WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump “celebrated” in the lead-up to Labor Day, 2025, by busting union contracts at seven federal agencies, bringing to 1.3 million the number of workers whose voices he has snuffed out. The historic attack on unions by President Reagan, when he killed the union rights of 14,000 Air Traffic Controllers, pales in comparison with the illegal attacks on unions by President Trump.
Trump’s hit list, all on alleged “national security” grounds—as usual—trashed the contracts covering workers at NASA, the International Trade Administration, and the Agency for Global Media, which oversees U.S.-produced news broadcasts overseas.
His executive order also smashed the contracts protecting workers at the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Satellite Service, and “units of the Bureau of Reclamation with primary responsibility for operating, managing, or maintaining hydropower facilities.”
“This is how President Trump is commemorating Labor Day: Continuing his administration’s all-out attack on workers and unions,” responded AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Trump again distorts the law by ripping away the collective bargaining rights of federal workers in an attempt to silence their voices on the job.”
This order, Shuler said, added to the one in March where Trump unilaterally terminated 30 union contracts, “undercuts the government services we all rely on, especially after DOGE”—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency—”has already recklessly gutted staff, and this order is no different.
“Among several others, the administration targeted three agencies that track and warn us about extreme weather and natural disasters. When those workers can’t speak up on the job and make sure their offices are serving the American people, we are all at risk.
“Issuing these executive orders,” Shuler noted, “just days before the holiday that honors everything working people fought and died for—including our right to come together with our co-workers in a union and bargain for what we deserve—shows us this administration’s callous disregard for workers’ rights knows no bounds.
“No matter what it throws our way, the labor movement will never stop organizing and fighting for each other—and we’ll see him in court,” Shuler concluded.
While Shuler and other union leaders pursue the judicial route to stop Trump and his MAGAites, many in the labor movement say much more fightback is required. They point out that court filings are not enough since Trump has stacked the courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, with anti-worker judges. What is left of eviscerated labor law is so shot full of corporate-created loopholes that it offers little protection.
And even that’s under attack by Trump-named judges on the New Orleans-based Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one level below the Supreme Court. That circuit’s three-judge panel handed multibillionaire Elon Musk—the former head of DOGE—a big win by ruling the structure of the National Labor Relations Board, specifically its administrative law judges who decide most labor law cases, is unconstitutional.
The solution, many say, is to hit the streets in massive numbers and to shut down functioning businesses and industries with massive civil disobedience actions and boycotts. They warn that at the rate things are going, the very existence of unions and democracy in the U.S. is not guaranteed without a stronger fight to preserve them.
Shuler was not allowing Trump to paper over his attack on workers with phony speeches on Labor Day when Trump said, “America’s greatness has always been the strength of our workforce,” and when he claimed he would “defend every citizen who works with integrity, honors the rule of law and strives to secure a brighter future.”
Trump cleverly avoided saying he would defend every worker. In addition to killing collective bargaining rights and eliminating unions for federal workers, his regime has already forced at least 175,000 federal workers to quit or be fired. He is rounding up and deporting massive numbers of immigrants, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding workers. His attack on immigrants is just one of many assaults he is mounting against the entire U.S. working class.
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