Corporate Lawlessness Comes Next
Trump's attacks on workers will soon become something even worse.
Ronald Reagan, who launched the modern American age of inequality, and Donald Trump, who is riding its consequences into an ominous new era, have something in common: They were both union members, in the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan served six yearlong terms as the union’s president, beginning in 1947. He leaned on these credentials during his more important career as union buster. At the infamous 1981 press conference where he vowed to fire the striking air traffic controllers of PATCO, Reagan cast himself as the reasonable one by noting, “as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union.”
By 2021, SAG-AFTRA had learned its lesson. After the events of January 6 the union moved to kick Trump out. He decided to resign, prompting an official statement from the union’s leadership that read, in full, “Thank you.” A fun little moment for the labor movement to look back on. Unfortunately, the other lesson that we can draw from the Reagan era is that the awful things that the federal government has already done to unions in Trump’s second term are only the prelude to a much broader attack on worker power that we should gird ourselves for right now.
It’s dumb to sit around waiting for bad things to happen before we start deciding how to deal with them. Let’s look forward a bit, shall we? And let’s begin by looking backwards, to what happened after Reagan fired the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. As jarring as that action was, its impact was felt not just by thousands of workers in one union in 1981, but by millions of workers, in every union, for decades. Because PATCO was also a big, flashing sign to corporate America that the federal government was definitively on their side in the battle between capital and labor. The legacy of the firings was not just a more anti-union public sector, but a private sector that felt unleashed to be ruthless with striking workers. This unshackling of union busting by America’s employers (along with Reagan’s entire economic and legislative agendas) helped to accelerate the collapse of the labor movement’s strike power. In 1974, there were 424 major strikes in America. In 1981, the year of PATCO, there were 145. By 1988, when Reagan left office, there were 40. Companies felt empowered to crush strikes as they wished; unions felt more intimidated, and became less likely to strike; the bargaining power of workers decreased; union density fell; economic inequality rose. All of these trends have continued to this day. When Reagan took over in 1981, more than 22% of workers were union members. Today, that figure has fallen below ten percent. And in 2024, there were only 31 major strikes in the country, a figure significantly lower than the lowest point of the Reagan era.
In his first months in office, Trump has already exceeded Reagan’s attacks on public sector workers by an order of magnitude. First he unilaterally tossed out the union contract covering more than 50,000 TSA workers, and then (after there was no powerful labor action in response, natch) followed that up by tossing out union contracts covering close to a million more workers across the federal government. You can bet that red state governors will do their best to copy Trump’s actions with public sector workers in their own states. If organized labor, dazed and confused, does not figure out an effective response quickly, you can bet that public sector unionism will be decimated nationally before Trump leaves office.
And that’s not the worst thing! The worst thing, which is what I want to touch on today, is what is to come. Like Reagan, Trump’s actions are a signal to private sector employers that they should feel free to go to war with unions. And the Trump administration, I’m sorry to say, is going to permit open corporate lawlessness in a way that Reagan could have only dreamed. In particular, three qualities of the Trump administration foreshadow what is going to be an all-out war by corporate America against organized labor:
Dismantling enforcement. Usually, Republican presidents put right wing anti-union bureaucrats in charge of the NLRB, and they set about reversing any pro-worker regulations that their Democratic predecessors put in place. This process takes years because it unfolds according to rules. Trump, however, cares nothing for rules. He illegally fired a Democratic NLRB board member, effectively shutting down the board’s national enforcement of labor law. The Supreme Court is likely to rule that he is allowed to do that after all, which will ensure that the NLRB effectively disappears. There will be no federal cops on the labor beat. Companies can fire workers who organize and refuse to bargain in good faith and retaliate against legally protected worker activity and illegally union bust to their heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that there will be almost no chance that they will be held accountable as long as they can afford to litigate things up to Washington, DC. This is bad news for unions that have spent the past 90 years building themselves into organizations that rely on these bureaucratic processes for power. We are counting down the days now until The Purge: Labor Law arrives. Will this prompt aggrieved statements from unions? Yes. Will those statements have any effect? No. We need to contemplate other avenues of enforcing worker power, and fast.
Active attack. It’s not just that the labor police are leaving the beat; the government is also going to do directly attack the power of organized labor in unprecedented ways. What Trump has already done to federal workers—the worst government attacks on unions since WW2—give a taste of what is to come. Trump has no scruples, and the White House is going to be more or less happy to do whatever its closest corporate allies ask, with little regard for the courts. Recognizing this, a corporate lobbying group has already sent a letter to attorney general Pam Bondi asking her to simply scrap a long list of pro-worker regulations that the NLRB passed during the Biden administration. These include things like a ban on mandatory “captive audience” anti-union meetings, regulations on overly broad severance agreements, rules discouraging companies from refusing to recognize duly constituted unions, the right of workers to wear union or political paraphernalia at work, and much more. As the corporations well know, these are things that a Republican NLRB would normally get to work rolling back, according the established procedures; but, in view of the fact that Trump cares nothing about established procedures or the Constitution or law in general, tech companies are trying to just get Bondi (whose job is not this!) to wave a magic I Am The Law wand and make these labor regulations disappear.
What is this? This is a well-thought-out attempt by an organization representing the majority of America’s business class to opportunistically use the poisonous lawlessness of the Trump administration to lawlessly toss out laws they don’t like, so that they can more easily exploit and oppress their own employees. That is what this is. Do not be fooled by all of the nice legalistic language. This is organized crime in action, except that none of it is “crime” any more, because the government charged with enforcing the law has decided that laws are not real any more. Depending on how successful the courts are at limiting these types of actions—and the smart bet is “not very successful”—you can expect much more of this.
Corruption. The Trump administration is corrupt. Let’s not use unnecessary euphemisms. They are corrupt in a much more bold and forthright way than any Presidential administration in living memory. Using threats of retaliation to scare companies and donors into paying hundreds of millions of dollars in protection money to the president is corrupt. Having the president’s family launch meme coins that are directly promoted by the President, and accepting millions of dollars from the crypto industry while having the government prop up crypto prices, is corrupt. The Trump administration is happily corrupt and open for business. This gangster-style transactional approach to governing is the best thing that corporations who want to cement their power over their workers could ask for.
Who is going to operate more successfully in a corrupt, bribe-driven political environment: Labor unions, or corporations? The answer is not labor unions. For companies, the ability to simply make large donations to Trump’s presidential library or to his political operation or to buy large quantities of his crypto or steer money to his hotels or do business with his children in exchange for political favors saves a lot of time and effort. This helps businesses dispense with a lot of pretense. They no longer have to funnel their bribes through a tortured array of PR firms and allies. They can go right to the source of power and get what they want. Unions cannot. For one thing, bribery is bad and participating in it goes against the democratic values that unions embody. Besides that, unions will never be able to financially compete with corporations when it comes to bribe money. In any contest of spending, business will be capable of outspending labor. Trying to play on the corrupt playing field is both immoral and a sucker’s game for organized labor. The unions that have tried to cozy up to Trump, like the Teamsters, have obliterated their own credibility while simultaneously suffering the assaults on labor detailed above that all the other unions are suffering as well. The biggest thing these unions “won” from the White House was the selection of a theoretically less anti-union Labor Secretary. What will this get them, materially speaking? Nothing. It is very close to worthless. A dumb booby prize to distract credulous people who are getting stabbed in the back.
So. If the labor movement thought that things were bad under Trump 2, just wait. This is what is coming down the pike, practically speaking: A shutdown of federal enforcement of labor law, and an accompanying echo of that on the state level in red states; a nonstop series of “legal” assaults on a century’s worth of post-New Deal law that established the relationship between government, business, and labor in this country; and a fee-for-service model in which an utterly unscrupulous pro-business White House will carry out anti-union wet dreams of corporate America, while thumbing their noses at the courts. If there are any major national companies that you think are nice, there is a very good chance that the actions that they take towards their workers over the next four years will prove you wrong.
Where does this leave the labor movement? The easiest way to answer this question is to make a list of all of our options for building and maintaining and exercising collective power for working people—and then crossing off that list the ones that are not going to work under the Trump administration. The NLRB? Nope. Litigating these outrageous actions up to the Supreme Court? Ha. Trying to shame Trump and his Republican allies in the court of public opinion? Psht. There is no upside to deluding ourselves. These traditional tactics are not going to work. There is some potential in directly shaming corporations, as the impact of recent politically tinged PR disasters at Starbucks and Target go to show. But the power of workers cannot be centered in consumer boycotts. The power of workers can only be centered in workers themselves. That means the power to do the work, or not do the work—the power of the strike.
Even absent NLRB protections, workers can still organize. Even in the face of corporate retaliation, workers can still agree to act collectively. Even in the face of fascism, unions can still strike. Businesses, fascist or not, don’t make money when no work is being done. We will refocus ourselves on the strike, or we are in for perhaps the most precipitous union losses in history. If anyone has any better ideas, please speak up.
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Related reading: Unions Without Strikes; Gangster Party; They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don’t Stop Them; There’s No Justice Without Power; Not Just Unions; Strike-Ready Unions.
What can you do now? Get ready to protest on May Day. Organize a union in your workplace. Talk to people in your community. Join DSA. Read a good book about the labor movement. Buy a How Things Work t-shirt. ROCK THIS FLY ASS T-SHIRT ON MAY DAY BABY.
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When you read the bloody history of labor struggle in this country you realize that we are just about back to where things were before the powerful and hard-fought New Deal labor reforms were established. And barring another catastrophic event like the Great Depression, it is hard to see how things get better given the degree to which the U.S. Constitution is inherently hostile to the kinds of central state-building efforts (like those of the New Deal) required to fix labor-capital relations (indeed, the New Deal was a sort of miracle by U.S. standards). I am not optimistic. There seems to be very little resistance from the weak unions we have left (I am a FUN member, and their calendar for April is virtually empty), and anyway, there is no real left to speak of anymore in this country of the kind that preceded the New Deal reforms (exhibit A -- the "left" is still talking more about "Tr*mp bad" than embracing any sort of program that might cohere as an alternative). Bernie tried to build that left structure back up to some extent in milder form, but we see how the corporate party machine crushed him to dust. The only thing I can think of that might spark a change is a widespread crisis brought on by the climate further destabilizing, which seems to be well in the works, so we will see. But by the time that starts happening in ways that affect people on a wide enough scale, we are truly in uncharted territory.
Anyone who thinks that a presidential election won't change much because "if it actually changed anything they wouldn't let you vote on it" hasn't looked at the Reagan Administration for more than like 3 minutes. What an unnecessarily shitty 8 years that was. Ugh.