His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy.
From the viewpoint of American workers, there have been better Labor Days. Donald Trump chose to celebrate this year’s edition by announcing last Thursday his unilateral abrogation of the federal government’s contracts with the unions that represent the scientists, engineers, and other staffers at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service), the Patent Office, and the International Trade Administration. This follows his earlier contract terminations with the unions that represented 400,000 employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as those at the Department of Health and Human Services, and other major departments.
According to a study from the Center for American Progress (CAP), these Trump-imposed contract nullifications have cost 81.8 percent of civilian federal workers their right to collectively bargain—and that study came out before last Thursday’s new round of government fuck-you’s to its workers. The total number of workers whose contracts Trump has trashed now exceeds one million, which comes to approximately one-fifteenth of American workers covered by a union contract. Georgetown University labor historian Joe McCartin terms this “by far the largest single action of union busting in American history.”
The largest federal worker union, the American Federation of Government Employees, has a case pending challenging Trump’s right to nullify contracts that the federal government has signed. In every instance of contract nullification, Trump has stipulated that his right to cancel is rooted in a clause stating that contracts should not extend to departments and agencies that deal with matters of national security. That’s why the CIA and Defense Department have never been unionized. But how the doctors, nurses, therapists, and social workers who care for the nation’s veterans—not to mention the park rangers who tend to Yosemite and Yellowstone, and the hundreds of thousands of other federal employees who help keep the nation running—could endanger national security in the course of their daily rounds remains unexplained.
Trump’s justification raises a further question: If those million-plus workers are all engaged in matters of national security, why has Trump laid off so many of them? This is a circle that resists squaring.
WOULD THAT THIS CONSTITUTED THE WHOLE of Trump’s war on organized labor. It doesn’t. Seven days after he took the oath of office, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, despite the fact that under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act, which stipulates that each of the five board members is to serve for five years, her term was not to end until August 2028. The NLRA narrowly limits the president’s power over the Board; his sole power is to nominate members, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and who can only be removed by the president for dereliction of duty or malfeasance in office, neither of which Trump even alleged as cause for Wilcox’s dismissal.
In fact, he failed to specify any reason for his action, though the effect was to reduce Board membership to a bare two—not enough to constitute a quorum. And while Trump and Senate Republicans have eagerly installed replacements for most of the department and agency officials he’s sacked, no such rush has been evident at the NLRB. So there it sits, powerless to rule on questions pertaining to violations and abuses of, or compliance with, workers’ rights on the job, even though it’s the sole government agency that has that power. Most of the agency’s duties and cases that arise can be settled by the Board’s regional staffs (which run union certification elections and investigate alleged “unfair labor practices”) and by its administrative judges, who rule on cases brought by employees, employers, or Board staff. Their rulings can be appealed to the Board, which then issue decisions that can affect workers’ rights broadly.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, the Board (which has always been composed of three members from the president’s party and two from the opposition party) significantly enhanced workers’ rights: forbidding “captive audience” meetings in which employers compel their employees to attend sessions of anti-union propaganda; requiring employers to recognize a union with which a majority of their workers have signed affiliation cards; and forbidding noncompete clauses through which employers keep their workers from moving to new jobs in the same field.
