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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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/