Trump's war on workers

Go back to March of last year. Trump signed an executive order pulling nearly a million federal workers out of collective bargaining entirely, citing national security at agencies that have nothing to do with national security, like the IRS. On the order’s one year anniversary this past March, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it “the single biggest act of union-busting in our country’s history.” She wasn’t exaggerating. In the months since, the administration expanded that order again and again, most recently pulling NASA, NOAA, the National Weather Service, and the Patent and Trademark Office out of union coverage too. Then in June, Trump went further, signing an order reclassifying career federal employees so they can be fired without due process and replaced with political loyalists. AFGE called it exactly what it is: “a blatant attempt to corrupt the federal government.” The courts have mostly let this stand. The Ninth Circuit sided with the administration back in February. A federal judge in Massachusetts did push back in June, ruling the administration couldn’t control union elections at federal agencies, but that’s one narrow win against a wave of losses. Roughly 400,000 federal jobs have disappeared since Trump took office, plenty of them union jobs. Manufacturing, the sector he promised to bring roaring back, has lost 75,000 jobs on his watch instead, partly because the factories the tariffs are luring back are built for machines, not people. Here’s the twist nobody in the administration wants to talk about. Union membership actually hit its highest level in sixteen years this past winter. Workers facing this kind of pressure are doing what workers have always done under pressure: organizing anyway. That should worry Republicans more than any poll number does. Now, I was one of the most pro-union Republicans in Congress, so maybe I see this differently than the rest of my old party. But here’s what they don’t get. The White House can cancel a contract with a signature. What it can’t cancel is the reason people organize in the first place. People join unions when they feel like nobody’s looking out for them. And right now, a lot of federal workers feel exactly that way.