Trump's Lawbreaking Also Aimed at Workers

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-01-28-trumps-lawbreaking-also-aimed-at-workers/



President Trump’s current day of running amok, which began with unconstitutionally impounding federal grants and appropriations, as my colleague David Dayen has explained, has continued with his attacks on American workers. During the past 24 hours, he fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Wilcox was fired illegally, despite Congress having ratified her appointment to a term that extends to 2028, in keeping with Trump’s campaign to negate congressionally enacted laws and appointments. Her firing—which Wilcox is contesting in court—also leaves the five-member Board with just two members, even as the Supreme Court has ruled that the Board needs at least three members to issue any rulings, including on illegal firings, union election certification challenges, citations of unfair labor practices, or anything else.

The simultaneous firing of Abruzzo, who’s been the most pro-worker federal official since New York Sen. Robert Wagner (who authored both the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act in 1935), means that the Board not only can’t rule on any employment issues but also that its local attorneys who investigate employee and employer complaints no longer have a senior counsel who sets their priorities and policy. In Wilcox’s and Abruzzo’s stead, we’re left with a labor law of the jungle, which enables employers to run as roughshod over their workers as their little pocketbooks desire.

Trump’s war on immigrants compounds this abuse. Last Friday, ICE agents showed up at a number of downtown San Francisco office buildings after hours, when janitors (members of SEIU Local 87) were engaged in their regular cleaning and maintenance tasks. In almost every major American city, a sizable share of the janitorial workforce is composed of immigrants, so this show of force is sure to compel workers to stop showing up to work and to engender fear among immigrants and their families, both documented and not. It also runs completely counter to virtually every city’s efforts to bring workers back to their downtowns, an effort upon which the newly elected, more-centrist-than-his-predecessor mayor of San Francisco has embarked. That mayor, Daniel Lurie, along with the city’s district attorney, police chief, county sheriff, and other public officials and community and labor leaders, is holding a press conference as we speak to reaffirm San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city and to make clear its determination to oppose Trump’s efforts to instill fear in its residents and disrupt both the city’s revitalization and workings of daily life that sustain it.

By coincidence, the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released its annual report on union membership, which showed that the share of America’s workers in unions declined from 10.0 percent in 2023 to 9.9 percent in 2024. Despite polls showing that unions’ approval rating stands at 70 percent, its highest level in more than half a century and much higher than the approval rating for corporations, and despite polls also showing that 60 percent of American workers would join a union if they could, the rate of private-sector unionization, now at 5.9 percent, continues its 70-year slide toward zero.

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