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Trump celebrates Labor Day as the most anti-union president ever

His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy.

From the viewpoint of American workers, there have been better Labor Days. Donald Trump chose to celebrate this year’s edition by announcing last Thursday his unilateral abrogation of the federal government’s contracts with the unions that represent the scientists, engineers, and other staffers at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service), the Patent Office, and the International Trade Administration. This follows his earlier contract terminations with the unions that represented 400,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as those at the Department of Health and Human Services, and other major departments.

According to a study from the Center for American Progress (CAP), these Trump-imposed contract nullifications have cost 81.8 percent of civilian federal workers their right to collectively bargain—and that study came out before last Thursday’s new round of government fuck-you’s to its workers. The total number of workers whose contracts Trump has trashed now exceeds one million, which comes to approximately one-fifteenth of American workers covered by a union contract. Georgetown University labor historian Joe McCartin terms this “by far the largest single action of union busting in American history.”

The largest federal worker union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has a case pending challenging Trump’s right to nullify contracts that the federal government has signed. In every instance of contract nullification, Trump has stipulated that his right to cancel is rooted in a clause stating that contracts should not extend to departments and agencies that deal with matters of national security. That’s why the CIA and Defense Department have never been unionized. But how the doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers who care for the nation’s veterans—not to mention the park rangers who tend to Yosemite and Yellowstone, and the hundreds of thousands of other federal employees who help keep the nation running—could endanger national security in the course of their daily rounds remains unexplained.

Trump’s justification raises a further question: If those million-plus workers are all engaged in matters of national security, why has Trump laid off so many of them? This is a circle that resists squaring.

WOULD THAT THIS CONSTITUTED THE WHOLE of Trump’s war on organized labor. It doesn’t. Seven days after he took the oath of office, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, despite the fact that under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act, which stipulates that each of the five board members is to serve for five years, her term was not to end until August 2028. The NLRA narrowly limits the president’s power over the Board; his sole power is to nominate members, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and who can only be removed by the president for dereliction of duty or malfeasance in office, neither of which Trump even alleged as cause for Wilcox’s dismissal.

In fact, he failed to specify any reason for his action, though the effect was to reduce Board membership to a bare two—not enough to constitute a quorum. And while Trump and Senate Republicans have eagerly installed replacements for most of the department and agency officials he’s sacked, no such rush has been evident at the NLRB. So there it sits, powerless to rule on questions pertaining to violations and abuses of, or compliance with, workers’ rights on the job, even though it’s the sole government agency that has that power. Most of the agency’s duties and cases that arise can be settled by the Board’s regional staffs (which run union certification elections and investigate alleged “unfair labor practices”) and by its administrative judges, who rule on cases brought by employees, employers, or Board staff. Their rulings can be appealed to the Board, which then issue decisions that can affect workers’ rights broadly.

During Joe Biden’s presidency, the Board (which has always been composed of three members from the president’s party and two from the opposition party) significantly enhanced workers’ rights: forbidding “captive audience” meetings in which employers compel their employees to attend sessions of anti-union propaganda; requiring employers to recognize a union with which a majority of their workers have signed affiliation cards; and forbidding noncompete clauses through which employers keep their workers from moving to new jobs in the same field. If the two nominees for Board seats that Trump has sent to the Senate are confirmed—and this process is moving at a glacial pace—the Board will again have a quorum and those Biden Board rulings are almost certain to be reversed. Also on the chopping block would be a 2016 Board decision classifying graduate students at private colleges and universities who work as teaching and research assistants as employees, and thereby entitled to form unions and bargain with management. (Prospect writing fellow James Baratta has a piece about the grad students’ future on our site today.)

But even without Trump’s nominees, the current quorum-less Board poses an obstacle to workers seeking the enforcement of their rights. Amazon, a fanatically anti-union employer, has gone to court challenging the unionization of workers at a Whole Foods store in Philadelphia (Amazon owns Whole Foods; the workers at that store voted 130-100 to unionize) because the Board lacks a quorum and Amazon will not accept the authority of the Board’s regional director to certify the vote. Even without such dubious accusations as Amazon’s, the Board is plainly MIA when it comes to setting policy. As a recent study from the Hamilton Project pointed out, “Between the first month with a Board decision (December 1935) and December 2024, there were only four months in which the NLRB published no decisions … Between January and July of this year, there have been five.”

The Board faces greater challenges than its current relegation to quorum-less nonentity. Amazon, along with SpaceX and a few other companies, is currently in federal court arguing that the Board itself is unconstitutional, because the limits imposed on presidential power over independent federal regulatory agencies violate the “unitary executive” doctrine that all federal agencies should be subject to presidential control, despite their establishment as independent agencies by Congress and presidents. The constitutionality of the Board, which was created to administer the worker rights enshrined in the NLRA in 1935, was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937, and it has issued tens of thousands of rulings for and against employees and employers in the nine decades since without ever having its constitutionality successfully challenged.

Earlier this month, however, the federal appellate court in the Fifth Circuit—the most right-wing set of judges since the Inquisition—held it to be unconstitutional on those grounds, in anticipation of a ruling from the six Republican justices on the Supreme Court that would strike down the independence of such agencies and boards.

Should the Court rule that way, as is widely expected, Trump would have the power to discharge the remaining Democrat on the Board and appoint all five members. The practical difference between having a 3-to-2 majority on the Board and having a 5-to-0 supermajority may not be all that great. As Harvard Law professor Ben Sachs told me, “What really matters is who has the three votes. It won’t be all that different if the vote is 5-to-0 rather than 3-to-2. But if the Court gives the president the right to discharge any member whose opinion even on a run-of-the-mill case displeases him, that does matter. In those circumstances, no one could trust that the Board’s decision-making would really be based in law.”

Historically, states and localities have been blocked from making laws dealing with private-sector workers’ collective-bargaining rights; the NLRA reserves such matters to the federal government. That preemption, Sachs told me, is rooted in the principle of deference to the federal agency assigned to the task by law: in this case, the NLRB. However, Sachs said, “if the agency is not operating as Congress intended, those preemption rules ought to give way.”

If the Board is to be without a quorum for a prolonged period of time, that could open the door to states controlled by pro-labor liberals to challenge federal preemption by enacting collective-bargaining statutes of their own. As the NLRA doesn’t extend those rights to public employees or farm or domestic workers, a number of those states have extended those rights to those groups of workers since the 1960s (in the case of public employees), the 1970s (in the case of California farmworkers), and the past two decades (when some states have enacted “bill of rights” legislation for domestic workers). Should the Board reverse its 2016 ruling that extended those rights to grad students at private universities, Rhode Island has already enacted a law granting those rights to its state’s grad students, as James Baratta reports.

But foreseeing a Trump Board that undermines the very rights and protections for workers that the Board was established to protect, some blue states are currently considering whether they can supplant the Board more fully. A bill pending in the Massachusetts legislature would have the state claim jurisdiction over private-sector workers if the NLRB remains powerless for lack of a quorum. A bill sitting on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk would enable the state to enact collective-bargaining rights for private-sector workers thwarted by the NLRB’s incapacity to act; it would require the Board to go to court to reclaim jurisdiction. A bill introduced in the California legislature would go so far as to give the state the jurisdiction the Board currently wields over private-sector workers if the Board should lose its independent status by virtue of a Supreme Court ruling finding that status unconstitutional. Suffice it to say that such a bill, if enacted, would prompt some serious challenges.

What’s behind Trump’s union busting? At one level, he wants to destroy unions simply because they oppose him; opposition is all it takes for Trump to order a hit. At a deeper level, unions are a voice from below, and their autonomy poses a threat to autocrats. Even enfeebled unions have the potential to reawaken and join a battle to thwart despots. It’s no accident that every Western democracy has had—at one time, at least—a powerful union movement; just as it’s no accident that no autocracy—and no aspiring autocrat like Trump—can tolerate one. A core part of Hitler’s seizure of total power was the utter destruction of the German labor movement.

IF I’VE DWELT MORE ON WHAT TRUMP is doing to unions than on what unions are doing themselves, that’s because, like every other American institution, unions have been overwhelmed by Trump’s onslaughts. They enter the fray from positions of both weakness and strength. While union members still constitute about one-third of the nation’s public employees, the near-pathological opposition to unions from American employers, abetted by the erosion of labor law protections, has reduced the union share of the private-sector workforce to just 6 percent. Nor do the nation’s union members constitute a blue wall. In the 2024 presidential election, a majority of blue-collar union members preferred Trump to Kamala Harris, while white-collar and female members preferred Harris. (The two unions that are home to the largest number of both white-collar and female members—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—have played key roles in the nationwide anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrations.) The political divide within the American electorate—non-college voters aligning with Republicans, college graduates aligning with Democrats—is present within the nation’s labor movement, too. If Democrats and unions can’t win back the working class, the prospects for a Democratic victory so large that it could finally rebuild an NLRA with the power to revive workers’ rights are dimmer than dim.

That said, labor has retained and even enhanced one form of strength: Today, in this populist age, unions are the only American institution whose popularity has been steadily rising, winning 68 percent approval ratings in Gallup’s polling. The gap between that level of approval and the 6 percent unionized share of private-sector workers, however, illustrates how completely the rickety remains of labor law have failed to enable a pro-labor workforce to go union—despite the best, though short-lived, efforts of Biden’s NLRB, and even before the havoc that second-term Trump has inflicted on unions. The 2026 elections may afford unions an opportunity to arrest some of Trump’s attacks; the 2028 elections, an opportunity to reverse them. Even then, the road to re-establishing workers’ rights will be steep.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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