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working class
Trump's Attack on EPA Workers Is an Attack on You
Silencing our union members, working on the front line of environmental protection, is beyond dangerous. It strips away a critical check against political interference in science. And that can only mean more threats on the horizon to the air you breathe and the water you drink.
Sep 01, 2025
Labor Day is a time to honor the workers who keep our country safe, strong and healthy. But this year, while families fire up their grills and celebrate the dignity of work, the Trump administration is continuing its brazen assault against the very workers who protect the air you breathe and the water you drink.
On August 8th, the Trump administration issued an executive order banning AFGE Council 238, our union representing more than 8,000 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers nationwide. The executive order categorized the EPA as a “national security” agency, an absurd and illegal misrepresentation of EPA’s historic mission to protect human health and the environment.
We are under no illusions: this move has nothing to do with national security. This action was about silencing the scientists and staff at the EPA and clearing the way for corporate polluters to have free rein.
This Labor Day, don’t just thank workers. Stand with EPA workers and make your voice heard too. Because protecting our rights is protecting your right to clean air and safe drinking water.
Here’s why banning our union matters. First, it means that science is on the chopping block. Practicing sound science is critical to protecting human health, and EPA scientists are your first line of defense against toxic chemicals, smog and hazardous waste.
For years, our union fought to secure ‘scientific integrity’ protections into our union contract so scientists wouldn’t be punished for telling the truth. Last summer, this became a reality in our most recent contract, which prohibited retaliation against EPA scientists who follow sound scientific principles.
The fight solidified the importance of sound science to EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment, and it underscored our union’s role as one of the public’s strongest safeguards against political infringement on EPA’s work to protect clean water and air.
Now, with Trump illegally terminating our contract, that safeguard protecting EPA’s scientific integrity is gone. Trump’s political appointees and corporate lobbyists will have a freer hand to rewrite science and weaken safeguards against environmental hazards like air pollution, toxic chemicals, and hazardous waste.
Second, it means transparency at the agency is out the window. Our union no longer has the protections to hold the agency accountable to its mission to protect your air, your land and your water.
In 2019, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency tried to hide flaws in a very controversial water permit proposal submitted by PolyMet Mining by asking that they not be documented and instead have EPA merely read the critical information over the phone. Our union blew the whistle and released communications showing that the two agencies colluded to keep the critical comments away from the public. After our union’s disclosure, MPCA’s permit action was overturned, thereby protecting the St. Louis River and Lake Superior.
Without our union, that cover-up might never have seen the light of day.
That is why silencing our union is so dangerous. It strips away a critical check against political interference in science. And that can only mean more threats on the horizon to the air you breathe and the water you drink.
That’s why federal unions, including ours, are actively working to push Congress to pass H.R. 2550, the Protect America's Workforce Act. This bill would restore collective bargaining rights and stop Trump’s illegal executive order in its tracks. As Congress returns from recess on September 2, we need your voice too: call or email your representatives, demand they support the bill and that they sign a discharge petition to bring the bill to the House floor.
This Labor Day, don’t just thank workers. Stand with EPA workers and make your voice heard too. Because protecting our rights is protecting your right to clean air and safe drinking water.
AFGE Council 238 will continue to fight the Trump administration’s illegal executive order. We will not be silenced, and we won’t stop defending the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the planet we all call home.
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Trump's Labor Day Assault on American Workers
This self-anointed man of the working people has waged an all-out attack on the unions that make workers’ lives better, thrashing away at workers’ rights and unions’ ability to organize.
Aug 31, 2025
The man in the McDonald’s suit insists unceasingly that he’s for working people, and huge portions believe him—but what do the facts of President Trump’s actual policies show? What does it mean to be for workers?
You’d think being “pro-worker” would mean things like lowering consumer prices and boosting wages. But the facts show the man in the McDonald’s suit isn’t doing either of those things—in fact, despite the president’s false protestations, he is doing the opposite.
Despite Trump’s profoundly Orwellian lies, prices are, in fact, UP from last year for most categories of daily life, according to the Trump administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices for food are up nearly 3 percent since this time last year. Workers’ grocery bills are spiking higher as supermarkets pass along Trump’s tariffs to consumers, as all critics predicted.
You’d think that being for workers would mean supporting higher wages, particularly for working-class and lower-income workers. But again, the man donning the McDonald’s outfit is in fact doing the opposite. As Economic Policy Institute reported, Trump “rescinded an executive order that raised the minimum wage for federal contractors,” effectively slashing these workers’ wages by 25% to 60%. This means that millions of federally contracted workers, some of whom make poverty wages, no longer get minimum wage protections because of Trump.
All of this pain and harm Trump is causing for workers is part of the plan, right out of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—promoting the profit and wealth interests of the rich and corporations over working people’s needs and survival.
Compounding all this harm, on Labor Day the Trump administration “will advance plans to eliminate federal minimum wage protections for millions of child care and home care providers,” the Center for American Progress reports. Think about that. Millions of low-paid domestic care workers will now lose federal minimum wage protections because of the man masquerading as a McDonald’s worker and man of the people.
With the help of a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, Republicans rescinded a Biden rule aimed at expanding overtime pay for millions of working Americans. That rule would have given overtime pay protections to 4 million workers. Seriously, does that sound pro-worker to you?
You might expect a “pro-worker” president to support middle-class jobs—wrong again. Is it “pro-worker” to fire and lay off hundreds of thousands of government workers, all to pay for tax cuts that almost entirely benefit the rich? This is precisely what Trump is doing. New government projections show Trump will have eliminated about 300,000 federal workers by the end of this year. Think about that, 300,000 people made unemployed by Trump. That is an entire city of middle-class workers, fired and laid off, now desperately scrambling to pay bills, buy groceries, and survive. Many will lose their homes if they don’t quickly find another middle-class job. Doesn’t sound very “pro-worker,” now does it?
Would a “pro-worker” president eviscerate worker safety and health protections on the job? That’s exactly what Trump is doing. His horrendous, harmful bill gutted the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, slashing staff and workplace inspections, the lifeblood of maintaining worker safety and health. More than 140,000 U.S. workers died from hazardous job conditions in 2023, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual “Death on the Job” report. That’s 383 Americans dying every day from dangerous working conditions that can be prevented by stronger regulations and enforcement—but the guy in the McDonald’s outfit is doing the opposite, erasing a stunning 30 percent of inspections while radically reducing penalties for endangering workers.
Deepening this harm, Trump eliminated nearly all workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a small but important agency that produces critical research on work hazards, including maintaining a firefighter cancer registry and a lab that certifies respirators for many industries. The cuts are “a very pointed attack on workers in this country,” Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the NIOSH workers union told the Associated Press.
This same alleged “champion” of working people is deploying heavily militarized battalions of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to round up suspected undocumented immigrants—engaging in racial profiling, violating Constitutional due process, tearing apart families, deporting legal residents and some U.S. citizens, raiding farms and warehouses and day labor sites, putting millions of hard-working immigrant (and non-immigrant) families in danger and terror.
This self-anointed man of the working people has waged an all-out attack on the unions that make workers’ lives better, thrashing away at workers’ rights and unions’ ability to organize. On the Thursday before Labor Day, Trump spat out yet another anti-worker executive order aimed at erasing collective-bargaining rights from workers at the National Weather Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and other federal agencies, Huffington Post reported.
All of this pain and harm Trump is causing for workers is part of the plan, right out of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—promoting the profit and wealth interests of the rich and corporations over working people’s needs and survival. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s tax plan enriches the rich while taking from the poor, while adding trillions to the national debt. Those tax cuts primarily going to the rich are paid for in part by Trump’s gutting and slashing of workers’ rights and protections on the job.
Writing for The Nation this week, Robert L. Borosage and Sara Steffens summarized Trump’s wholesale assault on workers compellingly:
Employers are being empowered to act lawlessly toward their workers. Unions are being stripped of the legal structure that protected their existence. Immigrant workers are abused, hunted, and deported. Women and minorities will suffer from discrimination at rates not seen since the civil rights revolution. Workers’ families are shouldering higher costs for food, healthcare, and energy.
On Labor Day and beyond, when the guy the goody grin in the McDonald’s suit says he’s helping working people and making their lives “great again,” remember—all the facts show the opposite. The facts show the Trump administration is undermining workers, making their lives harder, exposing them to more life-threatening hazards, robbing millions of overtime pay, eliminating minimum wage protections for millions more, and attacking the unions that improve workers’ pay and rights and safety on the job.
Don’t buy Trump’s false “happy Labor Day” hype—it’s all lies with those fatty, greasy fries.
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'Workers Over Billionaires': It's Time to Put Heat on the Oligarchy
From the Hamptons to DC and across this nation, the working class get nothing but pain from the billionaire agenda. We’re fed up with fascist attacks and now we fight back.
Aug 30, 2025
It’s no longer hypothetical. It’s here and it’s obvious: America has been captured by an oligarchic class of about a thousand corrupt billionaires who have taken over our government for their own benefit and are actively working to impose crushing austerity and fascist rule over the rest of us.
The good news? The "rest of us” are 350 million strong and we’re fighting back harder than ever this Labor Day weekend, with hundreds of “Workers Over Billionaires” actions across the country, including on the home turf of the billionaire class in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York.
And we’ve also got our own war room of the working class: the Department of Class Solidarity, a new website that arms organizers, activists, and everyday people with the tools to expose the billionaires ransacking our democracy, with a state-by-state list of billionaires that includes details and dossiers on their devastating impact on our communities.
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The Hamptons are one of the places where right-wing billionaires have been plotting and planning in their hundred-million-dollar mansions, exploding billions of dollars into the campaigns of our corrupt president and his fully-captured, fully-fascist Republican Party, which aims to secure oligarchic control.
Hamptons habitués like Bill Ackman, Ken Griffin, Ken Langone, William Lauder, and Dan Loeb have tossed tons of cash at Trump and the Republicans, and they seem to be winning at the federal level: the billionaire-class has secured a set of trillion-dollar tax breaks and endless billions more in sweetheart government contracts and subsidy deals in return.
But in the streets, millions of Americans have marched, protested, and taken direct action to oppose the wildly unfair trillion-dollar tax breaks for the rich alongside hundreds of billions in cuts to healthcare, housing, education and transportation as well as the authoritarian kidnappings of adults and children from courts, schools, and workplaces for forced deportation by the corrupt oligarchic state.
At the local and state level, principled public servants have refused to cave in to the billionaire class and the fascist politicians they control.
In New York City, the winning campaign of Zohran Mamdani on an explicitly pro-working class, anti-austerity affordability platform has given hope to millions of New Yorkers who love their home and hate the extreme inequality that has made it so expensive.
Zohran crushed the billionaire-backed neoliberal misogynist Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, but the billionaire class won’t take ‘no’ for an answer and have already spent another $19 million to attack Mamdani. It's just another reason we’re heading to their home turf and joining with thousands more nationwide to fight back.
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Working-class New Yorkers get nothing but pain from the billionaire agenda. And we’re fed up with fascist attacks on families and workers intended to inflame and divide working-class communities to maintain billionaire control. Hundreds of thousands of us have marched in the streets against oligarchy, and we’re ready to fight harder for each other and for leaders that have our back.
This weekend’s actions in the Hamptons and across the country mark the return of a real Worker's Labor Day and a working class ready, willing, and able to fight the class war that has been fought against us for the last 50 years. I believe that we can beat the billionaires, and I believe that we will win.
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