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 The nation’s labor laws remain outdated and exclusionary, but with someone like Abruzzo at the helm, we had a real chance of continuing to make progress.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.
Musk and employers like Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and the nonprofit National Audubon Society have been advocating to undercut the authority of the NLRB, and under Trump’s conservative Supreme Court, they may get their wish. But as Shaun Richman, program director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State University, wrote in Jacobin, the bosses might regret it. “If no union activity is protected because the NLRB ceases to exist, then all union tactics are potentially valid," he wrote, “or at least morally defensible, as long as unions are ready to fight back proportionally.”
The NLRB was first established via the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA), a far-reaching piece of New Deal legislation that guarantees (most) workers the right to organize and join unions, engage in collective bargaining, and participate in strikes. But the NLRA’s powers were subsequently limited by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which prohibits secondary activity that prevents non-involved workers from launching stoppages or boycotts in solidarity with an existing strike.
For instance, if your local coffee shop baristas go on strike and the bakers at the bagel shop around the corner join their picket line instead of clocking in for their own shifts, that would be an example of secondary activity — and it is currently illegal under the NLRA. Without those constraints, unions and their members would have quite a lot of room for creativity, and as history has shown, those efforts can quickly become a very big problem for bosses. Workers used to employ more extreme means to get their point across, and Trump’s cronies seem to have forgotten that the labor laws they hate so much were a compromise.
That’s not to say that a second Trump regime will be certain to usher in a tsunami of labor militancy; if anything, it will likely be even more difficult for us to organize and protest due to the policies he’s signaled he plans to implement. As I mentioned earlier, Trump's pal Musk is vehemently anti-union, and the two famously shared a chuckle this summer at the thought of firing striking workers. The Republicans as a party are viciously anti-worker — except when they need to convince working-class people to vote for them — and the kind of wealthy ghouls Trump surrounds himself with are even less sympathetic to labor.
Trump's vice president pick, J.D. Vance, is a one-time Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the protégé of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has awkwardly tried to sell himself as an authentic voice for the working man, but his record speaks for itself. As OnLabor detailed, Vance has consistently opposed pro-worker legislation such as the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act while throwing his support behind efforts to weaken worker protections, kill diversity initiatives, and hobble unions.
While in office Trump will also have license to run amok through a variety of other government agencies that have a very real impact on workers’ lives. The Department of Labor includes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Office of Disability Employment Policy, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the Wage and Hour Division, and many more agencies dedicated to improving and protecting workers’ health, compensation, safety, and rights. Many of the civil servants who keep those agencies running could disappear, due to Project 2025, the nightmarish conservative plan to remake the federal government, in part, by purging nonpartisan agency staff and replacing them with political appointees. Trump tried to distance himself from the project on the campaign trail, but he has since nominated some of its authors to serve in his government.
We’ve seen what kind of people Trump likes to appoint: management-side lawyers, coal industry executives, and conservative nepo babies. In 2016 he tried to install Andrew Puzder, then CEO of the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., as secretary of labor; Puzder, a billionaire with no government experience who has spoken out against a $15 federal minimum wage, withdrew his nomination after various scandals came to light. But Trump now has more MAGA sycophants in Congress likely to confirm his controversial choices.
Trump’s current pick for the secretary of labor position, Republican Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer, comes with the backing of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, and has been greeted with cautious optimism by some labor leaders. Chavez-DeRemer’s record on labor is indeed less terrible than that of her GOP colleagues: She was one of only three House Republicans to co-sponsor the PRO Act and one of only eight Republicans to co-sponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. If confirmed, there are many concrete policies she could implement to help workers — that is, if her anti-labor new boss even lets her try. As the AFL-CIO noted in its statement about Chavez-DeRemer’s nomination, “It remains to be seen what she will be permitted to do as Secretary of Labor in an administration with a dramatically anti-worker agenda.”
The fact remains: We’re in a bad spot. We don’t yet know who Trump will be able to appoint to key positions, how much of Project 2025 he’s likely to adopt, how far the Supreme Court is willing to go to decimate workers’ rights, or what kind of ugly mess Musk might manage to create while he’s in the inner circle, but we’ll find out soon enough. We need to be prepared for the worst.
We have about a month before Trump takes office, so if you’re at all able, you need to use this brief window to organize: Talk to your coworkers about unionizing; talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about unions; talk to your union about how it plans to protect the most vulnerable members during this period; call your representatives to pressure them into blocking Trump’s expected anti-worker agenda; start using secure communications for union-related planning; get involved in local mutual aid groups and political projects; and really think about the places you’re spending your money. For example, Amazon Prime may be convenient, but remember that Jeff Bezos really opposes unions and that his company has actively tried to squash them.
The labor movement has weathered storms before, and the working class is nothing if not resourceful and resilient. As I always say when I’m given the honor of speaking to groups of workers, there are far more of us than there are of them — the C-suiters and far-right extremists and spineless corporate Democrats and vile Republicans who want to dominate our lives. They want to crush us and destroy our movement, but we cannot give them that satisfaction. We know that we cannot depend on politicians to save us, or for some of them to even show up for us if there are no cameras present. This past election should have made that crystal clear to everyone watching, and we owe it to ourselves and those who come after us to seize this moment.
Shawn Fain, UAW president — a sworn enemy of Trump’s — summed it up well in a recent statement on the 2024 presidential election results. “It’s time for Washington, DC, to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate,” he said. “Will our government stand with the working class or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires? That’s the question we face today. And that’s the question we’ll face tomorrow. The answer lies with us.”
