(ThyBlackMan.com) Today is Labor Day, a day set aside to remember and honor workers and organized labor and their struggles to gain respect, decent wages, safe working conditions, benefits, the right to bargain collectively and a place at the workplace decision making table. The irony is on this day there is an ongoing attack on organized labor and unions spearheaded by the government at the behest of corporate executives, the financial sector supported by national elected officials and oligarchs alike.
President Donald J. Trump has been in the forefront of this attack on organized labor which goes back several decades. Billions of dollars have been spent to push back the gains made by both public and government unions and this pattern will continue into the foreseeable future. Upon his return to the White House, Donald Trump has overseen the negation of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers collective bargaining rights. He has terminated 400,000 employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Environmental Protection collective bargaining rights and illegally terminated thousands of government employees.
He has done this by Executive Order, fiat, personal decrees which are highly authoritarian. He is using little known legislation like the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act which allows for the setting aside of collective bargaining if collective bargaining is not applied in a manner consistent with national security requirements. This is a seldom used piece of legislation that Trump is applying unilaterally to dozens of federal agencies such as: Federal Communications Commission, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation.
Trump seems to like following Ronald Reagan’s model and example. In 1981 President Reagan broke a strike called by the Air Traffic Controllers Organization who were demanding better pay and working conditions. Reagan swiftly decertified the ATCO, effectively rendering it a non-entity while simultaneously firing all 11,000 members of the union! Ironically Reagan was a former union member himself having served as the president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild.
What made Reagan’s gambit work was the fact that powerful unions like the Teamsters and Longshoreman failed to support the ATCO membership. Had just these two union gone on strike in solidarity with the ATCO, all commerce across the nation would have stopped, Reagan would have had to back down, and been forced to deal with the air traffic controllers. Alas that did not happen and Reagan won a major victory for anti-union forces.
Similarly Trump seems to have little organized opposition, there have been a few lawsuits filed by federal union employees which are winding their way through the courts. Trump has won a few decisions in the lower courts while others are still pending. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was not created by an act of Congress so it really has no authority. It really was a working group or consulting entity.
Following the firing of thousands of government workers by DOGE, Trump was forced to scramble to get the Republican controlled Congress to approve the job cuts and his tax bill. It remains to be seen how the courts will rule on his firings and the abolition of collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of government employees.
Meanwhile people are partying, cooking out and going about their business celebrating a federal holiday that was created to honor the struggles and hard fought victories of workers, oblivious to organized labor’s long history or to the implications of what Trump is doing now!
The fact of the matter is, union membership is in decline in the US. Only 11.7% of private sector employees are union members while their federal worker counterparts make up 29.9% union membership. Decades of deindustrialization in America, offshoring of jobs and the shift to a service economy with so called gig worker has accounted for much of the decline in private sector union membership. However the push to de-unionize by corporate owners, employers and the federal government is also a major factor. We should think about this as Labor Day 2025 comes to a close.
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