Trump hasn’t killed the American worker yet

Assessing this perilous moment

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

I’ve been under the weather for the past bunch of days, during which time I’ve also been assembling a significant assortment of headlines, analysis, and reporting. Today’s newsletter is focused on labor and includes various notes from conversations with sources and tidbits from original reporting. Tomorrow, I’ll follow with election and policy news. And then this weekend, I’ll have another interview. I’m also working on more candidate interviews, as those seem to be helpful to folks.

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Trump hasn’t killed the American worker yet

Organized labor, at its most robust and expansive, is about liberation, collective power, and political change. Needless to say, there has been little good news on any of those fronts this year, and narrowing the scope to the nuts and bolts of union organizing and collective bargaining doesn’t produce much rosier of a picture.

That said, a realistic assessment of the situation is always the first step toward finding a solution, and there are also enough green shoots of potential to offer real hope for the future.

Trump’s war on workers

For all the frustrating narratives around the last election, there was none more outrageous or damaging than the notion that Donald Trump’s GOP would ever be an ally to labor unions or working people. A media that manufactures its own reality could simply not tell the difference between cultural affinity and economic interest, even as conservative leaders spoke outlined very specific plans to break the back of organized labor in Project 2025.

I reported on those plans with appropriate alarm back in July 2024, and just over a year later, the Trump administration has methodically worked through its anti-worker to-do list, with devastating impacts. So far, the White House and the agencies it controls (legally or otherwise) have done the following:

• Under the aegis of several flimsy executive orders, Trump has stripped one million unionized federal workers of their collective bargaining rights, which unilaterally canceled their contracts and ended workplace protections. In doing so, he also encouraged state and local governments to do the same thing, putting up to 7% of the US workforce in danger of losing its rights.

• He also fired 200,000 federal workers, with support from an unsigned Supreme Court order.

• Aiming to hobble the unionization process once again, Trump ended the quorum on the NLRB and appointed an anti-union general counsel who has begun reversing the legal protections won by workers and organizers over the past few years.

• His hand-picked judges on the Fifth Circuit also ruled that the structure of the NLRB likely violates the constitution, directly defying a century of precedent in a transparent gift to corporations like SpaceX, which want to squash union organizing for good.

• Trump’s Department of Labor has moved to roll back dozens of pro-worker rules passed under the Biden administration, including a rule that raised the minimum wage for home health and childcare workers and ended the sub-minimum wage for disabled workers.

• The Trump DOL also ended minimum wage for federal contractors, which had been set at $17.75 an hour.

These losses have been compounded by the fact that the rules that do remain in place are all but unenforceable, a product of the mass firings within the federal agencies and regulators that oversee worker safety.

In fact, the Trump administration is so dedicated to the total violation of workers’ freedoms that it recently issued a memo warning states not to try to fill the regulatory void with their own legal protection infrastructure.

(This one is at least a little bit personally thrilling, in that I produced a report on all the things that states could do to fill those voids last winter, which got passed around by legislators nationwide.)

The Biden administration made an historic effort to promote unionization, but even putting its thumb on the scale was not enough to reverse what has been an ongoing decline in national union density. That being said, the public support for unions that surged in the throes of the pandemic remains at record heights; there are certain classes of workers who maintain the militancy that they rediscovered during the early 2020s, and others who have been radicalized by the new assaults on their rights.

At the nexus of those two categories are the National Parks Service workers who have been quietly organizing since February, when the Trump administration began the mass firing of federal employees. Last week, workers at Yosemite and Sequoia Kings Canyon National Parks voted overwhelmingly to unionize, with 97% of the more than 600 employees choosing to join the NFFE in the fact of pervasive intimidation and ongoing dismantling of workers’ rights. I broke the story last week, then followed up with this video that dove into the how and why of the campaign:

There are organizing campaigns ongoing at about 100 other national parks, monuments, and related federal lands at the moment, and it’s likely that some of the most iconic ones, such as Grand Canyon and Glacier, could come forward and file for elections later this fall.

On the private sector ledger, the new conservative NLRB appointees and the uncertainty around the agency’s future has led to a slowdown in election filings and fights over unfair labor practices. Still, some unions have pushed forward with organizing and direct actions, undeterred by legal risks and driven by the opportunities presented by a populist moment.

The UAW in particular continues to pursue a newfound militancy, with positive results thus far: organizing workers have tentatively won an historic election at EV battery manufacturer BlueOval SK, a joint venture between Ford and a South Korean conglomerate. Several dozen contested ballots will decide the outcome of this election, but the union has expressed confidence that it will come out on top at the Kentucky facility.

Shawn Fain is also overseeing the ongoing strike at GE Aerospace in the Cincinnati area, a work stoppage that just reached a week and has shown no signs of folding. The workers at one of the striking facilities produce jet engines for major military contractors, while workers at another facility are in charge of the company’s main distribution hub. There are more than 600 workers on the picket line in a strike that seemingly took the company by surprise; GE was anticipating a last-minute deal, as it has gotten recently with IAM, and it’s now hemorrhaging money over what are relatively small demands. including a few additional days of vacation time and no changes to the employee healthcare plan.

Not that IAM (the International Association of Machinists) is acting like a pushover: the union’s St. Louis local is weeks into a strike against Boeing, which has been virtually shut down by the more than 3400 workers on the picket line.

Nurses around the country have not relented in their strikes on behalf of improved patient safety, taking on huge chains and “nonprofit” hospitals alike with rhetoric that seems pretty unimpeachable. Next week, it’ll be hundreds of nurses and other professionals from 20 Kaiser hospitals will go on strike to protest understaffing and burnout, which puts patients ‘ lives at risk. It’s a real problem, as hospitals have been unable (or unwilling) to staff up again after the pandemic, instead turning to outrageously expensive traveling nurse services and undermanned shifts.

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