A Trump Presidency Could Be A Disaster For Unions

Things have been looking up for the labor movement these days.

More workers are trying to unionize their workplaces. Employees have been going on strike in numbers not seen in years. And unions have been notching some major organizing breakthroughs, including in the anti-union South.

So what could undermine this hopeful moment for organized labor as it tries to rebuild after decades of decline? Another Donald Trump presidency.

As a protectionist, Trump could end up pursuing trade policies that benefit certain unions and their members. His running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has at least visited a picket line in his short Senate career. And Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who addressed the Republican National Convention on Monday night, seems to think Trump is open to hearing ideas from labor leaders like himself.

But anyone who thinks Trump wouldn’t be hostile to unions should review the actions of his first stint in the White House.

He placed anti-union officials in critical roles at labor agencies. He stripped away basic workplace protections that labor advocates had fought for. He shaped a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that made the entire U.S. public sector “right-to-work.” And he tried to dismantle government job protections and crush federal employee unions.

Unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, with a record high of Americans now believing they should have greater influence over the economy. Yet Trump has given no sign he would change tack from his first term when it comes to collective bargaining. Here are just a few ways Trump could squeeze organized labor once again.

President Joe Biden has made staunchly pro-union appointments at labor agencies, especially the National Labor Relations Board, a low-profile but critical agency that referees collective bargaining in the private sector. His pick for general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, has pursued an aggressive agenda to expand workers’ rights, while the Democratic-led board has issued rulings making it easier to form unions.

That direction could immediately be reversed under a Trump presidency. Project 2025, a blueprint for a Trump transition drawn up by his conservative allies, recommends Trump fire Abruzzo on his first day in office, just as Biden ousted Trump’s general counsel shortly after his inauguration. Trump had appointed Peter Robb, a management-side attorney who was despised by unions.

If Trump’s NLRB picks are anything like his last ones, they could be expected to do away with the progressive reforms of the Biden era, including one that creates major consequences for companies that break the law. And employers would be much more likely to prevail over workers in contentious cases alleging union-busting, providing relief to the likes of Amazon and Trader Joe’s, who’ve been trying to thwart organizing campaigns.

Unions can’t rely on a friendly NLRB to revitalize their ranks, with the legal playing field tilted so far to employers’ advantage. But an agency that’s unfriendly to unions can make their work much more difficult.

Sharon Block, a former NLRB member who later served in the Biden White House, said when it comes to labor policy, she would expect Trump to turn “the levers of government” back over to business lobbies and conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation.

“He subcontracted those levers to the Chamber of Commerce. And you could see that at the NLRB, at the Labor Department,” said Block, now a labor law professor at Harvard Law School. “There was just nobody that had any background or history in advancing the interests of working people.”

Trump could also look to starve these agencies of funding and personnel to weaken their enforcement powers. While serious damage to agency budgets would require the cooperation of Congress, Trump previously tried to weaken the government through funding cuts and hiring freezes. The Project 2025 map calls for cutting labor agencies’ budgets “to the low end of the historical average.”

Biden fashions himself the most pro-union president ever, and he’s certainly been an outlier among both Republican and Democratic presidents in the way he promotes the labor movement. Not only has he stumped for unions in his speeches, he’s publicly upbraided companies like Amazon for opposing their workers’ organizing efforts.

Acts like those may be largely symbolic, but they signify a government that not only tolerates collective bargaining but welcomes it. That is much harder to envision under another Trump administration.

When the United Auto Workers went on strike against Ford, General Motors and Jeep parent company Stellantis, Biden headed to Michigan and walked alongside UAW members in an unprecedented show of presidential solidarity with strikers.

Trump took a different approach. He gave a speech at a non-union auto parts manufacturer and solicited union support in typically transactional terms. “Your leadership should endorse me, and I will not say a bad thing about them again,” Trump said.

Unlike Biden, Trump did not publicly urge the Big Three to meet striking workers’ demands. (Vance visited a Stellantis picket line in Ohio.)

Gwen Mills, president of the hospitality workers’ union Unite Here, said she would expect nothing but an anti-union agenda from Trump as soon as he began a second term. Mills would know better than most: During Trump’s first run for president, the Las Vegas hotel co-owned by Trump and his business partner Phil Ruffin hired an anti-union consulting firm to prevent the predominantly immigrant housekeepers from joining the Culinary Union, a Unite Here affiliate. (The union still won the election.)

“The attacks that will come from the Trump administration will [force us] to play defense,” Mills said.

No group of workers would be more subject to Trump’s policies than the federal workforce.

Last time he was in the White House, Trump issued a trio of executive orders designed to weaken federal unions and pare back the rights of government employees. Those efforts got tied up in court, but the Trump administration still pursued its aims by stacking federal labor agencies with anti-union appointees who rewrote union contracts.

Trump could be expected to pursue a similar agenda against federal workplace protections in a second presidency. He could also resurrect a policy from his first term known as “Schedule F,” which removes many federal workers’ civil service protections and reclassifies them as “at-will” appointees who can easily be fired for any reason.

Schedule F could allow a president to bend the federal bureaucracy to his whims in potentially authoritarian ways, public policy experts say. A professor at Georgetown University recently described it as “the biggest problem that the fewest people understand about a potential second Trump administration.”

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers at dozens of federal agencies, warned that Schedule F could “politicize” frontline workers who provide basic services to citizens.

“Employees of the federal government are a snapshot of America. They are Republicans, Democrats and independents… When they come to work, they don’t bring their politics to the door,” Greenwald told HuffPost. “The Schedule F idea is that somehow there is a need to change the federal workforce to better support the president. Schedule F is dangerous no matter what party is in place.”

Schedule F is just one of several policies Greenwald is worried about if Trump returns to the White House. The Project 2025 agenda recommends reviving the same anti-union executive orders from Trump’s first term. She said her union has been working to renegotiate its contracts as soon as possible under the current administration to better protect union members in case Trump returns to the White House.

“The last term tells you exactly what his intentions were then,” she said. “I fully expect, if a second term comes to be, we will see those attacks on steroids.”