(C) Minnesota Reformer
This story was originally published by Minnesota Reformer and is unaltered.
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Workers in child care, health care and construction — many of them immigrants — fear the worst • Minnesota Reformer [1]
['Casey Hudek', 'Alfreda Daniels Juasemai', 'Chuck Johnson', 'Monique Stumon', 'Kenya Hodges', 'Alexandria Curtis', 'Jada Stumon', 'Aaron Brown', 'More From Author', 'February']
Date: 2025-02-26
We work with labor and community groups, and we’re already hearing from folks on the ground that President Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping attacks on our institutions are already harming working people and their families.
Workers in diverse industries like child care, construction and health care are already feeling the impact.
Both parents and child care centers rely on the Child Care Assistance Program, and about 75% of the funding for that state-federal program comes from the feds. That means Trump’s threatened freeze is destabilizing the already fragile industry. Child care workers are overwhelmingly women, and a disproportionate number are people of color compared to the population as a whole. Community-based child care center directors are small business people, and without them, our workforce and our state could not function.
Organizers and child care workers we’ve talked to described the past few weeks with phrases like, “We’re in panic mode,” and “It feels like we’re being pushed off a cliff.” Expect a wave of child care center closures if Trump and Musk have their way, and chaos in many workplaces as working parents scramble to cope.
The uncertainty about federal spending is also worrying construction workers. Because of the strength of Minnesota’s Building Trades unions, 77,000 Minnesota union construction workers enjoy stable careers and family-supporting wages. But fears of a 90-day pause on Department of Transportation spending, combined with Minnesota’s already short construction season, could delay major construction work by a year or more. Construction workers also fear the threat of a trade war that would increase material costs and stifle building.
Health care workers face a similarly unclear landscape. We spoke with folks in St. Cloud and Albert Lea about the deep fear that they and their clients are sitting with, wondering about the future of Meals on Wheels, Medicaid and other resources many rely on. Following the chaotic brief shutdown of the Medicaid portal in the days after Trump’s inauguration, now Trump has endorsed a U.S. House Republican budget that would cut $880 billion out of Medicaid to finance tax cuts whose major beneficiary would be the wealthy.
In addition to causing immense harm to hospitals, home care, disability services and other health care providers, the cuts could have apocalyptic effects on state budgets. Medicaid is a federal-state partnership. According to a health care union leader we spoke to, there is “no state in the country that could have a functional budget without the federal match program funded through Medicaid.” In Minnesota, 650,000 children are enrolled in Medicaid, or half of the total. Another 125,000 are people with disabilities.
If the Republicans follow through on their cuts, which of those Minnesota children or people with disabilities don’t deserve care?
One commonality among these diverse sectors suffering the threat of federal chainsawing: Immigrant workers. In spite of the workforce shortage in nearly every sector, in spite of the myriad ways immigrants allow communities to thrive, Trump continues to target immigrants and cruelly scapegoat them for merely seeking to attain the American Dream.
Panicked immigrant workers are calling unions, worker centers and other trusted organizations, desperate to know whether it’s safe to go to work or to send their kids to school.
Immigrant workers are disproportionately concentrated in jobs that are already often dangerous and exploitative (see the recent charges against a dairy filed by Attorney General Keith Ellison). Now, immigrant workers in settings like meatpacking plants and fulfillment warehouses, who before had built momentum for tougher safety standards, are hanging back since the election, afraid that standing up for their rights will make them a target.
Which is, of course, the point.
Relatedly, Trump has attacked the right of all workers with his de facto suspension of the National Labor Relations Board. Without a functioning NLRB, workers can take the heroic steps involved in forming a union, but the union can’t become certified as their official representative. Existing unions can’t file unfair labor practice charges when their members are exploited on the job. (No surprise: Musk was already part of a broad legal assault on the NLRB.)
Luckily, our movements have faced billionaires and politicians who care more about corporate profits than working people before. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve never once stopped fighting. The (intentional) chaos of Trump and Musk won’t stop workers from coming together to exercise their power and demand justice.
But in the short term, the oligarchs are trying to rob important tools from our shared toolkit – tools that our forebears in the union movement fought for and won decades ago. It’s up to us to show them the many are much more powerful than the few. While the onslaught has been scary, we also know the strength and resilience of our movements. We are confident that workers of all backgrounds will not only stand together against these attacks, but also be galvanized by this moment to do the longer-term work of building a more just system where all of us can thrive.
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[1] Url:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/02/26/workers-in-child-care-health-care-and-construction-many-of-them-immigrants-fear-the-worst/
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