Stopped Funding of Social Security
Under the guise of pandemic relief, President Trump signed an executive order suspending funding for Social Security. Specifically, the executive order allows employers to defer withholding and paying the 6.2% employee share of the Social Security payroll tax for workers making less than $2,000 per week. This poorly targeted tax deferral increases the disposable income of higher earners more and does nothing for unemployed workers. Only Congress has the authority to cut taxes—meaning affected workers may owe double taxes next year under the executive order. President Trump has said that he would like to permanently end payroll contributions to Social Security, but he has not offered a realistic plan to replace the lost revenue. Meanwhile, the Senate Republican leadership has tried to attach to a pandemic relief bill a fast-track, closed-door process that would make it easier to cut Social Security benefits.
It Dismantled Fiduciary Protection For Retirement Savers
The Trump Department of Labor (DOL) scrapped an Obama administration rule preventing conflicts of interest in investment advice offered to retirement savers, proposing to replace it with a misleading “best interest” standard based on vague and unenforceable language in an SEC rule. At the same time, the Trump administration reinstated a narrow definition of investment advice covered under a fiduciary standard that excludes most of the harmful “advice” offered to small savers. Dismantling fiduciary protections allows brokers and other salespeople to offer what appears to be expert advice while steering savers to higher-cost and lower-quality investments.
The Trump administration sided with Congressional Republican allies in attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2017, asked the Supreme Court to rule the ACA unconstitutional in its entirety on a wafer-thin legal justification, and weakened the ACA greatly as part of the 2017 tax cut for corporations. Finally, even in the face of millions of workers losing their employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) due to the COVID-19 economic shock, the Trump administration not only persisted in its efforts to repeal the ACA (through its request to Supreme Court), but also did nothing to make it easier for workers who had lost ESI to slide into coverage under the ACA marketplace exchanges, even though an administrative fix was easily available at the time.
The centerpiece of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is workers’ right to engage in “protected concerted activity”—for example, to protest, strike, or organize a union—to improve their working conditions. In a series of decisions and actions, the Trump National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has systematically narrowed its interpretation of what counts as protected concerted activity, leaving workers unprotected against employer retaliation when they protest or strike over safety conditions (for example, insufficient protections from COVID-19), employer rules on tipping, and other issues.
These are just a few ways Trump has attacked the American workers. There are plenty more examples using this link.
https://www.epi.org/publication/50-reasons/
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