This is a most unfortunate Labor Day for labor. The labor movement has taken it on the chin repeatedly in the last several decades, but President Trump is the most ruthlessly antilabor president since before the Great Depression.
If the labor movement does not fight harder than it has since Mr. Trump regained the presidency, its future will be dire.
Mr. Trump and his administration have unilaterally stripped collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal workers. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, 400,000 workers, or 2.8 percent of America’s unionized workers, have lost their collective bargaining rights because of an executive order that will eventually affect more than one million federal workers. Mr. Trump ushered in Labor Day weekend on Thursday by continuing his assault of federal unions, adding the Patent Office, NASA and the National Weather Service to his list of targeted agencies.
Despite this assault on their very existence, we have barely heard a peep from unions. Where is organized labor in the public fight to maintain union jobs, stop the stripping of the safety net and lead the fight for democracy? Other than some statements and angry speeches, the movement has been muted.
If the labor movement wants to fight for its survival, it must return to mass mobilization tactics, reminding Americans that their rights come through working together — not through supporting a president who talks about helping American workers while slashing worker safety regulations, supporting tariffs that raise the cost of consumer goods and stripping workers of their legal rights to contracts.
All this is happening at a time when Americans’ approval of unions is the highest it has been since the mid-1960s.
One cannot overstate the significance of Mr. Trump’s attacks on government workers. Public sector work has become organized labor’s power base, allowing the total workforce’s union membership rate to remain at around 10 percent, despite less than 6 percent of private sector workers having unions.
Based on actions Mr. Trump has taken this year — and without any notable public pushback from supposedly pro-labor Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio — it is unlikely that there will be any unionized federal workers outside of policing agencies by the end of his term in 2029.
Mr. Trump has attacked workers in other ways. He has gutted the Department of Labor through cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency. He is also rolling back Labor Department rules from the Obama and Biden administrations that allowed home care workers to earn overtime and farmworkers to campaign for better working conditions. And he has severely undermined the National Labor Relations Board, which handles thousands of union matters every year by firing its head and nominating corporate-friendly figures to steer its operations away from supporting workers.
Organized labor, for all its talk about solidarity, remains deeply divided on how best to approach organizing, politics and Mr. Trump. Certain labor leaders, particularly Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, have embraced Mr. Trump and his brand of Republicans, particularly around immigration restrictions. Other unions with memberships that are heavily white and male also lean toward Republicans. But they still represent a minority of union members.
In 2024, union workers were among the only demographic groups where Democrats improved their standing compared with 2020. Perhaps that reflects efforts by Joe Biden to be, as he put it, “the most pro-union president in American history.”
Unions have the internal support, structure and organizing capacity to support the fight against Mr. Trump. Yet no one in the labor movement has taken the public role of countering Mr. O’Brien and making it clear to the American public that most unions are strongly opposed to Mr. Trump.
This doesn’t mean that labor, which remains too closely tied to the internal workings of the Democratic Party, has to blindly follow Democrats. Democratic leadership is itself divided on how to fight Mr. Trump, and unions need independence in both politics and tactics to build public trust, so they, not Mr. Trump, can rebuild working-class power in the United States.
While many of the largest unions, including the teachers unions and service workers unions, have grown by organizing new workers and becoming politically powerful, many others have long resisted major organizing efforts, preferring to focus on protecting current members. This goes a long way toward explaining why labor has struggled to bring new industries into its movement to replace the shuttered auto, steel and other industrial factories that built strong unions in the 1930s.
The lack of a labor response to Mr. Trump contrasts significantly with labor’s response to the crisis precipitated when Ronald Reagan fired air traffic controllers in 1981. Solidarity Day brought upward of 260,000 union members and allies to Washington in September 1981 to call for workers to fight against the Reagan domination of the working class. It did not stop the decline of the labor movement, but it did help Democrats to significantly expand their House majority in the 1982 midterms.
To survive the Trump onslaught, organized labor must rise to the moment. First, it must go outside of union protocol by calling out labor leaders such as Mr. O’Brien. Until unionists take back the narrative of resistance, many in the larger liberal coalition will think that unions are much more supportive of Mr. Trump than they actually are.
Second, unions must get their own members engaged in issues that interact with politics. That includes much more political education, not just around candidates at election time but also on issues that matter now. For decades, many unions have shied away from discussing divisive issues (such as immigration) with their members. For some, this is a realistic response to the fact that unions means less than other political beliefs to many members. But when unions talk to their members about politics only at election time, it leads to a disconnect between rhetoric and action that causes many members to tune out.
Third, unions must step into the vacuum that millions of Americans feel when it comes to their economic lives. The hopelessness many people feel on economic issues — like the shuttering of factories and inflation — has led to working-class support for Mr. Trump. But it has also led to a surge in support for unions in this country. Most people believe the system is broken and are looking for someone to fix it. Unions can provide that leadership.
Unions love to talk about how workers have the ultimate power; they can withhold their labor through strikes. They should use their power to target President Trump’s war on the working class.
Erik Loomis is a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of, most recently, “Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice” and “A History of America in Ten Strikes.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Trump Is Wiping Out Unions. Why Are They So Quiet? appeared first on New York Times.
