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Report Details Global Deterioration of Workers' Rights—Including in US Under Trump
"Whether it's Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the U.S. or Javier Milei and Eduardo Eurnekian in Argentina, we see the same playbook," the report states.
Jun 02, 2025
A report released Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation, a global network of unions, states that workers' rights around the world are in "free fall"—including in the United States, where U.S. President Donald Trump has taken "a wrecking ball to the collective labour rights of workers."
The report, titled The 2025 ITUC Global Rights Index, details "a stark and worsening global crisis for workers and unions."
The index, which first began in 2014, is a review of workers' rights in law and in practice. It ranks countries along a criteria of nearly 100 indicators, such as whether there is a "general prohibition of the right to collective bargaining" or whether "killing or enforced disappearance of trade unionists" take place.
Depending on how many indicators they rack up, countries are ranked from 1-5+, based on their degree of respect for workers' rights. 5+ is the worst ranking a country can get. Each year, violations are recorded from April until March.
According to the index, in 2025, average country ratings deteriorated in three out of five global regions, with Europe and the Americas recording their worst scores since 2014.
The Americas earned a score of 3.68 and Europe notched 2.78, which is worse than the 1.84 score the continent received in 2014. That latter score constitutes the largest drop in any region of the world in the last decade, per the report.
"Governments have collaborated in decades of deregulation, neoliberalism, and neglect, leading to the collapse of workers' rights. This has disenfranchised millions and paved the way for extremism, authoritarianism, and the billionaire coup against democracy that now threatens democracy itself," said ITUC general secretary Luc Triangle in a statement published Monday.
"If this pace of decline continues, in ten years there will be no country left in the world with the highest rating for its respect for workers' rights," he continued. "This is a global scandal, but it is not unavoidable; it is a deliberate decision that can be reversed."
The report also states that 87% of countries violated the right to strike, 80% of countries violated the right to collective bargaining, and in 72% of countries, workers had zero or reduced access to justice, an increase from 65% the year prior.
"In the United States, the Donald Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to the collective labor rights of workers and brought anti-union billionaires into the heart of policymaking," according to the report.
Triangle toldThe Guardian that the report covers the time period up to March 2025. The report references various attacks by the Trump administration on workers, such as efforts to drastically reduce personnel at the U.S. Department of Education and the firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board, denying the agency a quorum.
Since then, the Trump administration has also cut staff at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and sought to strip the collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of government employees via executive order.
"Whether it's Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the U.S. or Javier Milei and Eduardo Eurnekian in Argentina, we see the same playbook of unfairness and authoritarianism in action around the world," the report states.
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How Federal Workers Can Leverage Civil Disobedience as a Strategy to Win
In the face of Trump’s attack on federal unions, government employees have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.
May 25, 2025
Federal unions are facing a do-or-die moment: President Donald Trump is trying to stomp out worker power by destroying federal labor rights and firing federal workers. The best tool organized labor and workers have for saving themselves—as well as everything from school funding and racial equity to cancer research and social security—is to shut things down.
At the end of March, Trump signed an executive order intended to eliminate federal unions and retroactively cancel collectively bargained contracts for nearly a million federal workers. Without their union protections, even more workers will be fired. Those who remain will be at constant risk of the same fate. Black workers and women, who make up a large proportion of the federal workforce (particularly entry-level positions), stand to lose the most. On May 16, a federal appeals court lifted the temporary block on Trump’s order, allowing Trump to deny collective bargaining rights to federal workers while the matter is litigated in the courts.
Many people ask, “Can Trump legally do that?”
A better, more urgent response is: “Will we let Trump do that?”
“If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?” Recent history says yes.
Trump’s order is a massive overreach of presidential authority, and federal unions have already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s action. More egregiously, the order is a blatantly illegal attempt at retaliation. The White House’s own statement verifies that Trump took away labor rights because the unions “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” by publicly disagreeing with the administration’s policies and continuing to file employee grievances. To be clear, this is their legal right.
It is a positive sign that unions immediately decided to fight back, unlike some of the other institutions targeted by Trump. The universities and law firms that preemptively surrendered to Trump’s shakedowns have tarnished their reputations and credibility while forfeiting massive sums of money. This has only emboldened Trump to demand more control and sent shockwaves through our democracy. Belatedly, those institutions have begun to follow the example set by unions, though the outlook is still grim. Lawsuits, rallies, and petitions are necessary and important tools of resistance, but they have not been sufficient to stop Trump’s authoritarianism and dismantling of government.
Federal workers have a unique, nonviolent, and powerful tool at their disposal: withholding their labor.
Strikes, slowdowns, sickouts—workers have many ways to withhold their labor to protest injustice in the workplace. Federal employees have no legal right to strike, which is why they have generally avoided this tactic. The last time there was a major strike by federal workers was in 1981. President Ronald Reagan crushed the strike by firing and replacing air traffic controllers who walked off the job, a moment widely viewed as the beginning of the labor movement’s decline.
But there is much that separates the strike under Reagan from what federal workers face today under Trump. Reagan had both public sentiment and the law behind him when he fired over 11,000 federal workers. As of April 2025, Trump had the lowest approval rating compared to the same period of any other second term president since polling began. Moreover, Trump’s retaliatory order to strip the rights of federal workers is not supported by legal precedent, and he has fired over 279,000 federal workers to much public outcry.
A strike by federal workers has high stakes. It risks the union being dissolved and striking workers being barred from working for the federal government in the future. But, with Trump’s mass firings and revocation of basic rights for federal workers, federal unions (and many workers’ middle class jobs, pay, and benefits) may disappear anyway.
This raises a follow up question: “If federal workers were to go on strike, could they win and save their jobs?”
Recent history says yes.
Public school teachers in West Virginia went on a nine-day strike in 2018 over abysmally low wages and rising healthcare costs. Strikes by public teachers have been illegal in West Virginia for decades, explaining why even their union leaders did not support the strikes initially. Undeterred, rank and file teachers took matters into their own hands by launching a “wildcat strike” (a work stoppage not authorized by the union). Even though the state attorney general declared the strike “unlawful” and threatened legal action, he never took steps toward enforcement, likely because of the heavy public support for the strikes. Even though the strike shut down schools across the state, parents and students viewed striking teachers as fighting for the common good against dysfunctional government leadership. The teachers won pay raises and a freeze on increases to health insurance premiums. Despite not having a legal right to strike, teachers took action anyway—and they won resoundingly. This inspired teachers in other red states to go on strike for better funding and conditions in their schools.
Essential federal workers provide another example from 2019. In a failed effort to secure funding for a border wall, Trump shut down the federal government for more than a month. Without a federal spending bill in place, federal workers were either furloughed or forced to work for 35 days without pay. What ultimately ended Trump’s shutdown was a small group of air traffic controllers. Throughout the ordeal, the air traffic controller union leadership strongly disavowed any idea of striking, both publicly and privately, worried that it would trigger serious legal consequences for the union. But after performing high stress jobs for a month without pay, and once other labor movement leaders began to call for a general strike, air traffic controllers started to call in sick, grounding flights in major metros. Within hours of the sickout, Trump reached an agreement on a new spending bill. If coordinated with the intention of creating a work stoppage, these sickouts ran the legal risks described previously. But support for ending the shutdown was high, and the public blamed Trump for causing the crisis.
An act of civil disobedience is not a risk to be taken lightly. But when government employers took deeply unpopular actions that hurt workers and communities, teachers and federal employees braved the legal risks and found a way to win.
As federal workers and their unions consider the path ahead, these words of a striking West Virginia teacher echo even louder today: “We understand this was a do-or-die moment. If we didn’t do it, there might not be a tomorrow to fix it. If we didn’t do it, we would have failed our kids, our schools, and our community.”
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US Banana Giant Chiquita Fires Thousands of Striking Workers in Panama
The Chiquita workers' strike is part of a nationwide protest movement against pension reforms approved by Panama's right-wing government.
May 23, 2025
The U.S.-headquartered banana giant Chiquita said Thursday that it moved to fire thousands of Panamanian workers who walked off the job last month as part of nationwide protests against the right-wing government's unpopular reforms to the nation's pension system.
Citing an unnamed source close to Chiquita, Reutersreported that the mass firings are expected to impact around 5,000 of the company's 6,500 Panamanian workers. José Raúl Mulino, Panama's right-wing president, defended the banana giant formerly known as United Fruit, accusing striking workers of unlawful "intransigence."
The company estimates that the strike, which began in late April, has cost it at least $75 million.
The pension reforms, known as Law 462, sparked outrage across Panama, with unions and other groups warning the changes would result in cuts to retirement benefits, particularly in the future for younger workers. The law transitions the country's pension system to an individual account structure that opponents say will be far less reliable than its predecessor.
"With the previous legislation, we could retire on 60% to 70% of our salary. Now, with the new formula, that amount drops to just 30% to 35%," said Diógenes Sánchez of Panama's main teachers' union. "It's a starvation pension."
The Associated Pressnoted Thursday that in recent weeks, "marches and occasional roadblocks have stretched from one end of the country to the other as teachers, construction workers, and other unions expressed their rejection of changes the government said were necessary to keep the social security system solvent."
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