Black Workers Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine During Trump 2.0

Nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump infamously asked Black voters in his pitch to garner their support: “What do you have to lose?”

The Federal Reserve answered Trump’s question in its recent Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households report for 2025: Black Americans lost more financially than every other racial group. According to the report, 60 percent of Black Americans expressed that their financial well-being declined, down 5 percent from 2024. In contrast, 79 percent of white Americans said they were “doing okay” last year.

Black job losses in 2025 underscore the Fed’s reporting. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Valerie Wilson, the Black unemployment rate rose 1.2 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same time last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also recently reported that the Black unemployment rate, which is typically higher than the national average, rose to 7.3 percent, making the rate as high as it was the pandemic in 2021. As I’ve previously noted, Black women endured sudden and staggering job loss as more than 300,000 were let go in the first few months of 2025.

Black American workers have experienced job losses across labor sectors during the first year of the new Trump administration. Its targeting of federal workers using the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as an economic battering ram disproportionately hit Black Americans hard. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more Black Americans came to view the federal government as a reliable employer that ensured some degree of economic mobility for a racial group increasingly marginalized by the growing “post-industrial” private sector economy. At the end of 2024, Black Americans comprised nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce. Now, with DOGE cuts and this administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and affirmative action programs for contractors, the prospects of Black employment in the federal government appear bleak as ever.

Weaknesses in manufacturing during Trump’s second term hurt Black laborers, who comprise nearly 11 percent of that industry’s workforce. Despite the president’s promises to grow manufacturing jobs in the U.S., that sector shed more than 70,000 jobs between April 2025 and January 2026, surely negatively impacting the industrial Black working class.

Tariffs and energy shocks from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran are broadly hurting American agriculture. The war is driving up the price of fertilizer and diesel as farmers are experiencing drought. However, Black agriculturalists in particular are experiencing significant strain: In addition to dealing with the rising costs of fuel and fertilizer, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other farmers of color who need help from federal assistance programs are being hindered by the Department of Agriculture’s choice to eliminate anti-discrimination protections. The agency’s cancellation of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program is one example of how this administration’s backlash against any hint of racial justice leaves workers of color vulnerable to ongoing trade and military wars. Again, the Trump administration is enacting economic policies that disproportionately hurt Black Americans in the name of “colorblindness” and “meritocracy.” It is more Jim Crow.

The economic devastation comes as Black Americans are experiencing a rollback in political rights not seen since the end of Reconstruction. And, as the history of racial violence and the implementation of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. illustrates, the theft of Black Americans’ jobs, wages, and property is linked to political disenfranchisement. When Black Americans joined with whites to elect a “fusion government” in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, white people there waged a white supremacist campaign to delegitimize that election, culminating in what many have called a coup d’état. Black Wilmingtonians not only lost out on governing, but many whites drove Black folks out of their communities and their jobs. Nearly two years after white supremacists took control over Wilmington’s government, they passed Jim Crow laws.

Of course, Black Americans are not the only ones experiencing economic loss in Trump’s second administration. Everyone is paying the price in high gas and energy due to the war on Iran and the tech sector’s efforts to build resource-sucking data centers in places like Memphis and rural Utah; rising inflation is cutting more into workers’ pay; and workers continue to pay more for groceries, vehicles, and housing. Most Americans are living in an economic crisis as the wealthy continue to profit from the oil shocks, AI boom, and war. All this political and economic turmoil presents us with organizing opportunities.

This is why we must support unionizing all workers, including undocumented laborers, and engage in other collective actions to protect and expand labor rights. Workers’ organizations and unions like the Federal Unionists Network, formed in the wake of DOGE cuts, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists also called for a national day of protest akin to the 1981 Solidarity Day mobilization in Washington, D.C. Their calls materialized in the “May Day Strong” coalitional effort to oppose the war, inflation, and economic inequality as thousands of workers and students stayed home from work and walked out of school to participate in nearly 3,500 May Day rallies. Ultimately, more of us will need to continue to participate in more of these protests and consider using them to build toward organizing a general strike.

Black Americans are the canaries in the coal mine. Black workers are usually the first to experience economic downturns and tend to endure the worst outcomes due to structural racism, lack of wealth, and disproportionate under- and unemployment. While we need to continue to build multiracial coalitions to protect and grow unions, to ensure jobs and wages, and to maintain and grow social programs, we need to pay attention to the economic prospects of Americans disproportionately at the bottom. That way, more Americans might prepare themselves to endure economic turbulence and we can better position ourselves to collectively fight back against the 1 percent.