Lawrence Wittner
(10/1)
On June 19, 2019, President Donald
Trump bragged at his re-election kickoff rally in Orlando
that, thanks to his leadership, the wages of American
workers "are rising at the fastest rate in many decades."
The reality, however, is that they
are not. Indeed, wages rose at a faster rate only a few
years before, under his predecessor. And a key reason for
the very limited wage increases since Trump entered the
White House is his administration’s success in blocking
any wage increases for some workers and in reducing wage
increases for others.
In fact, Trump has never been
enthusiastic about increasing the pay of America’s
workers. "Our wages are too high," the billionaire
businessman complained back in November 2015, during his
campaign for the presidency.
Naturally, then, Trump and his
fellow Republicans have blocked any increase in the
federal minimum wage during his time in office. In 2016,
Trump stated his opposition to setting any federal wage
floor and, since then, has never proposed raising it. As a
result of years of Republican resistance in Congress and
the White House, the federal minimum wage has remained
stuck at a poverty level $7.25 an hour for a decade and
has lost much of its purchasing power, making it the
lowest minimum wage throughout the industrialized world.
The minimum wage for waiters and other workers relying on
tips is even lower: $2.13 an hour.
Moreover, the Trump administration
and Republicans in Congress continue to oppose any minimum
wage increase. In early May 2019, Trump’s Secretary of
Labor, Alexander Acosta, testified before two
Congressional committees, declaring: "We do not support a
change in the federal minimum wage at this time." In
response, Senator Patty Murray, alluding to the 10-year
gap since the last increase, asked: "If workers do not
deserve [a raise] at this time, then when do they?" But
Acosta did not answer her question.
In July 2019, the new,
Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed
legislation to phase in an increase in the minimum wage to
$15 an hour, thereby—as the AFL-CIO noted giving "40
million Americans a raise." But only three House
Republicans voted for the measure, while Republican Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that he would
prevent a Senate vote on it. Although, in mid-June, Trump
said he was "looking at" the idea of a $15 an hour minimum
wage, he quickly countered that by stating, falsely, that
he had "already created a minimum wage because wages have
gone up more than . . . in many decades" under his
administration. Since then, nothing about a minimum wage
increase has been heard from the president, and the
Democratic wage raise legislation remains banned from
consideration in the Republican Senate.
Trump has also gone out of his way
to undermine the income of public sector workers. In
August 2018, he announced that he would scrap a scheduled
2.1 percent pay raise, plus locality paycheck adjustments,
for two million federal employees. "Federal agency budgets
cannot sustain such increases," he declared, avoiding any
mention of the fact that he had previously secured a sharp
reduction in federal income through legislation for a $1.5
trillion tax cut that largely benefited the wealthy and
their corporations. In late December 2018, Trump followed
up by issuing an executive order to freeze the pay of
federal workers. But, subsequently, Congress overrode his
action and partially restored the pay increase raising the
pay for federal employees by 1.4 percent (two-thirds of
the scheduled increase), with additional money factored in
for locality pay adjustments.
In the winter of 2018-2019, Trump
attacked the livelihoods of public workers once again,
when his shutdown of the federal government forced 800,000
federal employees to go on unpaid leave or to work without
pay.
One of the factors advancing the
income of American workers, as well as helping to
safeguard them from excessively-long workweeks, is the
provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act that guarantees
them time-and-a-half pay for more than 40 hours of work
per week. But coverage is based upon workers remaining
under a specific income level and, thanks to inflation
over the past few decades, fewer and fewer workers
remained below that level. Recognizing that only seven
percent of American workers were still covered by the law,
the Obama administration raised the income level for
eligibility substantially. But, upon taking office, the
Trump administration severely cut back Obama’s expansion
of eligibility, thereby depriving as many as 8.2 million
workers of the overtime coverage they had previously been
promised.
Despite these actions taken by
Trump and his administration to reduce wage gains, what
economists call real wages (that is, wages and salaries
adjusted for the rising cost of living) have been rising
in part because many states and localities have passed
laws raising their minimum wages far beyond the pathetic
$7.25 level set by the federal government.
But, overall, increases in real
wages during the Trump presidency have remained minuscule.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S.
Department of Labor, the real average weekly earnings for
American workers increased by just 0.2 percent between
June 2017 and June 2018. From June 2018 to June 2019, the
increase in their real average weekly earnings was only
1.2 percent. Consequently, as Senator Bernie Sanders has
stated, correctly, the average American worker earns less
today than he or she did 45 years ago.
Although the pundits say the U.S.
economy is booming and it certainly is for the country’s
billionaires it’s not doing much for the incomes of
American workers. And much of the responsibility for this
situation lies with Republican officeholders, especially
Donald Trump.
Dr. Lawrence
Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany
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