UNIONS FACE BIG ATTACKS FROM INCOMING TRUMP PRESIDENCY
by Paul Becker
Labor leaders around the country are bracing for the onslaught against unions that they see coming in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections. Speaking of the election results, Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said, “This is going to impact the entire labor movement.”
UAW President Sean Fain sounded a defiant note, declaring, “It’s time for Washington, DC, to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of billionaires?”
Much of their apprehension comes from Trump’s performance toward labor during his first administration when he appointed anti-union operatives to government posts that oversee labor-management relations. For example, the Department of Labor cabinet post was created during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to protect the interest of workers. Instead, Trump appointed Eugene Scalia as his Secretary of Labor. Scalia, son of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, had spent most of his career as a corporate lawyer fighting unions and used his new position to chip away at worker rights and protections.
And the National Labor Relations Board was created by the Wagner Act to protect the rights of workers to organize and engage in collective bargaining with their employers. Instead, his anti-union appointees handed down decisions that, among other things, allowed employers to delay collective bargaining elections, sometimes for years, while corporations illegally got rid of union activists and killed union organizing in their shops.
Public-sector unions, particularly teacher unions have special reason to anticipate an onslaught against them. Some of Trump’s top advisers want to eliminate them altogether. Project 2025, a wide-ranging document drawn up by a number of these advisers as a blueprint for the Trump administration, has proposed that Congress consider “whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place.” And Vivek Ramaswamy, who is likely to play a prominent role in the new administration, made elimination of teacher unions a priority in his campaign for the Republican nomination for president. He subsequently drew back only slightly when he said that he meant eliminating only collective bargaining rights for public school teachers. Some prominent Trump advisers have also called for the elimination of the federal Department of Education.
“There’s no doubt it’s an existential threat,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Also endangered are unions in the service industries that represent hotel and restaurant workers who are often immigrants who could be victims of Trump’s promise of mass roundups and deportations. In Nevada, the Culinary Workers union has raised the standard of living of many of these workers who are now threatened.
