[[link removed]]

TRUMP’S LAWBREAKING ALSO AIMED AT WORKERS  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
January 28, 2025
The American Prospect [[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Neutering the NLRB and targeting janitors, even as his billionaire
backers stomp on workers’ rights _

President Trump has fired the union-friendly General Counsel of the
National Labor Relations Board Jennifer Abruzzo, along with NLRB Board
Member Gwynne Wilcox.,

 

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.

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.

* President Trump; National Labor Relations Board; Firing;
Immigrants;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]