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**JANUARY 28, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Trump's Most Lawless Action Yet [link removed]
Pausing funds appropriated by Congress is a deliberate taunt to draw a legal challenge that the White House's most radical architects think will give them unilateral spending power. BY DAVID DAYEN
AI Bubble, Meet Pin [link removed]
Open-source software from China calls into question why we're committing trillions to winning the AI race. BY DAVID DAYEN
Dropping the Big One [link removed]
Will some serious pushback set in before Trump blows us and the Constitution to hell? BY ROBERT KUTTNER
Pulled in All Directions [link removed]
Chris Hayes's new book argues that the demand for attention has taken over every facet of our lives. BY RHODA FENG
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Trump's Lawbreaking Also Aimed at Workers
Neutering the NLRB and targeting janitors, even as his billionaire backers stomp on workers' rights
President Trump's current day of running amok, which began with unconstitutionally impounding federal grants and appropriations, as my colleague David Dayen has explained [link removed], has continued with his attacks on American workers. During the past 24 hours, he fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Wilcox was fired illegally, despite Congress having ratified her appointment to a term that extends to 2028, in keeping with Trump's campaign to negate congressionally enacted laws and appointments. Her firing-which Wilcox is contesting in court-also leaves the five-member Board with just two members, even as the Supreme Court has ruled that the Board needs at least three members to issue any rulings, including on illegal firings, union election certification challenges, citations of unfair labor practices, or anything else.
The simultaneous firing of Abruzzo, who's been the most pro-worker federal official since New York Sen. Robert Wagner (who authored both the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act in 1935), means that the Board not only can't rule on any employment issues but also that its local attorneys who investigate employee and employer complaints no longer have a senior counsel who sets their priorities and policy. In Wilcox's and Abruzzo's stead, we're left with a labor law of the jungle, which enables employers to run as roughshod over their workers as their little pocketbooks desire.
Trump's war on immigrants compounds this abuse. Last Friday, ICE agents showed up at a number of downtown San Francisco office buildings after hours, when janitors (members of SEIU Local 87) were engaged in their regular cleaning and maintenance tasks. In almost every major American city, a sizable share of the janitorial workforce is composed of immigrants, so this show of force is sure to compel workers to stop showing up to work and to engender fear among immigrants and their families, both documented and not. It also runs completely counter to virtually every city's efforts to bring workers back to their downtowns, an effort upon which the newly elected, more-centrist-than-his-predecessor mayor of San Francisco has embarked. That mayor, Daniel Lurie, along with the city's district attorney, police chief, county sheriff, and other public officials and community and labor leaders, is holding a press conference as we speak to reaffirm San Francisco's status as a sanctuary city and to make clear its determination to oppose Trump's efforts to instill fear in its residents and disrupt both the city's revitalization and workings of daily life that sustain it.
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By coincidence, the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released its annual report [link removed] on union membership, which showed that the share of America's workers in unions declined from 10.0 percent in 2023 to 9.9 percent in 2024. Despite polls showing that unions' approval rating stands at 70 percent, its highest level in more than half a century and much higher than the approval rating for corporations, and despite polls [link removed] also showing that 60 percent of American workers would join a union if they could, the rate of private-sector unionization, now at 5.9 percent, continues its 70-year slide toward zero.
Not only is Donald Trump determined to accelerate that decline, but his billionaire backers are accelerating it themselves. Elon Musk has declared he's "opposed to the idea of unions," and Amazon, where Jeff Bezos is board chair, just responded to the workers in one Quebec warehouse voting to unionize by having the company order the closure [link removed] of every single warehouse in the province. (I know, that's not in the United States, but it illustrates the depth of Bezos's commitment to retaining autocratic control of his company.) Workers in a Philadelphia Whole Foods market voted overwhelmingly to go union yesterday (Amazon owns Whole Foods), but there's no way Bezos will ever recognize their union and allow them to bargain with the company.
Also yesterday, the Republican-controlled House in the Utah State Legislature voted to strip [link removed] collective-bargaining rights from public-employee unions, over the objection of various teachers union locals, and the police and firefighter unions in Salt Lake City.
A truly awful day for American workers, which should produce pushback not only from the immediately affected workers but from anyone who supports democracy and human dignity.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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