In Reply to: Mascot madness posted by mh on September 26, 2025 at 10:47:33
For months, the Trump administration has been waging a multi-front war on the working class: ending collective bargaining rights for more than 1 million federal workers, ripping up signed union contracts, muzzling the agency tasked with overseeing private sector bargaining laws, and strangling manufacturing jobs while driving up costs for working families with costly tariffs.
Now Trump and his team are opening a new frontier by attacking minimum wage protections that benefit federal contractors, disabled workers and home care workers.
The first casualty was the minimum wage for federal contractors. In 2021, the Biden administration upped the minimum wage for private-sector workers on federal contracts, giving an estimated 327,300 workers a raise of about $9,256 per year. When the Trump administration assumed office this past January, these workers were earning at least $17.75 per hour — more than twice the current federal minimum wage. However, in March, the Trump administration revoked Biden’s executive order, reducing the allowable minimum wage on federal contracts to $13.30 per hour.
Next, the Trump administration reversed a policy that would have prevented corporations from legally paying disabled workers far less than the minimum wage. Federal minimum wage law allows employers to apply for a certificate, called a Section 14(c) waiver, which allows them to pay some disabled workers an average of $4 an hour in some states, rather than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. As of July 2024, an estimated 38,000 people were earning subminimum wages due to these waivers, which are held by more than 600 employers.