When Trump was announced as the winner of the 2024 election, the stock market went wild, scoring the fifth biggest one-day advance in its history. In the words of the Wall Street Journal itself, capitalists were salivating at the thought of another Trump presidency.
This investor enthusiasm for Trump has several sources, not least the likelihood of further tax cuts on corporate profits and capital gains earnings; but perhaps the biggest reason for this “irrational exuberance” is the expectation that Trump will once again attack labor. The working class has been on the rise for years now, striking and often winning major gains, much to the consternation of Wall Street and tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. From the massive UAW strike in 2023 to the more recent strikes at Boeing, Amazon, and Starbucks, workers are rising up and organizing in numbers and levels of militancy not seen in decades. The ruling class knows that Trump will attack this movement, and this is why they are much more enthusiastically throwing their weight behind him this time. This is almost certainly a major reason why Musk helped Trump to win in November, and why Trump’s support from the ruling class, particularly in the tech sector where resistance to unions is fierce, is much wider and deeper than it was in 2016.
Building a labor movement that can fight these attacks and grow stronger in the process will require not only a radical break with the business unionism of the past, but the active organization and mobilization of the entire working class. It’s up to rank-and-file workers to protect ourselves, not just against the hammer blows on unions that are coming our way, but against the devastating attacks on the working class meant to divide our power, like mass deportations and bigoted anti-trans legislation. That’ll require organizing ourselves from the bottom up, and pushing back on our union leaders, to be ready to strike against Trump and his administration, breaking restrictive labor laws to coordinate across the working class in self-defense. It’s up to us, in other words, to reclaim the power we hold, to use the weapons we wield as workers to defend ourselves and build our power.
The Coming Storm
The almost certain attacks on the still burgeoning new labor movement by the Trump administration will come in a few different forms.
To begin with, Trump will likely make big changes to the direction of the Department of Labor, making it harder for many workers to qualify for overtime — in other words, increasing the profits employers can extract from their workforce. Following the counsel of his court jesters and deregulation advocates like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswany, Trump will also likely push to ease child worker restrictions and attack workplace safety rules imposed by OSHA. These same advisors also want him to eliminate unions for government employees completely. Ramaswamy, for instance, who until recently had been tapped, along with Elon Musk, to lead the absurdly conceived new “Department of Government Efficiency,” has already been calling for ending collective bargaining agreements for public teachers’ unions entirely.
Another way Trump will likely attack labor is by restructuring the National Labor Relations Board, or the NLRB. That’s the “high court” in the government for resolving conflicts between new or established unions and employers. But the NLRB also sets precedent that can have dramatic effects on the ability of unions and workers to win legal recognition and the bosses’ ability to wage anti-union campaigns. With regard to the NLRB, Trump has already played his hand toward what kind of labor policy he plans to implement as President. While his nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer for Secretary of Labor was seen by some as a sign that he may be amenable to a more pro-worker approach and possibly open to the influence of conservative labor leaders like the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien, it’s more likely that her appointment was little more than a transactional quid pro quo for O’Brien’s support and a cynical attempt to hide his true intentions toward labor.
But, while Trump’s labor secretary may be more pro-worker than expected (though that certainly remains to be seen), the NLRB is where the real power to attack labor lies. And Trump and his congressional allies, including Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Democrat Joe Manchin, have already started laying the foundations for a Trump-controlled labor board. On December 11, Biden’s largely routine re-nomination of NLRB Chairperson Lauren McFerran, which would have theoretically allowed her to serve until after the midterms, was narrowly rejected by the Senate. This means that Trump will be able to appoint two new board members as soon as he takes office, giving him and his allies a 3-2 advantage on the NLRB, which could potentially allow them to overturn any number of labor protections and to make new decisions that could set the board’s policy for years or even decades to come. Among the most important of these perhaps is the Cemex decision, which the Teamsters have recently used to organize at Amazon. If Cemex is overturned by the NLRB, and there seems to be a good chance that could happen, that would be a slap in the face to Teamsters leader O’Brien, who helped elect Trump.
However, Trump’s cozy relationship with the rabidly anti-union Musk suggests that even bigger challenges to the federal government’s oversight of labor could be in the works. Musk and his company SpaceX, for instance, have already filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The very existence of the NLRA — a set of rules that codifies the right to strike, among other things — was a concession from the ruling class in the roiling labor battles of the 1930s. A sympathetic circuit-court judiciary and Supreme Court (possibly filled with a majority of Trump appointees) could conceivably take moves to gut or to overturn the NLRA completely. This is something that union leader Sara Nelson has described as a very serious threat. Musk’s lawsuit also seeks to give more power to the Executive to remove members of the NLRB based on the idea of the separation of powers, a move that, if successful, could mean that Trump would be able to fire the entirety of the NLRB staff and start again with all of his own appointees or just get rid of the board all together. Whether or not Trump would prefer an NLRB he controls entirely or no NLRB at all is still a live question, but it seems likely that Trump and his allies would prefer, if possible, to remake the board into a stick with which to punish labor, and that is the likely outcome we should prepare for.
Meanwhile, with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, there will be little chance for labor’s few supporters to respond if worker protections are gutted through the courts. Trump, for his part, has promised to veto any pro-worker legislation that might make it through Congress, specifically mentioning the PRO Act, which, though a mixed bag in terms of workers’ power, would theoretically make union organizing easier. This means that the PRO Act will not even be on the table for the next four years, which will in turn mean that it will have been more than a decade that it has failed to be passed despite labor’s incredible investments in trying to get it through. In other words, labor fought and lobbied and distracted itself from real organizing and work actions and class struggle for six years to get absolutely nothing. This shows why the working class cannot trust the state to fight its battles for it and cannot continue to rely upon laws and so-called rights that can be taken away at the drop of a hat.
But the threats to the labor movement from Trump go far beyond the Department of Labor and the NLRB. It’s no secret that Trump is organizing the machinery of the state for mass deportations. That’s a move aimed not only at immigrants, but also at dividing and weakening the labor movement itself and is nothing short of a headlong attack in the class war.
There are about 11 million undocumented workers in this country. About 8 million of them are in the workforce — often hyper-exploited, because of their legal precarity, but they still have the legal right to union protections. Many are already organized in unions, like in those for precarious, low-paid hotel and food workers. When Trump mobilizes the state to go for these workers and their families — and, as he says, place them in camps to prepare for mass deportation — he’ll be attacking a key force of the working class itself. It’s a move not just to satisfy his Far Right base and deflect fury from the ruling class; it’s meant to divide the working class from itself, and to split its power through appeals to nationalism. It’s a move to weaken the working class — which even some unions and workers are falling for. Sean O’Brien’s chauvinist response to the H1B visa debate and his flirtation with the Republican Party (he is apparently scheduled to attend Trump’s inauguration) is a prime example.
And make no mistake, the attack on workers is far from limited to this country. One of the first people to call Trump to congratulate him was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s little doubt, despite the recent ceasefire, that Trump will continue Biden and Harris’s policy of arming and funding Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Again, the hope is that the working class will turn a blind eye, and instead of building international power and solidarity, accept its own weakness and divisions in the name of “American interests” abroad.
Take the Fight to the Bosses and Politicians
If unions are going to survive, and maybe even thrive under Trump, they will have to radically rethink their relationship to labor law, the working class, and the state.
Trump’s victory shows that it is folly for labor to think that it can grow or build strength by throwing its weight behind the Democrats or that it can negotiate a better terrain for labor struggle by handing its power to organize over to institutions of the ruling class’s state, like the NLRB. The NLRB wasn’t just invented in the 1930s to channel, control, and tame labor, a role it has played since then; it’s also a political football that each new administration shapes to its will. Our labor unions poured countless millions of dollars and endless amounts of people power into Harris’s campaign, and all we got was a lousy “Trump is a Scab” T-shirt. Obviously, business as usual is not working, and unions will have to do more than just organize; we are going to have to learn to be disruptive again.
For too long, the labor movement, and many of its biggest supporters on the Left, including Labor Notes, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Jacobin, have operated under the assumption that the path to labor’s victory is mainly through steady and patient organizing of greater and greater numbers of new workers in new industries into new or existing labor unions — that is, unions as an end in themselves. This strategy — though it has, for instance, led to a rapid increase in graduate student worker organizing at colleges and universities across the country — has nonetheless failed to even maintain, much less increase, the total level of union density in the United States. This is in large part because even relatively robust increases in new labor organizing simply cannot keep pace with the number of new workers entering into the labor market. In fact, despite all of the new organizing and labor victories in 2023, total labor density in the United States actually fell from 10.1 percent in 2022 to 10.0 percent of the workforce by the end of 2023 — a record low. Whether or not this trend will continue remains to be seen, but there is no reason to believe, without some major increase in class struggle, that it won’t.
Furthermore, the success or failure of this strategy of unionization as an end in itself has been highly dependent upon the legal, political, and economic environment in which organizing drives have taken place. The uptick in labor organizing, and successful petition filings, since 2020 is so far proving to be relatively durable (that’s a good thing!). However, this organizing momentum was based on a whole set of contingencies. Perhaps the most important of these were the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, which led to both an uptick in class struggle and an awareness of the centrality of labor, as well as the life and death importance of labor unions to protect worker safety. But the tight labor market and a hot economy after the pandemic were also significant factors contributing to the increase in new labor union organizing. So was more worker-friendly labor legislation, particularly coming out of the NLRB — but that was a reaction to the rise of class struggle and Biden’s attempts to curry favor with the working class for another election campaign. There is no reason to assume that these trends will continue.
Already the economy is showing signs of cooling, and unemployment is slowly beginning to creep back up as a result of Fed rate hikes that have attempted to control inflation. This is particularly true for workers in the tech industry, which accounted for half of the job losses in the U.S. in August and about a quarter of total job losses in 2024. Likewise, as Trump takes office, it is highly likely that he will undo many of the recent “labor-friendly” policies decided by the NLRB and impose rules that will make it considerably more difficult to gain official recognition of new labor unions. All of this suggests that the old plan of playing along to get along is going to be even less feasible under Trump.
Without a radical shift in strategy, labor may wind up squandering the relative advantages it still has.
These include record-high levels of popular support for unions, an increasingly pro-labor workforce made up of young workers ready to organize, and the likelihood of increased class struggle as Trump attempts to carry out the worst of his proposed agenda against workers, immigrants, women, and trans people. A plank of Trump’s platform is the mass deportation of immigrants — which is not just an attack on immigrants, but also a frontal assault on the working class itself, to divide and weaken it. None of our union leaders have spoken yet of this threat. But stopping it requires a labor movement willing to strike for more than its immediate needs at its own workplaces. Stopping Trump here calls for a willingness of workers to strike in solidarity with immigrants and against the state and ICE — technically against the law. Here, again, relying on the state to support unions will weaken us, not strengthen us.
And not just for immigrants — we’ll need to strike for Gaza too. Ceasefire or not, Trump has made no secret of the fact that he’ll continue and intensify the Biden administration’s policy of sending billions in bullets, bombs, and blank checks to Israel for apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Union leaders like UAW president Shawn Fain have already spoken fine words about the need to stop the mass killings by the state of Israel — but those words have not been followed up with action. And that stance of inaction effectively chains the U.S. working class to the imperialist policy of the ruling rich and their politicians. It also accepts the prerogatives of the state and the law, accepting the legitimacy of law to forbid solidarity and political strikes and to dictate where, when, and how the working class can use its own weapons to fight back.
Even a single such high profile victory could inspire millions of other workers and set off a landslide of new union organizing. But even more importantly, it would lay the ground for larger cross-union political strikes. Shawn Fain raised the spectre of a general strike last year when he urged labor unions across the country to collectively agree to negotiate contracts that end on May 1, 2028, allowing them to legally strike together. But Fain has also unfortunately said that he plans to work with Trump, once again normalizing labor’s relationship with the state and undermining the possibility and power of any such general strike. But we cannot wait until 2028. We have to organize such mass strikes ourselves now as part of a united front of the entire working class.
In other words, now isn’t just the time to expand our unions. It’s also — and it’s centrally — the time to relearn how we fight. For far too long we’ve accepted that the rules of fighting capitalists can be set by the capitalists themselves.
We’re like a boxer who lets his opponent set all the ground rules of a match for him, letting him tie one of our arms behind our back, and cover one eye, before every fight. No fighter in their right mind would agree to this. We shouldn’t either.
Breaking the Law
To make the most of its advantages, labor needs to learn how to break the law again. That’s no small task.
Trump is preparing his mass deportations already, and his NLRB moves will almost certainly make it more difficult to win union elections. Labor cannot afford to waste its resources in drawn out legal battles trying to combat those laws with lawyers or to win official recognition for new unions through NLRB-run elections. Trump is going to stack the cards against new unionization.
But laws are only as powerful as we allow them to be.
Seizing the power that labor has means, first and foremost, rejecting, and challenging at every turn, all of the limits on solidarity strikes, political strikes, and recognition strikes imposed on labor unions by the state. These things are illegal because the ruling class and its politicians fear them and recognize their power to disrupt the flow of profit. Since employers will most certainly attempt to draw out and defeat official union recognition elections, workers looking to form new unions will have to strike and strike hard in order to force employers to recognize and bargain for first contracts. And if the rest of labor is really serious about increasing labor density and building real labor power, they will have to be prepared to mobilize in defense of those workers and their struggles to form new unions. This means joining picket lines, providing strike funds to organizing workers, and in many cases, organizing walkouts and strikes in solidarity with them.
The main set of rules for labor about when and how to strike were laid down as law in key legislation in the 1930s (the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act and 1935 NLRA) and then again in the 1940s, with Taft Hartley. And these were born of politicians facing down mass worker struggle throwing the economy into chaos: workers demanding control over their own labor and over the terms of that work. The explicit goal of those laws was, in the words of the framers of these bills themselves, to tame labor, to ensure the flow of profits for the capitalists with as little disruption as possible. This was the logic behind the creation of the NLRB itself. In other words, labor law and bodies like the NLRB were created not just as concessions but as state organs to monitor, control, and tame the working class. Neither labor law nor the NLRB are our friends.
Reclaiming the power of the working class, then, means embracing a certain disillusionment — seeing that the labor law we’ve trusted in for so long won’t save us. Building up both the size of our unions as well as the power of those unions will mean building up our fighting muscles once more, regardless of the master’s rules.
Here are a few examples of what we mean.
Right now, it’s illegal to strike in solidarity with other industries’ workers; to strike for political reasons like war; and to block scabs trying to get into our workplaces to keep the profits flowing. And why would Democrats and Republicans alike work together, like in the 1947 Taft Hartley bill, to stop workers from doing these things? It’s because they work, and build far more power among workers over the flow of profits, than campaigning for Democrats or “lawyering up.” In fact, in the 1930s, during one of the high points of class struggle in this country, blocking scabs was a key tactic to protect a strike and help it win. All these striking tactics could become sparks needed to show the power of unions, drive new union expansions, and increase the fighting power of the whole working class.
And labor is already starting to remember this power, and this ability to break the law that our masters hand down to us from on high. 2018 saw a wave of strikes, of teachers, bus drivers, and other kinds of workers, sweep the country, starting in West Virginia. And when they started, they were illegal — public sector workers are forbidden to strike in that state.
But all too often, our union leaders themselves are standing in our way. We’ve already talked about how the dominant strategy of union leaders for decades has been to side with Democrats — or, like O’Brien, with Republicans — in the hopes that the politicians will give us better laws to help us organize more easily. This has been a dismal failure; the plummeting rates of unionization alone is proof. But now, even our more militant leaders like Fain and Sarah Nelson are trying to run that playbook again: Fain speaking at the DNC to support Harris; Nelson supporting Biden and Harris, and so on.
It’s time to stop reheating the leftovers and try something else. And “something else” means not waiting for better laws, but breaking them, organizing ourselves, disobeying our union leaders when we need to to do so. In other words, to put up the fight we’ll need to put up against Trump, we can’t wait for our leaders to lead us. But we can build our power from the bottom up, organizing ourselves in our workplaces, in committees of the rank and file, in assemblies to coordinate ourselves, to fight Trump now, and not wait for Harris 2.0 and the next “most important election of our lifetime.”
It’s true, and important, that Fain is calling for a general strike in 2028. He’s the first union leader to do that in a very long time. But here’s the problem: we can’t wait, sitting on our hands, and then suddenly flip the switch of “general strike” in three years. That’s like a marathon runner who trains to run 26 miles by resting on the couch to save her energy.
You get ready to run by running. You get ready to fight by fighting. Existential threats face the working class of this country and the world: mass deportation, genocide in the Middle East, climate catastrophe, all in the name of more profits. And all those profits are extracted from us. We can fight back, we can use our real power, and that’s going to mean breaking the laws that separate us from our power.
Just yesterday, Shawn Fain wrote in The Washington Post that he’s ready to work with Trump. After all the tough talk about solidarity with immigrants, he’s saying cooperation is the order of the day, just so long as Trump helps protect American jobs, first and foremost. In other words, for the tasks that lie ahead, our leaders probably won’t help. We’ll have to do it ourselves, and drag them into the fight.