The Teamsters, Trump’s closest labour allies, had hoped for a rapprochement with the GOP. Credit: Getty
On Tuesday, Donald Trump ousted two of the strongest union advocates at the National Labor Relations Board: board member Gwynne Wilcox and general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. While the firing of Abruzzo is par for the course with the arrival of a new administration — Joe Biden fired Trump’s NLRB general counsel early on — Wilcox is a different matter. By law, a board member can only be fired for malfeasance, and Wilcox has a stellar record.
Beyond the question of legality, the move is a big favor to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, two Trump-friendly oligarchs who’ve filed suit to have the NLRB declared unconstitutional. Crippling the agency is the second best option: if Trump doesn’t fill the vacancy, the board would lack quorum to intervene in labour disputes. The National Labor Relations Act — the cornerstone of the New Deal — would effectively become a dead letter.
The decision radiates cold air toward the labour movement. Populist conservatives and some labour figures — most notably, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien — had hoped that Trump could bring about a rapprochement between the GOP and the unions. A welcome early move came in the form of a surprisingly pro-union nominee for secretary of labour. But the new administration can’t pursue much by way of pro-worker reform if it collapses the entire labour-law architecture.
Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The 45th and 47th president is a mercurial creature, to be sure, but the real reason is structural. To wit, Trump can’t deliver on his Gilded Age political economy — defined by tariffs and a labour market protected from immigration — without simultaneously empowering employers relative to employees domestically.
It is this structural reality that should shape the labour movement’s response to Trump’s encroachments: if he wants to upset the labour peace achieved by the New Deal, then labour leaders, too, can let it rip.
There is no denying that Trump’s big pitch to the working class paid off politically. He argued that workers’ wages and living conditions had been sliding as a result of too much foreign trade and too many foreign workers. He promised to build walls to protect American jobs. Trump’s narrative, which echoes that of many populist leaders worldwide, has a lot of truth to it.
Since the 1990s, blue-collar workers have witnessed the offshoring of high-wage jobs to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Automation accelerated these losses. At the same time, and inspired by the same political theory, workers from all over the world came to the United States in large numbers. In 2023, more immigrants entered the US homeland than at any other time in American history, and the share of foreign-born residents rivaled that of the 1890 peak.
For many consumers, the result was cheaper goods and services, and this is exactly why highly educated, white-collar workers, who now form the base of the Democratic Party, welcomed waves of immigration as an unalloyed good. Mass immigration allows these professionals to live like a neo-gentry on the cheap, thanks to a pliant, desperate foreign labour force for child care, dry cleaning, dining out, and home improvement.
But for those native-born workers who happen to find themselves in low-skilled construction or service jobs, the new arrivals depress wages. The refrain from employers, lately echoed by some progressives, has been that Americans simply “won’t do these jobs”. What they mean, however, is that Americans won’t do these jobs for serf-like wages and conditions.
Black and Latino voters are much more likely to compete directly with immigrants for scarce jobs, which is big one reason why many of them pulled for Trump in the last election. While liberals were focused on “the wages of whiteness” as an explanation for What’s the Matter with Kansas, voters in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles were far more concerned with the wage suppression wrought by decades of globalisation and immigration-driven labour arbitrage.
Trump promised to bring back high-wage manufacturing jobs and to kick out low-wage immigrants. But there is a catch. You can’t really have capitalism in one country. If the United States were to forswear all the benefits of trade and immigration, it would face a staggering economic contraction. Some economists estimate that a whopping 3% of GDP would vanish if Trump made good on his promise to deport all illegal immigrants. And if he succeeds in implementing the kinds of tariffs he called for on the campaign trail, prices would rise much faster than wages.
Put another way: Trump’s dream of ringfencing America’s home market, including its domestic labour market, comes with the risk of massive inflationary pressure. How, then, did Trump convince his billionaire donors and the business-friendly GOP to go along with his plans? The current drama around the NLRB provides a clue. As UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari argued in November, the flip side of Trump’s external protectionism is internal libertarianism.
That is, Trumpian Republicans hope to fatally weaken labour as a countervailing force to the power of big business. If they succeed, whatever economic benefits Trumponomics might yield would accrue mainly at the top. Sure, workers may no longer have to worry that their wages are being undermined by immigrants, but they would have no means to protest their wages being suppressed by employer collusion, their work being automated by the latest technologies, or their being fired for no reason at all.
Without the right to form unions and the right of those unions to strike, the corporate powers that control the commanding heights of the American government would be free to tear up all their contracts with workers to pursue profit with reckless abandon.
For union members struggling to respond, it’s important to keep in mind that we have been here before. Lately, Trump has taken to comparing himself to the Gilded Age President William McKinley (a lover of just this combination of tariffs and a boss-friendly labour regime). The analogies are apt, and will become more so if Trump’s attacks on organised labour escalate: Before the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — the law the NLRB is charged with enforcing — the United States was an employers’ paradise: business had all the rights, and labour had none. The union movement was in its infancy, small and weak. But what it lacked in size and influence, it made up for in the clarity of its moral appeal and the courage of its members.
This was a labour movement that could strike, even when no one authorised industrial action.
While Grover Cleveland, another Gilded Age president, was able to shrug off Coxey’s Army—a ragtag group of unemployed workers who came to Washington to protest his economic policies—he wasn’t able to ignore the Pullman rail strike. A wildcat action launched by 4,000 workers in Chicago soon ballooned to include some 125,000 railmen across the country. Among them was Eugene Debs, the future socialist presidential candidate whose ideas would later inform the American labour law. Cleveland brought out the Army to suppress the strike, but with it, he crushed his own political fortunes; his party, the Democrats, would be discredited and kept out of power for years.
Today’s labour movement ought to approach Trump’s policies with the same fighting spirit and sense of political independence. If the NLRB has been unlawfully neutered, well, the unions ought to renew the tradition of sympathy and wildcat strikes, secondary boycotts, and other means of exercising strength — especially regarding corporate behemoths such as Amazon.
Labour still commands a great deal of power, if it can wield it. The ports, logistics hubs, and quite a bit of critical manufacturing could be held up in the name of labour’s fight for its life. If the White House feels no need to respect labour law, then the unions ought not play the role of lawful lambs waiting for slaughter.
At the same time, politics must not be forgotten. Militancy will come to naught if it’s paired with a political message that fails to reckon with Trump’s appeal among working-class voters. Labour needs to organise new units and strike for better conditions, but it also needs to become reacquainted with its political interests. For too long, the unions have neglected to put forth a political vision of their own. Many union leaders shrink from talking about politics with their members. Others have too often swallowed the shallow liberalism of the professional left. The failure to develop and defend labour’s distinct political interests made it too easy for Trump to appeal to union members even as they knew he was no friend to their movement.
Nor must leaders shrink from the opportunities presented by this confused and seemingly hostile conjuncture. The new labour law being hammered out between the Teamsters and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — with apparent support from the likes of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers—opens space for reform. But labour must assert its voice to ensure the reform doesn’t compromise on non-negotiables, such as its independence and the freedom to take industrial action.
Labour has a duty to reimagine what an independent working-class movement might look like. That will take investments in organising and in education, it would mean a lot of work for union officials to educate their members, to drag them into meetings, to set up strike schools, to ensure that committees are formed for raising funds etc. It will not be easy. But to fail to do so will be so much harder.
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SubscribeThe reason people have a beef with unions is not because of rank and file workers. Its because of the intellectuals that claim to speak for them. This is nothing but a veiled threat. It’s a provocation. If you want to build popular sympathy how about talking to the people doing hard jobs instead of telling everyone of your plans to orchestrate economic disruption. There’s nothing more annoying than performative protests.
If you truly care about protecting the jobs of hard working people than speak about the bureacracy and red tape around manufacturing. The goal is for wages to keep up with prices.
Regulations are inherently inflationary. They introduce additional time and costs for any business. Businesses will pass on that cost to consumers and create inflation. Higher costs mean more people need help which leads to increased welfare payments requiring more spending. The money supply continues growing and it weakens purchasing power. Its a feedback loop of inflation.
So yes, fight for unions by seriously addressing price inflation caused by excess regulations. High wages are relative to prices. That’s why the minimum wage movements are silly. Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living. So nobody is getting ahead even if their wages are rising.
That to me appears to be nothing but a distraction. Trump campaigned on improving the lives and wages of working class voters, who in turn gave him their backing.
Since then he has sided with the tech barons in the visa row and now done the billionaire class another favour by trying to severely weaken the unions.
Whilst I may agree with him in regards to immigration, the scaling back of environmental red tape and the cancelling of the diversity nonsense, the man is an absolute snake who I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him
More TDS
You crack me up. Let me see if I understand you correctly based on this and past responses.
1) There’s not a single politician that you respect and you can’t name a living politician you respect more than Trump but your character attacks on Trump should he taken seriously.
2) You don’t particularly care about American politics, your interest is just based on the comedy of the “hypocrisy” and gullibility of the median Trump voter. You as an occasional watcher of headlines is more in tune with the desires of median Trump voter than I am as an actual Trump voter.
3) You speak of the desirability of wage increases without considering their relation to prices. Do you think its a win if wages go up 3% but prices go up 5%?
4) Robinhood. All Rich people are bad. All labor advocates are good.
I’ve said numerous times I think Trump is an imbecile, if he wasn’t born a billionaire he’d have struggled to hold down a job on the bins, but despite that if I was a yank I’d have probably chose him over the alternative.
I agree with his stated policies on immigration, the environmental stuff, the equality stuff etc, but I find the influence of unelected tech barons such as Musk & Co rather uncomfortable. You rightly ranted about the likes of Soros using his wealth to influence policy yet support others doing the same now it’s your preferred side in power, which to me seems rather hypocritical.
Trump campaigned on improving the lives of the workers, yet once in power has twice now sided with his wealthy backers over his working class support base, which wouldn’t fill me with confidence going forward if I had voted for him
He campaigned with Elon Musk, Steve Wynn and Steve Witkoff. He did not campaign with bureacrats from the NLRB.
Americans and Brits see the world differently. We don’t see everything as zero-sum. If my neighbor gets filthy rich off a product that makes trains travel at light speed, I don’t get poorer. But I do get poorer when some bureacrat organizes an economic shutdown of the economy
But that’s a false analogy. A neighbours financial situation is completely irrelevant. A better example would be an employer becoming more wealthy by refusing to give his workers a pay rise in line with inflation, as in that way he’s making himself richer by actively making his workers poorer. By siding with the likes of Musk when it comes to importing cheap labour or busting the unions that’s exactly what he’s doing
In order to improve workers conditions one needs to educate them so they leave un and semi skilled employment and enter skilled employment. Germany largely moved the German population out of un and semi skilled employment into skilled employment in the late 1990s. Immigrants did unskilled work.
The Swiss have high wages but make very expensive products, the basic watch is £5K. Compare the vast majority of American education and training to Switzerland.
One way of assessing product is Value per kilo. A 100 gramme Swiss watch at £5K works out at £50M/tonne.
Switzerland has ETH Zurich. If the USA had the same density of technical skill it would have 33 MITs.
Riots and high unionised wages drove the car makers out of Detroit from late 1960s. Now most car makes are outside of Democrat run cities/states.
Regulations should to promote the good and prevent the bad. What they become is way of employing people which increases costs.
Where selection and training is based upon the conditions encounted in employment, high tech companies paying well can exist. Once the schools no longer provide the education and training need for well paid high tech jobs and unions insist on overpayment of wages for the value of the products and services produced, jobs disappear.
We should fight for union members, not the unions themselves. It’s been a very long time since they were the same thing. The NLRB is a relic of a past age that has long since outlived its usefulness. It’s a peace treaty that ended a war whose basic axes of conflict have been overtaken by history and replaced with other conflicts that demand our present attention..
We shouldn’t forget that regulations are ultimately laws, and laws are about preventing things that are harmful and keeping civil order. Since the industrial era, labor laws have been a part of that, as the very violent history of the labor movement shows us what can happen when there aren’t laws in place. So some regulations, some laws, are necessary, and to the extent that makes things more expensive, perhaps they should be.
Right now, they’re not because they’re made overseas where there are a lot fewer laws and regulations, which should never have been regarded as an adequate solution by anybody, but it was, and here we are two decades later paying for it after all in other ways. In hindsight, maybe we should have just paid more for our big screen TVs, smart phones, and appliances after all. You pay the piper one way or another.
I’m sure there are quite a few useless rules that can be eliminated. That’s the nature of bureaucracy. It needs regular reforms to eliminate inefficiencies that creep in over time. Still, I stop short of advocating for a return to the bad old days before the New Deal and modern labor laws. If the problem is the lack of any standards or laws in countries we trade with and a resulting lack of manufacturing jobs, surely the solution shouldn’t be to recreate those conditions here.
Too many propose a race to the bottom as a path to prosperity
‘Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living’ – evidence please?
If you can’t find any, let me point you to plenty showing the opposite (see links below). Raising the minimum wage raises living standards – and yes – increases jobs (more money in the pockets of ordinary people does a whole lot more good for the economy than in those of the super rich who make our lives more expensive by trying to monopolise businesses and competing for assets in short supply, including housing and land and, to think of political assets, our media and politicians).
Yours is a popular misconception pedalled by a press largely owned by the super rich to discourage people from fighting for a fairer deal, even as owners and bosses take a larger and larger chunk of the pie, often in return for doing nothing, if you’re say Rishi Sunak who makes half a million a week in passive income.
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/the-minimum-wage-is-the-single-most-successful-economic-policy-in-a-generation-and-has-boosted-the-wages-of-millions-of-britains-lowest-earners-by-6000-a-year/
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/higher-minimum-wages-are-creating-more-jobs-with-michael-reich/
Trade unions are an important part of civil society, a crucial counterweight against corporate and political tyranny. Unions brought us so much from the weekend to protections against child labour. They even helped bring down the Soviet Union in the case of Poland. And yet so many on the right seem to have forgotten this to the point that I question whether they can even be called conservatives at all, insofar as a conservative is supposed to be concerned with giving peope agency and rewarding honest work sufficiently that family life can flourish.
ps BB – it’s great to see you still being one of the few traditional left voices standing up for workers on here, keep it up!
Union membership has dropped to 9.9% of the labor force and the great majority of that is public union membership. Trump has zero hope of support from them. That’s why California, Illinois, and NY are irredeemably Democrat.
So Trump has little incentive to kowtow to unions and the unions have little power to make him beyond that which they’ve exerted already.
Exactly. Private employer union membership is around 6% and continues to fall. Organized labor is irrelevent.
Which is exactly why workers need to organize and fight, or continue to be crushed
Cut their own throats?
UAW workers are in the top 25% of the income distribution. If they were universal, we’d all be there.
But all the talk of the Big 3 is about layoffs. Whereas Toyota is constantly hiring. And they make good money. Anyone who’s been through Georgetown, KY where the Toyota plant is (the largest Toyota plant in the world) could testify to the prosperity it’s brought to a whole region.
If only the UAW could say the same for Detroit or the USW for Allentown and Gary.
The recent picketing at some Amazon facilities was not by their employees. It was by Teamster professionals paid to do it. Inside those facilities, the employees start at $18/hour with health and other benefits. Not bad for unskilled labor.
If UAW workers are in the top 25% for income, than does that not prove unions are good for workers?
When combined with the fact that they’re also laying people off, it suggests that employee wages matter to profitability of the company, and if unions distort wages far enough, the profitability of the company will begin to suffer. The government has already bailed out two of the three American auto companies, and where does that money come from? Same as the rest of it, the printing press, and inflation. From the perspective of a national government, both profitable companies and high wages are worthy goals. The government should strive to strike a balance between the two, but over the past couple of decades, it has pretty much sucked at both and instead made the CCP and the likes of Warren Buffett and George Soros fabulously wealthy. I don’t love Trump but at least he’s not doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
If the only way a company can survive is by paying its employees too little to live off then they don’t have a viable business. It’s much better they fail and their market share be taken by a more productive rival.
Let’s not pretend low wages benefit anybody but the already wealthy
I agree actually. The burden is as much on management and ownership to find ways to make a profit while paying a fair wage. If they can’t do that, they fail at post-New Deal capitalism. The burden in capitalism must fall on both. The investor must put his investment at risk. These companies have failed to be profitable, and then took government bailouts, so the government took away that risk. Bailouts are arguably the most socialist thing our government has ever done.
We should understand that unions as they exist today are nothing like the unions of the Gilded Age. Those early unions were often illegal and fought both the robber barons and the government. The law itself was against them. They had few allies in government, which was, then as now, dominated by money. It was a long struggle, and it ultimately resulted in mostly a victory for the unions during the FDR administration. The National Labor Relations Act that created the NLRB was essentially a peace treaty that ended decades of conflict between employees and labor, but like all peace treaties, future circumstances can make it irrelevant or untenable. This is a case of the former. Since FDR, there have been a lot of other laws passed and almost all of what the unions fought for and more besides has since been codified into the law itself. We don’t need a union to negotiate safety standards because OSHA exists. We don’t need them to limit work hours or force them to pay overtime because they are legally required to adhere to the standard 40 hour week. We don’t need unions to negotiate wages because there is a minimum wage law, though it should probably be raised.
This is the real reason manufacturing in the US is more expensive. It has nothing to do with unions and strikes and everything to do with the various laws and regulations that have made unions largely unnecessary. Factories in the US have to meet standards for wages, safety, and environmental impact that are much lower or nonexistent in the several places jobs have been offshored. Through free trade doctrine, they then get to import the stuff duty free and pay only the cost of transportation, which is much less. Globalism has decimated union membership as much as it has American manufacturing and for the same reasons. The unions are neither a cause of the loss of manufacturing nor are they a solution. The solution, if there is one, is to end the free trade era and enact tariffs that reflect the differences in labor and environmental standards between nations and basically acknowledging that countries exist and borders are drawn for a reason. Trump is admittedly not the populist champion of the people I had hoped for, but to the extent he embraces tariffs as a way to balance the scales of trade and start to rebuild a manufacturing base, he’s better than the alternative.
Further, the unions we have today are often corrupt and political. For most of the period from the National Labor Relations Act, it was legal for states to have closed shop laws that required all employees to join a union if there was one, which made the union and the company essentially codependent organizations that would collaborate to a significant extent because keeping the factory open and employees employed kept both organizations intact, regardless of the wishes or interests of the workers themselves. A lot of the corruption came from this system, which was finally outlawed in 2017, long after unions became largely irrelevant anyway. Seven years isn’t long enough to undo decades of corruption and the symbiotic relationships that grew between unions and closed shop employers.
Even so, I’m not terribly surprised to hear Trump isn’t really defending workers and I am equally not surprised to hear Josh Hawley’s name backing another piece of legislation that is actually populist. Had Trump nominated Hawley as his VP, I might have actually voted in the election, hoping that somehow Hawley could succeed Trump, preferably not by assassination, and be the Teddy Roosevelt to Trump’s McKinley. Sadly, these days VP isn’t regarded as a political graveyard and they don’t put people in the position to get them out of the way because. of what happened back then.
I always figured there was a possibility that once they realized globalism was truly finished, many or most of the wealthy elites would then conclude that Trump’s version of economic nationalism was preferable to the wealth taxes and monopoly busting that Bernie Sanders, or Josh Hawley, might have done. Lo and behold, that’s what seems to be happening. I once again lament that the Democratic powers that be squashed Bernie’s campaign twice and instead doubled down on Trump bashing, woke virtue signaling, and racial grievance peddling. I once again call for the Democrats to ditch the woke nonsense of academia, ween your party off the crack of racial grievance peddling, get off the globalist ship before its entirely sunk, and find your own version of Trump. Maybe Fetterman, as he had the chutzpah to attend the signing of the Laken Riley act, which is a perfect example of a law that shouldn’t be needed, but is because of the pervasiveness of globalist ideology in our bureaucratic institutions. Then we could have two parties that have different visions of America and two differing opinions of how best to advance the interests of the American people, not a de facto global government trying to bring liberty and justice for all like some wannabe Superman.
Are you as boring in real life as you are online?
Actually I am way more boring. Are you as insufferably juvenile in reality as you are online?
Very interesting read (disregard disparaging comments from people who object to substance). But do you really think unions have no role now in raising living standards? When I was a teacher in the Netherlands I remember getting a 5% pay rise in 2022 through a collective agreement between govt and the AOB, while I have a friend at Siemens in Germany who says she’s eligible for certain privileges as a unionised worker which the non-unionised do not enjoy (in a system that creates financial incentives for the individual to join, which seems like a great way to rebuild the movement).
Also how likely do you think it is that Trump’s tariffs will do anything to protect or improve the lot of American workers? Are there any examples of tariffs being helpful for ordinary people around the world? I can only think of the example of the medieval English wool merchants being protected by Edward III from trade with the Flemish weavers, though doubtful how helpful that was to English people actually working with wool!
Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The answer is obvious. The organised working class has now voted for him, and accordingly is of no further use to him.
Union bureaucrats are not union members.