for their children—and these benefits tend to accrue even more heavily to workers without a college degree. Unsurprisingly, a large majority of workers without college degrees support unions.
Union membership and collective bargaining coverage have declined for several decades; today, just 9 percent of noncollege workers are members of unions, a lower percentage than for workers with a college degree. In spite of the downward trend, several presidents have seen increases in membership over a single year, but it would be a significant accomplishment if President-elect Trump could help support an increase in membership and coverage as a share of the workforce over his four years in office, and a truly remarkable achievement if he could help increase membership and coverage to the levels they were at in 1980.
Do real wages for noncollege workers increase faster than productivity over Trump’s final four years in office?
Real wages—wages adjusted for inflation—for noncollege workers have on average grown more slowly than productivity over the past four decades. (see Figure 1) This has meant that noncollege workers have received a smaller share of the gains they help create, and their wages have stagnated while the wealthy have received most of the benefits of economic growth.
There have been just a handful of single years in the past four decades where wages grew faster than productivity, so if President-elect Trump can boost the wages of noncollege workers above the rate of productivity gains for his entire second term, he would have accomplished something special.
Conclusion
By any objective measure, the working class has struggled for decades. President-elect Trump has an opportunity to implement legislation and administrative policies that could help protect workers, build unions, and create quality jobs that lead to better real wages for workers without college degrees. His overtures to the working class must be assessed on these policies and whether he actually delivers meaningful raises and stronger unions. The working class should demand that he back up his rhetoric with real action.