This past Labor Day the Trump administration hung an enormous banner over the front of the Labor Department building with the words, “American Workers First.” With banners like these and other staged events with working people standing behind him in their blue-collar work gear, the Trump administration works overtime to say how much it cares about working people. But their words are directly contradicted by their open attacks on us and our unions.
In late March, Trump directed at least 22 agencies in at least nine branches of the federal government to stop all collective bargaining with unions representing federal workers at those agencies. In late August he directed yet another six government agencies to halt all collective bargaining with unions representing workers at those agencies. In total, about 500,000 workers have had their legal and effective rights to unions stripped of them by the Trump administration and his obedient Supreme Court. Along with losing their collective bargaining rights, these workers have also seen previously agreed upon contracts voided. While in these situations their salaries or benefits may not be undermined, they often lose access to procedures and practices previously guaranteed by those contracts governing such things as work hours, seniority, promotions, vacations and more.
Trump – in collaboration with fellow billionaire capitalist Elon Musk – has also fired, laid off or pushed out close to 300,000 federal workers of all types. Most of these were initiated and carried out by DOGE, the executive branch agency dreamed up by businessmen Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. These jobs ranged from highly qualified expert scientists and researchers to maintenance people and custodians working in government agencies. Even the worst of these were at least dignified jobs, with at least decent pay and a minimum of benefits like health care and pensions. Many of these jobs also disproportionately benefitted Black workers, who in government jobs with basic union protections were less vulnerable to unjust firings and outright discrimination.
Not only has Trump either laid off or pushed out these 300,000 workers and stripped collective bargaining rights from 500,000, he is also actively undermining the only federal government body with any ability to stop business attacks on workers. He pushed out the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which left the U.S.’s most important mediating body without a quorum and three open seats, temporarily halting any minimal ability to protect workers from corporations’ anti-union, anti-worker tactics. Now, after no action for months because of three vacant seats, Trump has appointed two unapologetically pro-business members and is trying to add a third. In this case the NLRB – already limited in its ability to protect workers and unions from the harmful practices of employers – will stand solidly on the side of the bosses.
Trump has also initiated policies that have led directly to private sector workers losing their jobs and even basic protections. He has stopped in their tracks many renewable energy projects that collectively employed tens of thousands of construction workers. He has stopped funding for billions in public works and public transit projects employing tens of thousands more. He has killed a previous proposal to pay disabled workers at least $7.25 an hour. He’s stopped enforcement of regulations intended to protect coal miners both in the mines and protect them from lung diseases. He’s slashed staffing at the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) by 12%. He’s also limiting the regulations that OSHA will actually enforce, putting in jeopardy even basic safety procedures and requirements that protect workers lives and health and dangerous job sites. He’s even pushing to end minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home health care and domestic workers! We could go on.
Obviously, the so-called leaders of our unions also share the blame for union decline with Trump and the big businesses and politicians who have carried out these attacks. Leaders of many unions have continued to receive their paychecks as their unions degenerate and have done nothing to halt their decline. For decades, rather than conduct rank-and-file political-education and mobilize memberships for the struggles we face, these bureaucrats have leaned on Democratic politicians and insider negotiating to manage the cuts. Rather than build connections with the larger working class of which they are a part, they have allowed their unions to remain isolated from the struggles faced by the millions of workers not in unions. At this moment and under these conditions it is obviously a huge challenge to reorient and reinvigorate our unions to do these things. But a large part of the reason that Trump is getting away with these attacks is because for the most part, federal workers and their unions are not even attempting to fight back. Some union leaders, like Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brian, are actually sucking up to Trump rather than organizing their members to struggle against him. These union bureaucrats and the stagnant, top-down unions they have nurtured are now almost totally unable to stand up to the attacks.
We should be clear: in a class-based, capitalist economic system, this is just what union bureaucrats do, and of course no government is ever worker-friendly. Capitalist governments manage society to ensure profits for the capitalist class that dominates. At best, and only when under intense pressure from workers organizing and demanding more, capitalist governments will occasionally give workers a few concessions just to quiet us down. More often, politicians do what the capitalists want and allow them to exploit us more harshly or more efficiently.
In the decades prior to the Trump presidency, it was Ronald Reagan’s firing of more than 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 had been the most aggressive and direct attack on workers by a government. That attack was conducted after unions had already been in decline for almost 30 years, both in membership numbers and in strength. But the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a brief upsurge in union organizing, particularly among public sector workers like government employees and education workers. In response to this newfound drive for union rights among some sections of the working-class, Reagan’s crushing of the air traffic controller strike signaled to businesses that they could go after workers and their unions directly and that the government would back them up. Bill Clinton also attacked workers and the poor through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), his 1994 crime bill, and his 1996 welfare reform bill. All of these did tremendous damage to the working class, although not by directly attacking our unions and firing us. His many anti-worker laws led to the continued loss of union rights and the continued undermining those unions that did still exist.
The Trump administration is now going far further than the Reagan or Clinton administrations. Trump is openly and directly attacking the very working people he says he cares about. Already, only nine months into his presidency, he probably deserves the label of the most anti-worker president in U.S. history.
But this shouldn’t surprise us. Trump, Musk and the many capitalist billionaires in Trump’s cabinet have all accumulated their wealth and power by skimming value off the backs of their workers. They have hired and fired people for decades in their endless pursuit of profit for themselves and their corporations. They have never, not for one second, cared about us or our needs. We are simply labor inputs who they pay well when it benefits them to do so, and who they attack or fire when they see more advantage in doing that. They are the bosses, and they love using us and then dismissing us as soon as we try to stand up for ourselves or we’re no longer contributing to their profits.
No working people should be confused. Trump is not our friend. In fact, quite the opposite.
