(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Trump and the Labor Movement: How the New Administration Might Target Workers [1]
['Kim Kelly']
Date: 2024-12-23 12:00:00+00:00
I’ll be blunt: None of us know what the hell is going to happen over the next few months, let alone the next four years. The shocking reelection of former president Donald Trump has unleashed a fresh wave of chaos upon our already profoundly broken country, and it’s anyone’s guess what he’s going to do from one moment to the next. One of the few certainties we can expect is that life will soon become more painful for great swaths of the populace — immigrants, trans people, queer people, Muslim people, librarians and teachers, people impacted by poverty or homelessness, anyone who desires the freedom to control their own body, the list goes on. And despite Trump and his party’s insistence that they care about the American working class, guess which other group is due to land directly in their crosshairs? Workers.
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There is a reason so many union leaders worked overtime to rally their members behind the Democratic presidential campaign, and it’s not because they were necessarily enthralled with the candidate on offer; rather, the threat of another Republican administration — let alone a MAGA-fied one — was too terrible to even consider. The labor movement has enjoyed a significant burst of energy and enthusiasm in the past few years, which has resulted in a wave of new organizing in long-unionized industries and newer frontiers like tech, video games, green energy, and graduate education, plus big contract wins, major strikes, and a surge in public approval for unions. As self-aggrandizing as it was, President Joe Biden’s framing of his time in office as the “most pro-labor administration in history” was not entirely inaccurate (the bar, of course, is in hell).
The Biden administration, for all its many faults, made a number of pro-labor moves that had a measurably positive impact on workers’ lives and their ability to organize. For example, appointing labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has had a seismic effect: Under her tenure, the board simplified the process for workers to win union recognition, added protections for immigrant workers, declared college athletes’ right to unionize, smacked down nondisclosure agreements, and banned captive audience meetings (in which anti-union employers force workers to listen to anti-union speeches). The nation’s labor laws remain outdated and exclusionary, but with someone like Abruzzo at the helm, we had a real chance of continuing to make progress. Now, under a Trump regime, the picture looks quite different.
For one thing, the NLRB itself is in very real danger. Trump’s current favorite tech toady, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, has had a long-standing beef with the agency ever since the NLRB dinged him for publicly discouraging Tesla employees from unionizing (though an appeals court has since overturned that decision). Through various lawsuits, the far-right billionaire has been vocal about his opinion that the agency has no right to regulate his companies’ anti-union behavior — or to exist at all.
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