labor

The huge Labor Day banner outside the Labor Department building with Trump’s picture and the words “American Workers First” depicts one of Donald’s most disgusting lies.

With multiple factual examples, Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, provides proof that Trump is the most brazenly “anti-worker” president in U.S. history. With his Big Vicious and Ugly Bill, barely passed by his fawning GOP in Congress, and dozens of illegal Executive Orders, he is smashing the American Worker beyond the avarice of the cruelest Plutocrat.

Quoting liberally from his Labor Day article in The Guardian, I urge labor union leaders and rank-and-file union members to absorb its contents. This article could make American labor angry enough to mount an unstoppable movement to tell Trump, “You’re Fired,” and fire up enough convinced or electorally scared lawmakers in Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office.

The aggregated madness from this failed gambling czar, wholly devoid of empathy, compassion, truth, while betraying his own voters and his oath of office, follows:

1. Trump put corporate interests first by “often cutting [workers’] pay or making their jobs more dangerous.” This includes gutting regulations that protect miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the top labor watchdog – The National Labor Relations Board, whose now stalled mission is to “protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics.” Then “Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.”
   
2. “Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage construction of factories that make renewable-energy products.”
   
3. Trump is pressing to end “minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers,” and has already ended a “Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.” Trump adamantly opposes raising this frozen minimum wage for 25 million workers who would benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage. He ended a “requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.”
   
4. Tariffs and reckless, wholesale deportations are “pushing up prices and slowing economic growth.” His big tax cut for the super-rich is being paid for by “millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage” (from Medicaid). As for deportation, it is “undermining their employers’ businesses,” and I might add closing down some of them and impairing farmers from harvesting their crops.
   
5. “In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president [Liz] Schuler said: ‘We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.’”
   
6. Trump is swinging an axe to end worker safety protections, cutting OSHA staff and pushing those still working at OSHA to weaken all kinds of essential safety and health protections, ranging from coal miners to workers under extreme heat, to reducing fines for violating safety rules, and much more. He “froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.” “…a major killer among coal miners.”
   
7. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) “forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9 million lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. ‘If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs.’ ‘Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers,’” and tens of billions of withheld tax revenues annually, one might add.

The list of anti-worker cruelty goes on. Tyrant Trump always says, “This is only the beginning.” He acts like an imperious dictator because that is what he is, imposing burdens and pain on the American people – in red and blue states alike. The six rogue Supreme Court Injustices, who thus far know no limits, are enabling the madman in the White House. Before his sleazy conversion, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.” UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORST IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE!

The flip side of Trump’s feverish repression of worker rights, remedies, and existing protections is that there is no chance of reforming anti-union laws, such as the notorious Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, with Trump and his congressional cronies in power.

Readers may well ask why all these attacks on workers didn’t lead unions and their allies to launch a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS and insist that the feeble, corporate-conflicted Democratic Party adopt it authentically and replace their stagnant leadership with new, vigorous leaders. That is what they should have done right after their disastrous loss to Trump, the serial law violator, abuser of women, corrupter, daily, delusionary falsehood teller, shredder of the Constitution, greedy, egomaniacal, and seriously dangerous personality.

There is still one Labor Day before the 2026 midterm elections. Can Unions and the Democratic Party save our Republic from the rampaging daily Trump outlawry and viciousness (he is now invading American cities while wrecking our country)? It should be easy, just based on his failed record. (See my letter of August 27, 2024, to Liz Shuler).

As the economy worsens amidst the chaos, consumer prices rise, unemployment rises, and Trump behaves more like Captain Queeg (the fictional, cruel, and crazy skipper in the film, The Caine Mutiny), voters for Trump are starting to ask, “Did We Vote for This?” Non-voters, in turn, should resolve to head for the polls and reject what Trump is doing. The people who are the sovereign in our Constitution must start acting like they have power.