Trump Celebrates Labor Day as the Most Anti-Union President Ever

His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy.

by Harold Meyerson September 1, 2025


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.


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But foreseeing a Trump Board that undermines the very rights and protections for workers that the Board was established to protect, some blue states are currently considering whether they can supplant the Board more fully. A bill pending in the Massachusetts legislature would have the state claim jurisdiction over private-sector workers if the NLRB remains powerless for lack of a quorum. A bill sitting on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk would enable the state to enact collective-bargaining rights for private-sector workers thwarted by the NLRB’s incapacity to act; it would require the Board to go to court to reclaim jurisdiction. A bill introduced in the California legislature would go so far as to give the state the jurisdiction the Board currently wields over private-sector workers if the Board should lose its independent status by virtue of a Supreme Court ruling finding that status unconstitutional. Suffice it to say that such a bill, if enacted, would prompt some serious challenges.
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-trump-celebrates-labor-day-as-most-anti-union-president/