Trump is Moving Rapidly to Destroy Workers' Rights

Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.

Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump's mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.

Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really "about power," with Trump "gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence."

In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by President Biden "to harm my administration."

Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers' rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world's wealthiest man and Trump's largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk's SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.

Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers' right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.

"We're fighting that tooth and nail," declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. The firing of Wilcox "did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they're in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them."

As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency's general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB.

The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers' rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were "far-left appointees with radical records."

These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary. The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate.

As these and other curbs on workers' rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it's likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will.

After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far"" such as its mass firing of federal workers"" is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump's second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought, appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is "one of the most influential positions in the federal government," acting "as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities and agency rule-making."

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers' rights, we should expect Trump's future implementation of Project 2025's recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their union. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws.

All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: "Which Side Are You On?"

Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).