Former Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan doesn’t pull punches about what he expects from the new Donald Trump administration: “Attacks on workers and unions.”
In battling back against the Republican president and his anti-labor agenda, “union leaders must remind and inform their members and the general public about the impact that Trump’s policies will have on them and their families, and use whichever platform they have available to disseminate information that refutes the lies and distortions about the policies which undermine the well-being of workers and their families,” said Londrigan, who headed the state’s largest labor organization for two dozen years before retiring in 2023. Dustin Reinstedler succeeded him.
Most union leaders say Trump was one of the most anti-labor presidents in decades. “The idea that Donald Trump has ever, or will ever, care about working people is demonstrably false,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said. “For his entire time as president, he actively sought to roll back worker protections, wages, and the right to join a union at every level.”
While “Union Joe” Biden was said to have been the most labor-friendly president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, Trump has again lost no time going after unions.
“In another show of hate for workers, especially unionized federal workers ... Trump, masterminded by union-hating multibillionaire Elon Musk, declared he will trash all union contracts in the federal government,” Mark Gruenberg wrote in People’s World on Tuesday. “Trump actually declared that ‘collective bargaining runs counter to the American system of self-government.’ He and his pal Musk have said no such thing about corporate monopolization and the collective price gouging and fixing that goes along with it.”
Gruenberg said the immediate sources of the president’s ire were “two pacts the predecessor Democratic Biden administration signed with Government Employees (AFGE) locals, one representing Social Security’s workers and the other covering Education Department workers. Trump wants to abolish the department.”
On Monday, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board Member Gwynne Wilcox, “an unprecedented move that paralyzes the board while teeing up a constitutional challenge that could further weaken it,” wrote Max Nesterak in Michigan Advance. He also sacked Jennifer Abruzzo, the board’s general council, a move “which was expected and in line with presidential transitions.”
But he explained that with Wilcox’s dismissal, “the five-seat board now has just two members and lacks the necessary quorum to hear cases on alleged unfair labor practices in the private sector (although functions lower down in the agency may continue).”
The NLRB is under the labor department, which would be headed by Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pick for secretary, if the Senate confirms her. Some of the media labeled the former member of Congress a “pro labor” Republican; some union leaders hope she might be an ally in the otherwise anti-union Trump administration. Other union leaders are skeptical. “I think the labor secretary will carry out the wishes and directives of Trump and his billionaire buddies or be replaced,” Londrigan said.
Meanwhile, John Ripton of Common Dreams denounced Trump’s speedy moves “to consolidate his authority over Congress, to diminish its oversight, law- and policymaking, and its approval of executive appointments. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the authoritarian and potentially fascist direction he is taking the nation. If he can tame his media critics, emasculate Congress, and expand control of the justice system, from local prosecutors to Supreme Court justices, he will have retooled the government. And that government will progressively integrate corporate and private interests into it.”
Londrigan said the president is closely following Project 2025, the hard-right blueprint for a second Trump term. “They pretty much told us in Project 2025 what they were going to initiate when they got in, and they’re going forward with that.”
Concluded Londrigan: “People didn’t listen to the warnings about what this guy was going to do. He’s going along or following the playbook of the typical authoritarian by taking control of government agencies and making people beholden to him and not the constitutional principles of our nation. These are very, very scary developments, but not unexpected.”
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