Union-Buster in Chief

[justaprogressive]

Up until now, the go-to example of a president using his power to try to destroy unions and set back the labor movement was Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers in 1981. That move threw 11,000 dedicated workers who kept Americans safe and flight paths clear out of their jobs. It declared open season on workers who exercised their fundamental rights to improve their working conditions, sending a message to private employers that they, too, could fight worker organizing drives, break strikes, and undermine workers’ rights. And its impact—a decades-long decline in union density and workers’ bargaining power—reverberated throughout the 1980s, ’90s, and into this century.

Donald Trump has taken that playbook and weaponized it for his own War on Workers. It wasn’t enough for him to use his Department of Government Efficiency (creating inefficiencies wherever it went) to put nearly 150,000 federal employees out of work. It wasn’t enough for his administration to traumatize its own employees and threaten them with criminal prosecution for talking to the media, and even to family and friends, about what was happening to workers inside the federal government.

Now, the Trump administration has stripped workers of their unions at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). At 430,000 workers, this is by far the single biggest employer-imposed contract abrogation in American history.


Here’s why this happened—and why it matters.

Unions—specifically federal employee unions—have been in the forefront of challenging the administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions. Those actions include firing en masse probationary employees who were doing their jobs and running roughshod over civil service protections that ensured workers’ only oaths were to the Constitution and the country, not to Donald Trump. These actions have also included shutting down entire federal agencies and drastically cutting others that served the American people and American interests around the world, including ensuring food safety, approving lifesaving drugs, combating diseases, providing relief in the wake of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, protecting workers from being injured and consumers from being cheated, and supporting independent media. In the process, this administration has waged a campaign of terror against their own staffs.

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-08-15-union-buster-in-chief-federal-employees/

[Celerity]

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