Let’s start with the labor market. It’s shrinking, and it’s weak.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.”)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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