Trump’s Anti-Union Offensive and How We Stop It
Alarmism only helps the bosses
Donald Trump is trying to shock and awe the workers’ movement (and everyone else) into submission. On the labor rights front, this took the form of a late Monday night firing of pro-union National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials, including General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and board member Gwynne Wilcox. The latter move is illegal, since Wilcox’s congressionally mandated term does not end until August 2028. And it leaves the five-person national board without a quorum and therefore unable to do its work nationally. (Local NLRB work, however, can still continue in the meantime, which means that workers should not yet throw in the towel on filing for board-sanctioned union elections — more on this below).
It’s unclear what Trump’s next steps will be. Perhaps he intends to leave a seat vacant in order to hobble the board for the next four years. But for employers, such an approach would have the downside of leaving all of the Biden board’s pro-union decisions on the books.
Maybe the new administration just wants to temporarily deprive labor of a board majority until congressional Republicans confirm pro-business nominees. Some have speculated that firing Wilcox is an attempt to fast track Musk and Bezos’s push to get the Supreme Court to rule that the NLRB is unconstitutional.
All we know for sure is that, contrary to some union leaders and pundits’ ill-founded hopes, Trump is not taking a more pro-union approach than prior Republican administrations. To the contrary, his moves so far suggest a desire to flout legal bounds on behalf of his billionaire buddies.
That said, falling into alarmism by overstating the extent to which union rights have suddenly disappeared will only play into the hands of Trump and corporate America. Not only do workers still have the legal right to unionize, but they can also still use the NLRB for its most helpful functions: running union elections and filing Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs) when employers break the law. These tasks are entirely the responsibility of the board’s regional offices and therefore do not depend on quorum nationally.
Without a quorum at the national five-person board, companies will have an easier time refusing to bargain first contracts, since employers could refuse to bargain and appeal ULPs to a paralyzed national body. But the NLRB already had extremely weak contract enforcement powers, even under a pro-union fighter like Jennifer Abruzzo. Well-funded employers have long been able to drag the NLRB’s legal process out for so long and through so many appeals that even if the national board eventually sides with workers, oftentimes the union drive collapsed during the ensuing wait.
For that reason, workers generally win first contracts through their independent power and community support, not through NLRB legal orders. It's good (and still feasible) to lean on the law where possible, but workers’ power has always primarily come from organizing, solidarity, and disruption.
In the same way that labor organizers need to dispel the widespread perception that workers don’t have any union protections in “right to work” states, we urgently need to counter the idea that workers suddenly have no federally protected organizing rights. The AFL-CIO’s official statement yesterday is not accurate or helpful in its claim that Trump “has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s operations, leaving the workers it defends on their own in the face of union-busting and retaliation.” Rather than call on workers to defeat Trump’s attacks by deepening their workplace organizing both inside and outside the board process, the statement only meekly suggests that the AFL-CIO expects Wilcox to get reinstated via court challenges.
We need a clear sign from union leaders right now that the labor movement is not only prepared to fight back hard against all of Trump’s attacks, but that it is also ready to go on the offensive to win economic dignity for all workers. Labor can’t survive Trumpism by keeping its head down. To the contrary: unions have the opening and responsibility to fill the political vacuum created by the Democratic Party’s disarray. Through large-scale workplace resistance, strikes, and ambitious organizing campaigns, unions can take their rightful place as the best defenders of working people and political democracy.
We need union leaders who can, for example, point to the historic union win of Philadelphia Whole Foods workers on Monday to widely say: “This is the path forward. Don’t despair. Whether you’re in the civil service, an auto plant, a local cafe, or in construction, you have power by collectively banding together with your co-workers — and by joining a movement that understands that an injury to one is an injury to all. It’s time to fight back. And we’re prepared to organize with you every step of the way.”
Faced with Trump’s moves to undermine labor rights, every union drive now becomes a de facto confrontation with the new regime. It’s through scaling up bottom-up workplace battles — by finally tapping labor’s $38 billion war chest in funds — that we can best expose the new administration as a corrupt tool of and for the billionaire class.
Trump is not invincible. Nor have our rights to unionize disappeared overnight. Take a breath, talk to your co-workers, and get in the fight. It’s only just begun.
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I know everything feels overwhelming right now. Hopefully, my new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big can help provide some clarity on the road ahead — and why all is not lost. You can get a 30% off discounted copy by clicking on this link, pressing on the UC Press button under the Buy menu, then including this discount code: UCPSAVE30
Join a national and international study group of We Are the Union (and get a 50% discount). RSVP here for the March 3 launch event with me, Kim Kelly, and Moe Mills.
NYC friends, hope to see you at the book’s in-person launch: Wednesday February 26 at the People’s Forum with Alex Press as well as Amazon and Starbucks worker leaders. RSVP here.
I’ve noticed some growing solidarity sentiments among some of my typically labor-apathetic (read: wealthy) liberal friends in the face of the base evil they perceive in Trumpism. I hope this will help to grow the labor movement and center it in mainstream leftist politics.
Paul Krugman podcast something similar to this. Negative effect to labor of Trumpian administration is just not a exception of Capitalist governing. It sounds like the old cliche.