Trump’s War on Workers
By 
But hey, at least Sean O’Brien gets to hate trans folk and immigrants!
In his first few weeks back in office, Trump fired the acting chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), leaving the US’s top labor watchdog without a quorum to enforce laws that protect workers’ right to unionize. Trump has designated Musk, a vehemently anti-union billionaire, to launch an all-out war against the federal bureaucracy and workforce, and Trump and Musk have essentially treated the country’s 2 million-plus federal employees as if they were disposable.
Not stopping there, Trump fired two members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), leaving it without a quorum to carry out its mission of fighting against discrimination. In his crusade to downsize the government and demolish the “deep state”, Trump and his administration have fired thousands of federal employees – moves that union officials say have violated laws and rules that require due process and a finding of poor performance before workers can be dismissed.
“Donald Trump is showing that his promises to be a champion of workers are hollow,” said Judy Conti, government affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. “He surrounds himself with people who are anti-worker. He has a history of being anti-worker, but he tries to put a nice face on it. He says he’s a champion of workers. He’s just not.”
In a move that many federal workers found distasteful, Trump asked them to snitch on each other, to inform on co-workers engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion activities. The Trump administration further angered federal employees, as well as the labor movement, by announcing that it would nullify contracts reached with federal employee unions in the final weeks of the Biden administration.
Last month, just hours after an American Airlines jet collided with an army helicopter over Washington DC, killing 67 people, Trump dissed and angered Federal Aviation Administration employees, when he denounced diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as fostering incompetence and suggesting that many FAA employees were unqualified. In another move upsetting worker advocates, Trump named Russell Vought, one of the architects of the controversial rightwing blueprint Project 2025, to run the White House budget office. Project 2025 is brimming with anti-worker recommendations, among them abolishing all government employee unions across the US.
“Trump has already shown that he’s not a friend of working people,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main union federation, said in an interview. “Project 2025 is playing out exactly as we feared, and America’s workers are right at the heart of those attacks.”
One Trump move that particularly upset labor leaders was his order to fire Gwynne Wilcox, the NLRB’s acting chair and a Democrat, even though her term ran until 2026 and even though the labor board is an independent agency. That left the five-member board with just two positions filled and thus without a quorum to make decisions (although its regional offices can still operate).
Finally, some of that good ol’ economic populism!