Trump’s war on workers meets mass resistance

It hits the streets this weekend

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

First, I’ve held off on saying anything because we’re a nation in crisis, but I can’t hold it in any longer: Liverpool Football Club are Premier League Champions once again.

Man, that feels good to say.

Now, in other news: Today is May Day, aka International Workers’ Day, a grimly forgotten holiday given new cultural relevance by activists staging anti-Trump protests and demonstrations. If you’re like me and had work during the public events that took place around the country today, there’s good news: Americans will take to the streets once again on Saturday to voice their outrage and pledge opposition.

If you did get a chance to hit the streets today, please share photos and video and descriptions in our chat!

Note: Unlike many journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write.

Subscription support means that I can publish scoops on national security failures and host live streams on breaking election news. It’s why I can highlight grassroots activists doing work that few are covering. And how I can speak truth to power.

You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!

Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: John, Marian, Kevin, Alan, Valerie, Ann, Elizabeth, Ellen, James, and Suzanne!

---

---

Trump’s War on Workers Meets Mass Resistance

International Workers’ Day evolved out of the Haymarket affair, the chaotic and deadly conclusion to a labor demonstration in Chicago that took place in early May of 1886. A peaceful rally, a follow-up to a nationwide general strike that called for an eight-hour workday, went awry when a stick of dynamite was thrown at the police officers who were trying to disperse the assembled workers. The cops, including Pinkertons, opened fire on the crowd, leading to a bloody exchange with armed workers.

Seven officers and four workers died that day, after which anti-union newspapers helped rally the public against unions; the backlash was a big setback for the movement. But the unearned animosity — workers didn’t throw the explosive — paired with prosecutors’ rush to blame and convict a handful of innocent anarchists (most were later pardoned), also stirred up solidarity among unionists, and imbued the May 1st general strike with a deeper meaning.

If this story is new to you, it’s because International Workers’ Day is exactly that: despite its origins, the holiday isn’t officially recognized in the US. While there is an American version of Labor Day, it isn’t imbued with meaning; some labor groups had already started celebrating workers at the beginning of September because the date was convenient, and President Grover Cleveland decided that it’d be better to embrace that instead of a day linked to socialists, anarchists, and a real conflict.

It would take another 50 years for the American labor movement to command formal recognition from the government and build the power to shut down the world’s biggest corporation. Now, 90 years after the UAW’s sit down strike tamed GM, workers rights are facing one existential threat after another from a hostile government and emboldened corporations.

Even if this country doesn’t formally celebrate International Workers’ Day, it’s a good time to take stock of where these battles — among many — stands.

Action continues, at the workplace and in the statehouses

While they’re now operating without a safety net, having lost the comfort of an aggressively pro-worker NLRB general counsel and labor board quorum (more on that later), unions are still organizing wherever possible and hitting the streets whenever necessary.

The private sector has also seen some big moves of late, though every fight is fraught with more peril than usual.

The UAW continues to be bold when necessary, and today, it announced that its workers at two Lockheed Martin plants had rejected a final contract offer from the weapons maker and elected to hit the picket lines.

Over 900 employees between Colorado and Orlando refused to accept a $15-an-hour starting rate and a progression that would take most of them more than 20 years to reach the top of the pay scale. It was particularly insulting coming from a company that made $24 billion over the past three years and is poised to do even better under the Trump administration.

Any delays to the assembly line could be especially costly now that international production and shipping have been so scrambled under Trump’s tariffs, which already threaten weapons makers.

New organizing continues, as well, especially in non-traditional fields where it took off during the post-Covid rearranging of society. Doctors and scientists have been among the most prodigious new union members, and this week, more than 1600 postdoctoral medical researchers at Johns Hopkins declared their intention to form a bargaining unit.

The next day, over 1500 postdocs and research assistants at the University of Pennsylvania filed to unionize, as well. Both are with the UAW, which has turned to higher education to help grow its numbers in recent years. It’s had interesting impact on the union’s politics — would it be so adamantly against the Israeli genocide in Gaza otherwise? — while fostering a cross-industry and class solidarity that simply did not exist in the past.

More than 55,000 public employees in Los Angeles County just wrapped up a successful two-day strike that brought services and other government functions to a screeching halt.

SEIU 721, an amalgamation of seven different unions that represent everyone from social workers to park operations, accused the county of bargaining in bad faith and offering 0% raises after those workers toiled day and night in the toxic air following the massive wildfires in the region this past winter. LA County is suffering from serious financial strain, but workers questioned some of its spending, including the $205 million its board of supervisors is putting toward a new skyscraper office.

They re-entered negotiations on Tuesday night, though a contract has yet to emerge from the talks.

The ability to negotiate at all is a North Star for public workers in Utah, who have moved one big step closer to regaining their rights to collectively bargain.

Election officials in Utah this week confirmed that organizers have submitted more than enough valid petitions to qualify a ballot referendum that would repeal the state’s new prohibition on public unions’ ability to negotiate on behalf of members.

Utah has some of the most onerous referendum requirements in the country, and it took a coalition of teachers, police officers, firefighters, municipal workers, and private sector unions to collect the necessary signatures. Now opponents of the proposal have 45 days to try to convince petition signers to rescind their support.

Meanwhile, unions and workers’ advocates are also pushing for positive legislative outcomes in several states.

As I’ve covered extensively, negotiations continue in the “Labor Peace Act” repeal saga in Colorado, while a new fight is starting to heat up in New York.

With the state’s budget now complete (a full month late), attention is turning to outstanding bills that lawmakers still have the will to usher forward. Advocates are beginning a push to pass the EmPIRE Worker Protection Act, which would allow workers in New York to initiate public lawsuits against employers over instances of wage theft.

The idea is that with wage theft increasingly rampant and enforcers increasingly stretched thin, workers and unions could start civil regulatory action against employers in the stead of government officials. It doesn’t guarantee that they’d win anything, and public officials could take over at any time, but it’d allow for a jumpstart to what are often dormant cases that beget more theft.

In New York City, the Department of Buildings is launching a new initiative to identify the riskiest construction sites in the city and force them to get up to code. There are only 500 inspectors watching over 40,000 buildings under construction in the city, which can lead to terrible accidents — there were 482 job site injuries reported in 2024 (and many are not reported) and seven worker deaths. There have already been four workers killed on site this year.

Reagan fired air traffic controllers. Trump wants to fire everybody.

It’s hard to keep track of all of Donald Trump’s attacks on both federal workers and working people more generally, so here’s a rundown of the big stuff — because, after all, that’s my job.

Mass firings: The Trump administration fired more than 25,000 federal “probationary” employees in March, a mass bloodletting that was as catastrophic as it was cruel. They were sloppily done, forcing the shut down of national parks and the interruption of critical services, and done under entirely false pretenses, citing poor evaluations for employees that often garnered the highest scores from their bosses.

The phony justifications weren’t just annoying, but instead central to the lawsuit filed by the Association of Federal Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 federal workers. A federal judge in San Francisco reinstated 16,000 of those workers in March, reasoning that they’d been fired illegally by the Office of Personnel Management, but on April 8th, the Supreme Court issued a stay that allowed the firings to go back into effect pending their hearing of the case.

Just where many of those workers stand at the moment depends in large part on the agency where they worked; some began re-hiring workers and giving them tasks to perform, others put them on administrative leave, and still other agencies dragged their feet, waiting for the Supreme Court to bless the firings.

In some cases, the fate of the workers is tied to other litigation. OMB chief and segregation enthusiast Russell Vought has attempted to fire around 1500 employees as part of his plan to shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but just two days ago, an appeals court restored a ruling that had blocked the mass layoff.

Sources tell me that the CFPB has largely been stripped to the bone, and workers who do remain there have had little to actually do. Whether courts will intervene to restore its mission is a very different proposition.

Collective Bargaining Agreement: Like Goldfinger or some other nefarious Bond villain, this administration just cannot help but openly give away its evil plans before it can actually execute and get away with them.

In this case, Trump's executive order purporting to reclassify most federal employees and strip them of their collective bargaining rights just straight up said that he was punishing unions who did not want to cooperate with his directives. Once again, the AFGE made the administration’s statement a big part of its lawsuit, arguing that reclassifying hundreds of thousands of federal workers as critical to national security was politically motivated.

Pulling the national security card was really the only hope the administration had of cutting off collective bargaining agreements, or contracts with unions, but it was never believable. Nurses at the Veterans Administration, materials handlers at the Bureau of Prisons, disease scientists at the CDC — none of them have anything to do with protecting the United States from terrorists or foreign aggressors.

But they played that card because unilaterally ending collective bargaining agreements is the holy grail for employers, and it signaled to private enterprises that it’s game on. Plus, from the moment the order hit, agencies stopped withholding union dues from employees’ paychecks, and in many cases, that led to the deactivation of their membership.

The local president of the corrections workers union (he works in shop education) told me that membership was cut in half once the deductions ended and workers hesitated to contribute toward an organization that managers said would soon be defunct.

“I think that they wanna send a chilling effect to the rest of the unions,” AFGE president Everett Kelly told me recently. “If they're successful at eliminating dues deductions, grievance procedures, and collective bargain for federal employees, I think that you'll see them coming after other trade unionists next. They're gonna work their way down until there is no trade unionists in this country.”

The executive order was blocked by a judge last week in a decision that impacted 37 different agencies, but that’s not the end of the line for this attempt, either.

Wiping out the regulators: These firings were obviously political, and often-times targeted.

The NLRB, for example, suffered serious losses despite already being underfunded and understaffed, which were pushed by the White House itself. Crippling the labor rights agency has been a key goal of Elon Musk, who previously sued in a long shot effort to have the agency itself ruled unconstitutional.

It’s gotten less attention, but RFK Jr. has also all but fully wiped out the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the agency that does the research on the physical and health risks that form the basis of safety regulations. With 93% of NIOSH now out of work, workplaces are in danger of becoming something akin to The Jungle again.

When I interviewed former NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo last month, we largely spoke about her work overturning bad legal precedents and restoring various worker protections from the National Labor Relations Act. She produced an incredible string of accomplishments, but did express regret that she had been unable to get the board to move on a new interpretation of the duty to bargain in good faith.

perfectunion

A post shared by @perfectunion

Right now, employers can essentially indefinitely delay bargaining a contract because there are no real financial or other penalties for doing so. Getting a bargaining order can take years, and it’s all but useless unless you’ve got a huge unit willing to strike. Abruzzo wanted to add teeth to the bargaining order, as she explained to me:

Employers have no incentive to bargain in good faith at the time that their workers chose union representation because they gain from the delay. They don't have to pay higher negotiated wages and benefits because they're not bargaining and they get to undermine union support. Because the workers are like, “we got certified three years ago, what are you doing for us?”

So what I had wanted the board to do was to remedy by requiring the employer who fails to bargain in good faith at the time to provide their workers with the gains they should have made. So [the labor board] would make up for workers’ lost gains by taking high road collective bargaining agreements in the same geographic area, with same sort of class worker classifications, and not imposing the contract, but just saying, this is what your workers would have gotten, or close to it, [and forcing them to compensate the workers].

It takes a long time to unwind a precedent, so this could have been in effect for the next few years — and even longer had Democrats bothered to re-confirm the chair of the NLRB before Republicans took over.

---

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!