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‘TRUMP AND MUSK ARE SETTING THE EXAMPLE’: HOW COMPANIES ARE
BECOMING EMBOLDENED TO BE MORE ANTI-UNION  
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Steven Greenhouse
April 7, 2025
Guardian
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_ As the White House carries out an anti-worker agenda, labor leaders
fear corporate America could also grow more hostile _

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Donald Trump [[link removed]]’s
aggressive wave of anti-union actions is already spurring some US
employers to take a more hostile stance toward unions, as labor
leaders voice fears that the president’s moves will embolden more
and more companies to fight harder against unions and slow their
recent progress.

Indeed, some worker advocates worry that unions will be walloped
during Trump’s second term the way they were under Ronald Reagan
after he crushed the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike and
inspired many corporations to fight harder against unions. As Trump
and Elon Musk
[[link removed]] carry out their
anti-union agenda in Washington DC, Utah passed a law that prohibits
collective bargaining by public sector workers, and a Michigan company
refused to move forward with a union election.

“If history is any indicator on this – and I think it is – when
you see a president’s administration basically declaring war on
unions, that’s going to certainly embolden private sector
employers,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown
University and author of the definitive book about the disastrous 1981
strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization
(Patco).

Organizers accuse Trump of trying to silence federal workers with
union order
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Labor experts point to several Trump administration actions that show
a huge hostility toward unions, including Trump’s order to end
collective bargaining by 50,000 airport screeners and then a
far-reaching order
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rip up union contracts and prohibit bargaining for over a million
federal employees at more than a dozen agencies, including the state
department, the treasury and health and human services. Trump and Musk
have also fired tens of thousands of federal workers while
disregarding protections in their union contracts. Moreover, Trump
fired Gwynne Wilcox
[[link removed]],
who was the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) acting chair.
Wilcox insists her dismissal was illegal, but on 28 March a federal
appeals court declined to reinstate her
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at least for now.

“What we’re seeing is Patco on steroids,” Sara Nelson, the
president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in an
interview. “This is the president saying even the idea of having a
union contract and having something in black and white to protect
workers and having collective bargaining – he’s saying none of
this should exist.”

Trump’s anti-union and anti-worker actions have been piling up.
He rescinded the $17.75-an-hour minimum wage
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federal contractors must pay their workers. He issued an order
to kill the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
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which seeks to settle potentially disastrous labor disputes. He
nominated a management-side lawyer, Crystal Carey, to be the NLRB’s
general counsel; her law firm represents anti-union employers,
including Amazon, SpaceX and Tesla. Even the Teamsters’ president,
Sean O’Brien, who has sought good relations with Trump, condemned
that appointment
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saying: “Carey has spent her entire professional career backing Big
Business to the detriment of working people … [S]he wants to
decimate labor unions.” (O’Brien did praise
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choice of labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer.)

Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly insulted the nation’s 2 million
federal workers, saying: “Many of them don’t work at all
[[link removed]]. Many of them never
showed up to work.”

Eric Blanc, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said
these actions have “demonstrated that Trump’s rhetoric about being
pro-worker and pro-union was just that: pure rhetoric. This is an
administration that is pushing the limits on how far you can go to
destroy the labor movement and people’s labor standards.”

A bargaining breakdown and strikes: the bitter union fight at
Starbucks
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Blanc said Trump’s replacing of the pro-union Joe Biden
[[link removed]] as president, has
“certainly emboldened the big corporations that were already
stonewalling their unions: Starbucks, Amazon, REI, where we saw the
most emblematic union successes of the past few years”.

In February, Utah’s governor signed a law that prohibits unions
representing
[[link removed]] teachers,
firefighters, police officers and other government employees from
bargaining for better pay and working conditions. In a move directly
inspired by Trump’s actions, a Michigan amusement and water
park refused to move forward 
[[link removed]]with a
union election, believing that the NLRB was paralyzed after Wilcox was
fired, leaving it without a quorum.

“Companies could definitely get more anti-union because Trump and
Musk are setting the example,” said Thomas Kochan, a longtime
professor of industrial relations at MIT. “They’re firing workers
who are unionized. They’re ignoring their labor contracts.”

Kochan said he fears the consequences for unions if the supreme court
upholds the firing of federal workers despite their contract
protections or upholds Trump’s dismissal of Wilcox, leaving the NLRB
without a quorum. “Then I think we will see companies come out of
the woodwork to be more anti-union because there’s so little
risk,” Kochan said. “We’ll see companies like SpaceX and Tesla
just ignore the law because there will be no consequences. That’s
the big risk now.”

In his high-profile role, taking a figurative chainsaw to federal
agencies and firing tens of thousands of workers, the fiercely
anti-union Musk could inspire corporate executives to follow in his
anti-union footsteps. SpaceX is even seeking to have the
NLRB declared unconstitutional
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“Musk is sort of the praetorian guard of the anti-union movement,”
McCartin said. “He’s the tip of the spear.”

But Blanc said corporate executives might hesitate about following
Musk. “He is extremely unpopular, and his policies are not
popular,” Blanc said. “Corporate America is not blind to that, and
they’ll think twice about unleashing a backlash like the one Musk
has unleashed.”

Labor experts said it could take a few years before many companies
become visibly more hostile toward unions. That was the case after the
Patco strike. It was not until two or three years after that strike
that several prominent employers –International Paper, Greyhound and
Phelps Dodge – showed a harder attitude toward unions. They broke
their unions’ strikes by hiring large numbers of replacement workers
– an unusual move at the time.

Trump vowed to champion US workers - the reality has been a relentless
assault
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That tougher behavior under former president Ronald Reagan sped the
decline of private sector unions. Today, just 6% of private sector
workers are in unions, while 32% of public sector workers
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ideologues are increasingly targeting public sector unions, which
often support Democrats.

“Because almost half of the labor movement is now in the public
sector, the assault that we’re seeing now is really focused on the
public sector,” McCartin said. “That really threatens to break the
spine of the labor movement.”

The flight attendants’ Nelson said it’s imperative for the labor
movement to stand up and stand together to resist Trump’s and
Musk’s anti-union actions: “It’s on all of us to use the power
we have to stop this before everything is broken and every safety net
is stolen by the oligarchs,” including Musk. Nelson said the labor
movement has very few options at this point except to mobilize for a
general strike.

_Steven Greenhouse
[[link removed]] is a
journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well
as economic and legal issues _

_The Guardian [[link removed]] is globally renowned
for its coverage of politics, the environment, science, social
justice, sport and culture. Scroll less and understand more about the
subjects you care about with the Guardian's brilliant email
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free to your inbox._

* union-busting
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* PATCO
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* Amazon Workers Union Organizing
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* Starbucks Workers United
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* labor union organizing
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