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    ‘Trump and Musk are setting the example’: how companies are becoming emboldened to be more anti-union

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    Donald Trump’s aggressive wave of anti-union actions is already spurring some US employers to take a more hostile stance toward unions, as labor leaders voice fears that the president’s moves will embolden more and more companies to fight harder against unions and slow their recent progress.Indeed, some worker advocates worry that unions will be walloped during Trump’s second term the way they were under Ronald Reagan after he crushed the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike and inspired many corporations to fight harder against unions. As Trump and Elon Musk carry out their anti-union agenda in Washington DC, Utah passed a law that prohibits collective bargaining by public sector workers, and a Michigan company refused to move forward with a union election.“If history is any indicator on this – and I think it is – when you see a president’s administration basically declaring war on unions, that’s going to certainly embolden private sector employers,” said Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University and author of the definitive book about the disastrous 1981 strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco).Labor experts point to several Trump administration actions that show a huge hostility toward unions, including Trump’s order to end collective bargaining by 50,000 airport screeners and then a far-reaching order to rip up union contracts and prohibit bargaining for over a million federal employees at more than a dozen agencies, including the state department, the treasury and health and human services. Trump and Musk have also fired tens of thousands of federal workers while disregarding protections in their union contracts. Moreover, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, who was the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) acting chair. Wilcox insists her dismissal was illegal, but on 28 March a federal appeals court declined to reinstate her, at least for now.“What we’re seeing is Patco on steroids,” Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in an interview. “This is the president saying even the idea of having a union contract and having something in black and white to protect workers and having collective bargaining – he’s saying none of this should exist.”Trump’s anti-union and anti-worker actions have been piling up. He rescinded the $17.75-an-hour minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their workers. He issued an order to kill the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which seeks to settle potentially disastrous labor disputes. He nominated a management-side lawyer, Crystal Carey, to be the NLRB’s general counsel; her law firm represents anti-union employers, including Amazon, SpaceX and Tesla. Even the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, who has sought good relations with Trump, condemned that appointment, saying: “Carey has spent her entire professional career backing Big Business to the detriment of working people … [S]he wants to decimate labor unions.” (O’Brien did praise Trump’s choice of labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer.)Beyond that, Trump has repeatedly insulted the nation’s 2 million federal workers, saying: “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”Eric Blanc, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said these actions have “demonstrated that Trump’s rhetoric about being pro-worker and pro-union was just that: pure rhetoric. This is an administration that is pushing the limits on how far you can go to destroy the labor movement and people’s labor standards.”Blanc said Trump’s replacing of the pro-union Joe Biden as president, has “certainly emboldened the big corporations that were already stonewalling their unions: Starbucks, Amazon, REI, where we saw the most emblematic union successes of the past few years”.In February, Utah’s governor signed a law that prohibits unions representing teachers, firefighters, police officers and other government employees from bargaining for better pay and working conditions. In a move directly inspired by Trump’s actions, a Michigan amusement and water park refused to move forward with a union election, believing that the NLRB was paralyzed after Wilcox was fired, leaving it without a quorum.“Companies could definitely get more anti-union because Trump and Musk are setting the example,” said Thomas Kochan, a longtime professor of industrial relations at MIT. “They’re firing workers who are unionized. They’re ignoring their labor contracts.”Kochan said he fears the consequences for unions if the supreme court upholds the firing of federal workers despite their contract protections or upholds Trump’s dismissal of Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum. “Then I think we will see companies come out of the woodwork to be more anti-union because there’s so little risk,” Kochan said. “We’ll see companies like SpaceX and Tesla just ignore the law because there will be no consequences. That’s the big risk now.”In his high-profile role, taking a figurative chainsaw to federal agencies and firing tens of thousands of workers, the fiercely anti-union Musk could inspire corporate executives to follow in his anti-union footsteps. SpaceX is even seeking to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. “Musk is sort of the praetorian guard of the anti-union movement,” McCartin said. “He’s the tip of the spear.”But Blanc said corporate executives might hesitate about following Musk. “He is extremely unpopular, and his policies are not popular,” Blanc said. “Corporate America is not blind to that, and they’ll think twice about unleashing a backlash like the one Musk has unleashed.”Labor experts said it could take a few years before many companies become visibly more hostile toward unions. That was the case after the Patco strike. It was not until two or three years after that strike that several prominent employers –International Paper, Greyhound and Phelps Dodge – showed a harder attitude toward unions. They broke their unions’ strikes by hiring large numbers of replacement workers – an unusual move at the time.That tougher behavior under former president Ronald Reagan sped the decline of private sector unions. Today, just 6% of private sector workers are in unions, while 32% of public sector workers are. Anti-union ideologues are increasingly targeting public sector unions, which often support Democrats.“Because almost half of the labor movement is now in the public sector, the assault that we’re seeing now is really focused on the public sector,” McCartin said. “That really threatens to break the spine of the labor movement.”The flight attendants’ Nelson said it’s imperative for the labor movement to stand up and stand together to resist Trump’s and Musk’s anti-union actions: “It’s on all of us to use the power we have to stop this before everything is broken and every safety net is stolen by the oligarchs,” including Musk. Nelson said the labor movement has very few options at this point except to mobilize for a general strike.

    This article was amended on 7 April 2025 to clarify the timing of an order to rip up union contracts and an appeals court declining to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox. More

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      Trump claimed he was pro-worker. His new order shows how absurd that was | Steven Greenhouse

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      If any workers are still holding on to the notion that Donald Trump is pro-worker or pro-union, his move last week to terminate union bargaining rights for 1 million federal workers should disabuse them of that notion. As a candidate Trump often wooed workers by promising to fight for them, but ever since he returned to the White House, he has taken dozens of anti-worker and anti-union actions.In an unprecedented anti-union action last Thursday, the president moved to end collective bargaining for a million federal employees and scrap union contracts nearly that number, while attacking their unions as “hostile” merely because they were doing what unions are supposed to do: battling to save the jobs of tens of thousands of union members whom Trump and Elon Musk had summarily fired.In an era when many workers are demanding respect, Trump keeps showing disrespect toward the country’s 2.3 million federal workers. He and Musk have cavalierly fired more than 50,000 federal employees, ignoring contractual protections saying they could only be terminated for poor performance. Then Trump blamed the victims, saying, without evidence: “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.” Trump views federal employees not as dedicated workers who serve the nation’s 340 million people, but as deplorables who work for the detested deep state.Not stopping there, Trump has named several vehemently anti-union figures to be his right-hand men. Russell Vought, head of Trump’s office of management and budget, has shown true sadism toward workers. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video disclosed by ProPublica and the research group Documented. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains … We want to put them in trauma.”Would anyone who cared an iota about workers name such a callous, anti-worker person to a top position?Then there’s the aggressively anti-union Mr Musk. Trump praised Musk over the idea of firing striking workers, an action that is illegal and would go far to cripple labor’s most powerful weapon: the strike. Musk has become a pariah in Scandinavia for his extreme anti-union animus: Tesla has refused to recognize a union there – something that virtually all Scandinavian corporations do. Like Trump, Musk has a penchant for disrespecting workers, repeatedly tarring federal employees as being guilty of “waste, fraud and abuse”. Last week on Fox News, Musk insulted the intelligence of federal workers by falsely saying: “Basically almost no one [no federal employee] has gotten fired.”Again, would anyone who cared a whit about workers and unions tap Musk for such a powerful position?Trump’s first two months back in office have been filled with anti-worker and anti-union actions. In an unseemly move, the Trump administration called on federal workers to snitch on each other, to report on co-workers who promote diversity and inclusion. Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, the acting chair of the National Labor Relations Board – a move she says is illegal – leaving the board without a quorum to penalize employers that break the law when fighting against unionization. Trump also fired the NLRB’s vigorously pro-union general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, and wants to replace her with a management-side lawyer whose firm represents many anti-union companies, including Tesla and SpaceX.Trump, the supposed champion of workers, has done little to raise workers’ wages. As in his first term, he’s done zilch to increase the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at a shockingly low $7.25 an hour for 15 years. He also rescinded Joe Biden’s order securing a $17.75-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors. As a candidate Trump wooed tipped workers by vowing to end the income tax on employee tips, but he has failed to get the House budget bill to end that tax, although that bill tentatively includes Trump’s idea not to tax overtime pay.Labor leaders have denounced Trump’s order to gut union bargaining for 1 million workers. Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, called Trump’s actions “the biggest assault on collective bargaining rights we have ever seen in this country”. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said Trump’s order was “a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants – nearly one-third of whom are veterans – simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies”.Anti-union CEOs and ideologues will no doubt applaud Trump’s order. By targeting unionization among 1 million workers, Trump aims to weaken the nation’s 14-million-member labor movement. If successful, his move would end bargaining for those 1 million workers, holding down employee pay and thereby making more money available for Trump’s tax cuts for the rich.Republican lawmakers will love Trump’s move because it undermines a key financial pillar for the Democrats. Half of US union members are government employees, and their unions are often major funders of Democratic candidates. Trump certainly knows that – 10 minutes after the supreme court issued its Janus decision in 2018, ruling that no federal, state or local government employee can be required to pay union dues, Trump tweeted “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!” Trump’s new executive order will further skew a huge imbalance: Open Secrets, a research group that tracks political contributions, found that in the 2024 election cycle, business out-donated unions by 16 to one. Corporations donated $6.1bn to unions’ $264m, which is less than the gazillionaire Musk gave all by himself.Trump also won over many workers by vowing to cut prices. Not only did he vow to cut egg prices, he boldly said he’d cut auto insurance prices and energy prices in half. But Trump has totally failed to do any of that. Moreover, his 25% auto tariff will cause auto prices to soar.One has to strain to think of even one or two pro-worker or pro-union moves that Trump has taken. The White House says his tariffs are pro-worker and pro-union, insisting they will bring back manufacturing jobs. But many economists say Trump’s tariffs will hurt myriad industries and workers. His auto tariffs, for instance, will increase car prices and as a result, auto sales, auto production and auto jobs will decline, at least short-term. Not only that, other countries’ retaliation will pummel various US industries and trigger additional layoffs. Moreover, Trump’s tariffs will undermine GDP growth and perhaps push the US into recession. Bottom line: Trump remains obsessed with tariffs, even though they’re likely to result in more pain than gain for US workers.When it comes to worker issues, Trump resembles the emperor in the famous fairytale: he sees himself wearing magnificent union-made clothes covered with buttons containing pro-worker slogans. But more and more Americans realize that when it comes to helping workers, Trump is like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor: his nakedness is showing.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Organizers accuse Trump of trying to silence federal workers with union order

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      Union leaders have accused Donald Trump of union-busting in a “blatant” attempt to silence them after the president stepped up his attacks on government unions on Thursday, signing an executive order that attempts to eliminate collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.The order limits the departments and classifications of federal workers who can organize a union and instructs the government to stop engaging in any collective bargaining.The office of personnel management issued a memo following the directive, providing guidance to the departments and subdivisions on the order, which includes terminating their collective bargaining agreements and ending voluntary union dues collection through payrolls.Following the order the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in a Texas court to support its move to end collective bargaining, claiming collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) “significantly constrain” the executive branch.“Plaintiffs wish to rescind or repudiate those CBAs, including so they can protect national security by developing personnel policies that otherwise would be precluded or hindered by the CBAs. But to ensure legal certainty and avoid unnecessary labor strife, they first seek declaratory relief to confirm that they are legally entitled to proceed with doing so,” the lawsuit states.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, said the move was “straight out of Project 2025”, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s manifesto to remake the federal government.“This executive order is the very definition of union-busting. It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government at more than 30 agencies,” said Shuler. “It’s clear that this order is punishment for unions who are leading the fight against the administration’s illegal actions in court – and a blatant attempt to silence us.”According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 29.9% of federal employees are union members as of 2024, representing more than 1.2 million workers.Unions representing federal workers have criticized the order and vowed to take immediate legal action.“President Trump’s latest executive order is a disgraceful and retaliatory attack on the rights of hundreds of thousands of patriotic American civil servants – nearly one-third of whom are veterans – simply because they are members of a union that stands up to his harmful policies,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest union representing federal workers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“These threats will not work. Americans will not be intimidated or silenced. AFGE isn’t going anywhere. Our members have bravely served this nation, often putting themselves in harm’s way, and they deserve far better than this blatant attempt at political punishment.”Kelley added: “AFGE is preparing immediate legal action and will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”The union held a press conference with Democratic lawmakers on Friday afternoon at the US Capitol, during which Kelley criticized the invocation of national security to strip federal workers of their union rights and called for support from the public.“This isn’t about safety or security. It’s about silencing workers who are courageously standing up to this non integrity, non accountability in the government,” said Kelley. “We won’t be silenced.”The congressman Jamie Raskin said the Trump order was an attempt to bring “chaos and retaliation” against the US labor movement.“It’s clear as day that they are retaliating against the labor movement for standing up for the rights of workers,” said Raskin. “When rightwing coups and authoritarian takeovers happen all over the world, the first thing they do is they attack the civil service, and then they attack the labor movement.”Unions representing federal workers can only bargain over conditions of employment, with wages, benefits, and classifications set by law and Congress. Bargaining is governed by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act. Federal workers are also barred from conducting strikes.“President Trump’s attempt to unlawfully eliminate the right to collectively bargain for hundreds of thousands of federal workers is blatant retribution,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). “This attack is meant to silence their voices, so Elon Musk and his minions can shred the services that working people depend on the federal government to do.”Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, warned Trump’s executive order was a warning for more attacks on workers and labor unions to come from this administration.“If we allow this administration to tear up federal union contracts, fire federal workers who stand up for our legal rights and target federal unions and union activists, they won’t stop there,” Nelson said. “An injury to one is an injury to all. It is time for the labor movement and the American workforce to rise up for our rights and fight for our country – whatever it takes.” More

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      Doge shutters federal workplace mediator agency after Trump order

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      The Elon Musk-run “department of government efficiency” (Doge) in effect shuttered a 79-year-old federal agency that mediates labor disputes on Wednesday – saving an estimated 0.0014% of the federal budget.The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), an independent federal agency that works to prevent and resolve work stoppages and disputes in the public and private sector, has shut down most of its services and placed employees on administrative leave with firings to follow.“The administration released an executive order a week and a half ago naming FMCS as one of the agencies to be shuttered, but other than our agency denying it and making a few adjustments, we didn’t hear anything further,” said Jefferson Dedrick, a commissioner at FMCS. “Earlier today our mid-level managers informed each of the commissioners that effective at close of business, we would be put on admin leave with a RIF [reduction in force] letter to follow.”The agency provided mediation for several high-profile strikes, including the Boeing strike last fall.“Doge basically decided to eliminate all but a few people from the agency. We don’t know the final count but maybe a dozen left out of an agency that had almost 200 employees through last year,” said a FMCS employee who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It is shocking as the agency does not regulate and has always been non-controversial. Even Republicans have always seen the value of an agency that saves the economy far more money in reduced work stoppages in the private sector than the agency spends. It is also a blow to the use of more efficient dispute resolution by federal agencies who have used our services for non-labor disputes. That program has now been entirely abolished.”They noted the cuts were drastic to the point where the agency, in most cases, can no longer be effective and noted it will worsen and prolong labor strikes and lockouts.The FMCS was established by Congress in 1947. Its shuttering comes in the wake of Donald Trump’s executive order, signed on 14 March, to dismantle seven federal agencies, including FMCS.Dedrick added in a LinkedIn post on the dismantling of the agency: “Annually, FMCS saves the US Economy over $500 million by protecting household earnings, safeguarding company revenues and services, and ensuring the continuity of the robust commerce that promotes and underlines our national prosperity.”He noted this savings is achieved with fewer than 150 mediators around the US, accounting for less than 0.0014% of the federal budget.FMCS was contacted for comment. More

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      US health department offers early retirement in latest round of Musk-led cuts

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      The US health department told employees on Monday they could apply for early retirement over the next 10 days and should respond to a request for information on their accomplishments of the past week, according to emails seen by Reuters.Republican president Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who oversees the so-called “department of government efficiency”, are spearheading an unprecedented effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy, including through job cuts.The Department of Health and Human Services told employees in an email that it received authorization on Monday from the US office of personnel management to offer early retirement under the voluntary early retirement authority, which impacts agencies “that are undergoing substantial restructuring, reshaping, downsizing, transfer of function or reorganization”.An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Employees were directed to the OMP’s website, which says eligible employees must be at least 50 years old with 20 years of federal service, or any age with 25 years of service, among other requirements. The offer is valid until 14 March at 5pm ET, the email said.Last week, the administration sent out a second round of emails asking employees to share five bullet points on their accomplishments of the past week.Employees at HHS, which includes the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had previously been told that they did not have to respond to Doge’s emails and there would be “no impact to your employment with the agency if you choose not to respond”.Multiple other US agencies had also told employees not to respond immediately to Doge’s demand, including the FBI and state department.But in a Monday email seen by Reuters, HHS told employees to respond to Doge’s email by midnight without revealing sensitive information, including the names of drugs and devices they are working on.HHS previously warned employees that responses to Doge’s request may “be read by malign foreign actors”. The department sent two versions of its email on Monday, the second of which removed that reference.The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents HHS workers, told members in an email seen by Reuters that they must comply with the agency’s choice to proceed with the “ill-advised exercise”. The union was not immediately available for comment.Employees were told in HHS’s email to follow supervisor guidance on how to reply and respond in a way that would not identify grants, grantees, contracts or contractors, nor information that would identify the precise nature of scientific experiments, research or reviews.“I feel I will spend the whole day writing these five bullets in a way that does not contain sensitive information while also providing information that my job is important. I don’t know if this can be called efficiency,” said an FDA source who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.Employees on leave, out of office due to work schedules, or who have signed a deferred resignation agreement are not required to respond, according to the email. More

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      Trump administration can continue mass firings of federal workers, judge rules

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      The Trump administration can for now continue its mass firings of federal employees, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, rejecting a bid by a group of labor unions to halt Donald Trump’s dramatic downsizing of the roughly 2.3 million-strong federal workforce.The ruling by the US district judge Christopher Cooper in Washington DC federal court is temporary while the litigation plays out. But it is a win for the Trump administration as it seeks to purge the federal workforce and slash what it deems wasteful and fraudulent government spending.The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and four other unions sued last week to block the administration from firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and granting buyouts to employees who quit voluntarily.The unions are seeking to block eight agencies including the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Veterans Affairs from implementing mass layoffs.In his 16-page order, Cooper started by acknowledging Trump’s “onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society”.He went on to add: “Affected citizens and their advocates have challenged many of these actions on an emergency basis in this Court and others across the country.”However, Cooper on Thursday said, he likely lacks the power to hear the case, and the unions instead must file complaints with a federal labor board that hears disputes between unions and federal agencies.Cooper wrote: “NTEU fails to establish that it is likely to succeed on the merits because this Court likely lacks subject matter jurisdiction over the claims it asserts. The Court will therefore deny the unions’ motion for a temporary restraining order and, for the same reasons, deny their request for a preliminary injunction.”Trump has tapped the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, to lead a so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which has swept through federal agencies slashing thousands of jobs and dismantling federal programs since Trump became president last month and put Musk in charge of rooting out what he deems wasteful spending as part of Trump’s dramatic overhaul of government. Trump also ordered federal agencies to work closely with Doge to identify federal employees who could be laid off.Termination emails were sent last week to workers across the federal government – mostly recently hired employees still on probation at agencies such as the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the General Services Administration and others.The plaintiffs, which include the United Auto Workers, the NTEU and the National Federation of Federal Employees, said in their lawsuit that White House efforts, including through Doge, to shrink the federal workforce violate separation-of-powers principles by undermining Congress’s authority to fund federal agencies.The unions said that unless the court intervenes, they will be irreparably harmed by lost revenue from dues-paying members who were either fired or retired early to take buyouts.In a statement released last Wednesday, NTEU president Doreen Greenwald said: “We will not stand idly by while this administration takes illegal actions that will harm citizens, federal employees and the economy.”She went on to add: “All of these orders are further evidence that this administration is motivated not by efficiency, but by cruelty and a total disregard for the government services that will be lost.”Most civil service employees can be fired legally only for bad performance or misconduct, and they have a host of due process and appeal rights if they are let go arbitrarily. The probationary employees primarily targeted in last week’s wave have fewer legal protections.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA judge overseeing a similar case in Boston federal court allowed the buyouts to move forward in a ruling on 12 February, finding labor unions that filed the case did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they had not shown how they would be harmed by the plan.The window to accept buyouts has now closed, and about 75,000 workers took up the administration’s offer, according to the US office of personnel management. That represents about 3% of the total federal workforce.The unions are asking the judge to declare the firings and buyouts illegal and block the government from firing more employees or offering another round of buyouts.In a Monday court filing, the government said the unions did not have a right to sue because they would not be harmed by the firings and buyouts. Granting the unions’ request would also inappropriately interfere with the president’s efforts to streamline the federal workforce, the government argued.More than 70 lawsuits have been filed seeking to block Trump’s efforts to remake the federal workforce, clamp down on immigration and roll back transgender rights.The results have so far been mixed, but judges have blocked some aspects of Trump’s marquee policies, including his bid to end automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the US.On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the Internal Revenue Service had began firing employees as part of the widespread layoffs.Speaking to the outlet, a person familiar with the decision said that approximately 7,000 employees were expected to lose their jobs, marking 7% of a 100,000-person agency.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Want to defeat Trump? Support unions | Eric Blanc

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      Can anybody stop Trumpism? Progressives are understandably worried. Though federal judges may temporarily pause some of the new administration’s most brazenly illegal executive orders, a hyper-conservative supreme court lies waiting in the wings. And looking ahead to 2028, it’s hard to feel hopeful about defeating Maga given that the Democratic party continues to hemorrhage working-class voters.But there’s no need to despair. A powerful force in our society has the legitimacy, resources and leverage to turn things around: organized labor. Unions can beat back Donald Trump’s attacks, expose his sham populism, and – by uniting workers around their shared economic interests – help isolate his xenophobic scapegoating.Rather than hibernate for the next four years, or limit ourselves to posting online about the president’s latest outrages, each of us can lend support to workers organizing at federal agencies, schools, Starbucks, Amazon, auto plants and beyond. Just as importantly, we can expand the labor movement’s reach by unionizing our own workplaces. It won’t be easy to counter Trump’s shock-and-awe offensive, or to fill the void left by the Democrats’ disarray. But it’s both necessary and possible.Consider Trump’s latest moves. While he can appoint his cronies to head crucial civil service agencies, it is still unionized federal employees who make these institutions run. And their resistance to his power grab – through defying the new administration and enlisting public support – constitutes our best hope for protecting these services upon which millions of Americans depend.Remember the government shutdown during the first Trump administration? By late January 2019, the crisis had already lasted a month, with no end in sight. But then the flight attendant leader Sara Nelson began making national waves by agitating for a general strike, stressing the public safety dangers of not paying the people whose labor makes air travel possible. On 25 January, various air traffic controllers refused to come into work, resulting in a temporary grounding of New York flights. Only a few hours later, Trump announced a deal to end the shutdown.Resisting Maga’s barrage is crucial. But it would be a mistake to fight only on the right’s chosen political terrain. Trump’s achilles heel is that he won by speaking to the economic grievances of working people, but heads an administration of and for billionaires obsessed with maximizing their own profits and control. Centrist Democrats have generally been unable to expose this contradiction, as they too are often tied to big business. But combating corporate greed is the labor movement’s bread and butter, which is why unions in our era of rampant inequality are experiencing record-high levels of popularity, even among conservatives and independents.The administration’s connection to the world’s richest men – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – makes it easier for anti-Trump sentiment to channel into workplace battles. When Tesla factory workers unionize, or coders at X push back against their boss, this is now de facto a confrontation with the White House. By scaling up high-publicity union drives and strikes for economic dignity across the country, labor and its supporters can force politicians to show which side they’re really on.Even labor struggles focused on economic issues can have dramatic political repercussions. Faced with Trump’s efforts to deprive workers of the right to unionize by kneecapping the National Labor Relations Board, every union drive is now on a collision course with the new regime. Moreover, since workplaces bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and ideologies, union organizing requires listening to and persuading people who disagree with us, a skill sorely lacking among most progressives today. Effective persuasion happens not by haranguing or shaming others, but rather by finding points of commonality – often economic – around which working people can come together.Through this patient process of building solidarity across differences, labor organizing is uniquely positioned to convince large numbers of Americans to direct their anger at the bosses above (and their political proxies), instead of immigrants or trans people. Unsurprisingly, union members voted for Kamala Harris by a 16-point margin in the last election; indeed, Trump would probably have lost had the US labor movement represented a significantly higher percent of the American workforce.Despite Trump’s constriction of labor rights, conditions overall remain favorable for union growth. Organized labor, for example, is sitting on an unprecedented war chest of roughly $38bn in assets, over a third of which are highly liquid. This is more than enough to defend against Project 2025 while simultaneously going on the offensive against corporate America. Big, assertive unionization battles could lay bare Trump’s oligarchic allegiances, while pressuring Democratic politicians to champion economic populism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnfortunately, it’s unclear whether union officials will finally find the chutzpah to break from business as usual. Most remain exceedingly risk averse, narrowly focused, and deferential to establishment politicians. For that reason, labor’s post-pandemic upsurge has been driven from below, with young, left-leaning workers taking the lead – most recently at the Whole Foods in Philadelphia that voted for a union last Monday. But to scale up widely enough to transform the US, this grassroots uptick will need deep-pocketed labor leaders to fully jump into the fight.It remains to be seen whether unions can rise to the challenge of Trumpism. For the sake of our democracy, our livelihoods, and our planet, let’s hope they do.What’s giving me hope nowWhat’s giving me hope is that Philadelphia Whole Foods workers last Monday voted to unionize, 130 to 100. It’s a really big deal: this was only the second time American workers have defeated Amazon in a union election. Many in the labor movement were expecting a loss, since Maga is now in office and since management – headed by Trump’s new billionaire buddy Bezos – went scorched earth against the nascent union effort. But a multiracial crew of young, self-organized, left-leaning workers proved the skeptics wrong, as so often has been the case since 2021. Labor passed its first big test under Trump, and hopefully we’ll see many similar wins in the months to come.

      Eric Blanc is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which is out with UC Press in February 2025 More

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      What does Elon Musk believe?

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      View image in fullscreenElon Musk is not a people person, as millions around the world will be able to attest after the planet’s richest man cut off food supplies, healthcare and probably even life itself to some of the most vulnerable without so much as a fore- or afterthought.Musk sees himself as a data man, wielding numbers like a machete to slash and burn his way through government waste and corruption as he leads the rightwing charge to capture the US state.Within days of Musk dispatching his minions to kick down the doors of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and rifle through its finances, the agency was in effect out of business. Musk claimed USAid was “a criminal organisation” and full of Marxists – an assertion called “laughable” by the agency’s former administrator under George W Bush, Andrew Natsios, who describes himself as a conservative Republican.Musk didn’t care. Less than three weeks after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the head of the new “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group that Trump created, has built an extensive power base in Washington of a kind not seen before.Trump has given free rein to Musk to send his operatives into more than a dozen federal agencies to look for evidence of mismanagement and subversion, and to generally create chaos, outside of the usual bounds of oversight and regulation.Crucially, Musk now in effect controls the office of personnel management (OPM), which oversees federal employment. He immediately encouraged more than 2 million government workers to resign with the stated aim of forcing a few hundred thousand out the door.View image in fullscreenIt’s clear who Musk thinks should be running the country instead, from his recruitment to Doge of “special government employees” from his own companies and the wider tech industry to storm the federal citadels. They include a significant proportion of young male software engineers of the kind who tend to worship tech billionaires like Musk, including a teenager who has gone by “Big Balls” online.Few, if any, have undergone the security clearances other government workers need to access sensitive and personal information. If they had, Doge might have been discouraged from hiring another recruit from Silicon Valley, Marko Elez, who was sent into the US treasury department, where he had access to taxpayer records. Elez resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal revealed he had posted racist messages on social media and defended eugenics.“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” Elez wrote on X in July.He was reinstated on Friday.On the face of it, Musk is implementing Trump’s commitment to cut spending, “dismantle the deep state” and sack “rogue bureaucrats”. But his embrace of the far right, including an unrestrained endorsement of the German nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD), and what looked to much of the world like a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration celebrations, has raised urgent questions about Musk’s political beliefs and how he intends to use his newfound power.As it happens, much of what Musk is doing is also good for his businesses, including scrapping regulatory bodies and curtailing the power of unions and workers. The labor board, which upholds workers’ rights, has been frozen and agencies that regulated the financial industry have either been scrapped or told to abandon key parts of their work.Musk’s politics have been eclectic. In the past, he has backed universal basic income and a tax on carbon emissions. At the same time, he has a deep dislike of trade unions and public transport because it means being around “random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer”. He espouses a visceral hostility to diversity programmes and appears to regard those who believe in helping the less fortunate as subversive.Thrown into this mix is Musk’s fascination with the pro-natalism movement, for which he has done his bit by fathering 12 children, and his hope that one day his rocket company, SpaceX, will help them colonise Mars.Raised in South Africa under apartheid, Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces. His grandfather headed a fringe political movement in Canada in the 1930s, Technocracy Incorporated, which sought to abolish democracy in favour of government by elite technicians, but its overtones of fascism saw it banned during the second world war.Musk shows some of the same tendencies, as do other libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley billionaires unhappy with the messiness of elected government. He has spoken in support of direct democracy, where policies and other issues are decided by popular referendums rather than elected representatives.In the meantime, Musk appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler through the Republican right’s “unitary executive theory”, which regards the authority of the president as paramount and Congress as an impediment to the implementation of his or her will.Over the years, Musk has described himself as “not a conservative” and “politically moderate”. He backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 until he soured on the party in the past few years.View image in fullscreen“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold,” he wrote on X in 2022.But there were clues to other motives, including a statement that he would be voting Republican because of Joe Biden’s support for trade unions and what he regarded as insufficient Democratic backing for his companies.Not long before last year’s presidential election, Musk declared that Trump would save American democracy from Democrats trampling on individual liberties. But he kept moving ever further to the right in public, with an open embrace of racist European political leaders, including the AfD, and the promotion of claims of a “white genocide” in the country of his birth, South Africa.Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, has linked his shift from Obama voter to cheerleader for the AfD to the transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.Wilson was 16 when she texted a relative: “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna. Don’t tell my dad.” The day after Wilson turned 18 in 2022, she changed her name because of “gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form”.Musk told Isaacson he was sanguine about the change but then Wilson became a fervent Marxist and wouldn’t speak to him any more, a situation he described as one of the most painful of his life.“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk told the author.Musk blamed Wilson’s progressive Los Angeles school and said he was disturbed at the “woke mind virus” holding back America.After California passed a law barring school districts from requiring teachers to tell parents of changes to a student’s sexual orientation and gender identity, Musk announced he was moving the headquarters of his two largest companies, SpaceX and X, to Texas. He said that the law caused “massive destruction of parental rights” and put children at risk of “permanent damage”.Musk did not say that moving his companies also had significant tax advantages for himself and his businesses, which would additionally be subject to fewer climate regulations than in California.Still, his apparent anger over his daughter’s transition appears to have set in motion a broader hostility toward identity issues, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, a favourite target of the Trumpian right. Musk announced that the words “cis” and “cisgender” were considered slurs on X, and he came out against pronouns, tweeting that they “suck”.In late 2022, another tweet linked Musk’s hostility toward the way people choose to identify themselves – an odd position for a man who claims to be a champion of free speech – to his anger at the Biden administration’s Covid restrictions.View image in fullscreenMusk mocked Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, who was instrumental in the lockdown and other measures to contain the crisis.“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he wrote.Some saw the tweet as evidence that Musk was now openly identifying with the far right, which defied mask regulations and stay-at-home orders and called for Fauci to be locked up for intruding on their liberties.But while Musk’s hostility toward pronouns was personal, Covid regulations touched on his businesses and net worth.Musk refused to close his Tesla factory at the height of the pandemic, claiming without evidence that “panic” over the virus would do more damage than the disease itself. He disparaged social distancing, predicted that the virus would claim few lives in the US (it eventually claimed more than 1.2 million), and described the lockdown as “fascist” and “erasing people’s freedoms”. Musk tweeted a meme comparing Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to Hitler over his government’s Covid restrictions.Musk may have dressed up his position as a concern about people’s welfare but its immediate effect was to keep his factories rolling even if the people working in them were at greater risk of infection and death. And while Musk claimed a principled position in favour of individual liberty, he has a history of suppressing the rights of his own workers.In 2023, he said that he disagreed with the concept of trade unions.“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords-and-peasants sort of thing,” he told the New York Times Dealbook Summit. “Unions naturally try to create negativity in a company.”One reason Musk may not like unions is they tend to stand up for their members. He has faced accusations from former employees of aggressively using a secretive dispute-resolution process to fend off repeated claims of sexual and racial harassment within his companies, including accusations of women enduring a “frat house” atmosphere of groping and other abuses ignored and even perpetrated by high-level managers.Tesla has paid out millions of dollars to Black workers subjected to racial harassment.Yet, while Musk restricts the rights of his employees to seek redress from the courts, he and his companies filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts in the year to August 2024, according to Fortune magazine.They include a legal action by X against the Center for Countering Digital Hate over a report accusing the social network of making millions of dollars out of accounts spewing hate from “neo-Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists and spreaders of dangerous conspiracy theories”. A California judge threw out the lawsuit last year, saying it was clear the “case is about punishing the defendants for their speech”.Musk will probably spend a lot more time being frustrated by the courts. Judges have already put on hold his push for mass resignations from the civil service and placed some restrictions on Doge’s mass collection of data. Federal workers, unions and civil rights organisations are lining up a flurry of lawsuits to challenge Musk’s actions.But the courts themselves may become a target for Musk as he works to tear down the old order.Isaacson in his biography wrote that Musk once described being in “a state of war at all times” as one of his default settings.No one thinks that, so long as Trump continues to regard the billionaire as more of an asset than a liability, Musk’s thirst for power will stop at gutting federal agencies. The question is where he will launch his next offensive. More

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      Democrats ignored pleas to address price of ‘eggs and gas’, campaigners say

      by

      Saru Jayaraman tried. As far back as January, the president of low-pay campaign group One Fair Wage recalls telling Democratic leaders in Washington DC that voters were worried about the cost of living.“It just went on deaf ears,” she said. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was they kept wanting to talk about the economy. And we kept saying, it’s not about the economy, it’s about our economy: it’s about my economy, my ability to pay for eggs and gas.”“And so, it was no surprise to us that people did not turn out, why people did not feel incredibly motivated – whether they didn’t vote or they voted for Kamala or they voted for Trump,” said Jayaraman, director of the food labor research center at University of California, Berkeley. “There was a universal feeling of ‘you’re not listening to us.’”A single mom working three jobs as a waitress, and struggling to make ends meet on a sub-minimum tipped wage, is “not going to take time out of her three jobs to vote for either person”, she added. “There’s no future for the party unless they really address the needs of working people. And I use the word ‘address’. It isn’t just running on the issue.”Democrats face calls to actSam Taub has worked as a server for the past 10 years in Michigan, one of the key election swing states, which swung from Joe Biden in 2020 to Donald Trump in 2024. Taub was not that surprised by this year’s result.“You see a lot of generalizations of people who live in the midwest, people who are working class and people who are working-class in the midwest,” he said. “And as somebody who is one of those people, it is a little bit frustrating to hear people say that they’re listening to you – and then not actually listen to you.“The message that Democrats really need to understand is that they can’t assume that they already know what people think and what people need.”View image in fullscreenTaub is one of hundreds of service industry workers who backed an open letter, organized by One Fair Wage in the wake of the 2024 election results, urging the Democratic party to do more to address the needs of working people.Democrats at the state level need to fight to protect workers rights even more given the upcoming second Trump administration, he argued, and push back against industry efforts to scale back or prevent policies, such as raising the sub-minimum wage for servers in Michigan, from taking effect.“It’s pretty obvious Donald Trump is not going to protect workers’ rights, so it’s really important for politicians at the state level to do everything that is within their power to protect workers,” said Taub. “By getting rid of the sub-minimum wage, which is something that’s happening gradually, we can help a lot of people.”Juan Carlos Romero, a bartender in New York City, has worked in the restaurant industry for 16 years. “It’s really hard to try to make ends meet” in this economy, he said.Under Trump workers in the service industry aren’t going to see improvements, he suggested, arguing that the incoming administration’s proposals – such as eliminating taxes on tips – overlook the fundamental issue that so many service workers are in precarious economic circumstances because they rely on tips and sub-minimum hourly wages.Democrats must use the final weeks before Trump takes office “to support us”, he added. “I think our desperation comes from the reality that we see, and especially if wages stay like this, [that] they’re going to continue to affect people on a daily basis. So it really is a call to action that is desperately needed by folks in the industry.”Fears of recessionCampaigners and academics fear the Democratic party’s losses of the White House and Senate majority, and its failure to retake the House majority will leave workers on lower incomes – especially immigrants – vulnerable.“One of the consequences of this election is that the government backs away from having people’s back when they want to join a union,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. “There’s just a cool irony to that that I think is just devastating: this is a time when people need to be in a union more than ever.”Deportation plans targeting undocumented and temporary workers are already inciting fear among these workers. Immigration groups are pushing Biden to solidify protections for immigrants before he leaves office in January.“I think that the anti-immigrant fervor out of Trump and his acolytes is terrifying and defies humanity,” said Judy Conti, director of government affairs at the National Employment Law Project. “And I think immigrant workers everywhere have reason to be worried about discrimination, potential violence, workplace raids.”Trump’s proposed tariffs, and the impact they may have on the costs of basic goods and necessities, are also causing concern.“If they’re not talking about raising wages, which they’re not, but they’re talking about making all of the goods and services that we need for our day-to-day lives 20% more expensive,” warned Conti. “I have fears of recession, and certainly fears that things are going to be less affordable for the people who can’t afford it most.”Democrats who still hold office nationwide are facing calls to help such people when Trump reaches the White House. “Even if you fail,” the One Fair Wage letter said, “at least we’ll see you fighting for once.” More