Trump and Musk mounting furious attack on labor rights and workers

President Joe Biden was the most pro-labor US president in many decades. Now, with Donald Trump as president, America is experiencing severe political whiplash, as the Trump administration has unleashed the most furious attack since Ronald Reagan on labor rights, labor unions and workers.

Led by anti-labor billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the attack has targeted 19 federal oversight agencies, including ones regulating trade, banks, the stock market, elections, the media, Big Tech, and more. Several agencies in the presidential crosshairs are those charged with protecting workers’ rights, the two most prominent being the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. 

The anti-labor attack has followed the familiar blueprint that Trump/Musk have used to paralyze these other federal agencies. They are placing thousands of Department of Labor employees on leave and crippling operations and enforcement capabilities. They also have tried to seize highly sensitive data and information systems, and to illegally fire congressionally-appointed labor commissioners.  

Contrary to the appearance of a scattershot approach, Trump and Musk are actually following a strategy that was laid out a year ago as part of a far-right manifesto from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, known as Project 2025. The thirty-seven-page chapter in Project 2025 on the Department of Labor contains numerous recommendations to weaken not only the labor agencies but also labor unions and their advocacy for workers. And President Donald Trump, through his informal “prime minister” Elon Musk, is implementing a number of these recommendations.

Attack on the independence of federal labor agencies

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was formed in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, oversees employee-employer relations and guarantees the right of workers to organize into trade unions. The White House fired NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox and General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo on January 27. The firing of the general counsel was widely expected as part of normal administration turnover, but the removal of a board member is without modern precedent. NLRB members are Senate-approved and can only be removed for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” and not over political disagreements.

By firing the chair, Trump essentially shut down the NLRB because he left the board membership below the quorum it needs to operate. The fired chair sued Trump for exceeding his presidential authority and requested reinstatement. While Wilcox’s case was pending before the court, the NLRB was unable to perform its duties protecting the rights of workers and monitoring union elections. As a result of this purge, Amazon demanded that the Trump administration overturn a 27 January union election at its subsidiary grocery chain Whole Foods, when the workers voted overwhelmingly to unionize, arguing that “in the absence of a Board quorum,” the NLRB lacked statutory authority to certify the results.

Other businesses hoped to take advantage of the NLRB chaos, one of them being Musk’s company SpaceX. Showing Musk’s clear conflict of interest, SpaceX has been trying to get the federal courts to declare that the very existence of the NLRB is unconstitutional. The Trump-captured NLRB actually sent the court a letter indicating that, since it was below the quorum needed to make decisions, it was withdrawing its legal defense of its own constitutionality.

These federal agencies were congressionally-mandated many decades ago to be independent of the presidential office, and its commissioners are protected from removal by a 1935 unanimous Supreme Court ruling that said the president may not fire them solely over policy disagreements. Nevertheless, President Trump has insisted that he has the authority to fire whomever he wants within the executive branch, overriding any previous Supreme Court rulings or laws.

But in NLRB chair Wilcox’s appeal of her firing, the judge harshly slapped down the president. The judge called her dismissal “a blatant violation of the law” and wrote that Trump’s “interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power is flat wrong … An American President is not a king.” On 6 March, the judge ordered Wilcox’s reinstatement. 

However the legal game did not end, since the White House appealed this decision to a higher court. A federal appeals court ruled in favor of Wilcox, but then days later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court overruled the appeals court, halting Wilcox’s reinstatement in a one-page order until the entire Supreme Court can hear the case. So the NLRB is once again below quorum and administratively paralyzed. Trump/Musk are not going to give up their blatant attempt to neuter the NLRB.

More labor agencies undermined

The next labor agency axe to fall was at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which requires federal contractors and subcontractors to commit to nondiscrimination toward workers and tracks compliance by these businesses. Established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, it has long been on the conservatives’ kill list – and a major priority of Project 2025 -- since for decades this program has audited the nation’s largest companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to ensure fair pay and hiring practices for workers of all races and gender.

President Trump’s acting Labor Secretary Vincent Micone issued an order to the OFCCP to “immediately cease and desist” enforcing government contractors’ adherence to anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action initiatives, and stop ensuring workplaces are free from illegal discrimination. Using various pressure tactics, 90 percent of the OFCCP’s 500 staff are in the process of resigning or being terminated. It hardly seems coincidental that Meta, Google, and Amazon, which were scheduled for anti-discrimination compliance evaluations, all contributed $1 million to Trump’s personal inauguration fund.

In another executive order, President Trump directed that the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which mediates labor disputes in the public and private sectors, be reduced "to the minimum presence and function required by law.”  In response, more than a dozen major unions filed suit seeking to block this shutdown. 

Trump also fired the leaders of two other labor-related boards that hear petitions from federal workers contesting their firing and protect federal workers against illegal employment practices. A court temporarily reinstated one of these leaders, but the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court overturned that reinstatement (in the same order overturning the reinstatement of the NLRB chair) until the full Supreme Court can hear the case. 

Rollback of Biden executive orders

Other rollbacks of labor rules passed under the Biden administration are in the works, including ones targeted by Project 2025. These include decreasing the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, decreasing protections for people working in extreme heat, decreasing protections for teenagers hired to do dangerous jobs, undermining a worker’s right to not be subject to manipulative noncompete clauses that lock you in a job, and overturning regulations that would allow more workers to hold their employers accountable for labor violations. 

Trump also is moving to end the legal defense of a Biden rule on independent contractor status, which will make it easier to treat workers as contractors instead of regular employees and deny them Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation and other labor protections.

Targeting data analysis capabilities

Like it has done with other federal agencies, DOGE has taken aggressive moves to target labor- related databases that include crucial private information, including about whistleblowers. Among the targeted agencies are the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wage and Hour Division and the Federal Employees Compensation Act Claims Administration, all of which hold sensitive worker information, including about labor law violations. These agencies are key sources of data measuring fundamental gauges of the US economy, which shape how policymakers and businesses view the economic outlook.

A coalition of unions, including the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA), have filed a lawsuit seeking to keep Musk and his computer moles out of the Labor Department’s internal systems. But it’s hard to predict how the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court will ultimately rule.

Trump tries to fire – illegally – tens of thousands of federal workers

It’s likely no coincidence that the White House launched its attacks on labor-supportive federal agencies at the same time that it initiated layoffs in February and early March of tens of thousands of the nation’s more than 2 million federal workers. Then in late March, the Trump administration issued a new executive order stripping collective bargaining and union rights from 700,000 workers across the federal government, claiming that federal employee unions have „declared war on President Trump’s agenda."

These moves echo past attacks on federal and public sector unions, including President Ronald Reagan firing of 11,000 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (known as PATCO), in 1981. The Trump administration has been clear about its objectives, which are far more ambitious than merely reducing the size of the federal workforce. Trump/Musk are looking to undermine the nonpartisan foundation of the federal civil workforce, and to shed workers who are not personally loyal to the president and his brand of politics. These acts, if allowed by the courts, would undo over 100 years of civil service reform and protections. In the next phase, the Trump administration has ordered most federal agencies to prepare to lay off anywhere from 10 to 50% of their employees.

But the workers themselves and their labor union representatives are defiant and fighting back. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler blasted the White House, saying “Straight out of Project 2025, this executive order is the very definition of union-busting. It strips the fundamental right to unionize and collectively bargain from workers across the federal government…The labor movement is not about to let Trump and an unelected billionaire destroy what we’ve fought for generations to build. We will fight this outrageous attack on our members with every fiber of our collective being.“

Numerous lawsuits have been filed by unions, claiming that the Trump administration has drastically overstepped its presidential authority. Unions representing federal employees sued the Trump administration to block an executive order that has turned tens of thousands of career civil servants into at-will employees with no labor protections. The lawsuit alleges that Trump has politicized the federal bureaucracy by stripping federal workers of their job protections. Also, Trump’s  Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) rescinded enforcement of a Biden administration rule requiring a reduction in miners’ exposure to dangerous silica particulate to improve respiratory protection; recently the unions United Mine Workers and United Steelworkers, who collectively represent thousands of miners affected by the pause of the silica rule, filed a lawsuit to force reinstatement of the rule.

The American Federation of Government Employees and two other unions filed a lawsuit arguing that the administration lacked any statutory basis for a buyout offer as a tactic to shed workers, particularly as the buyout notification threatened that many employees would be stripped of civil service protections if they refused, and dangled the use of loyalty tests for those who remain.

Federal law generally requires 60 days’ notice for a reduction in force and prohibits new probationary employees from being fired for reasons unrelated to performance or conduct. So the Trump administration got slapped down hard by the courts. On 13 March, two different federal judges in California and Maryland ordered the Trump administration to reinstate tens of thousands of probationary federal workers who were mass fired at 19 different agencies, including the Department of Labor. The back-to-back court rulings were the most significant blow yet to Trump and Musk’s anti-labor efforts. 

The federal judges used unusually strong language. One judge wrote “The sheer number of employees that were terminated in a matter of days belies any argument that these terminations were due to the employees’ individual unsatisfactory performance or conduct.” The other judge was even more scathing, writing, “It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie.”

Of particular concern is that the layoffs axe could cause a number of dangers for everyday Americans. There have been large dismissals at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – several thousand employees, about a tenth of its workforce – just as flu cases have spiked and a potential bird flu pandemic is raising alarms. Also targeted has been the Federal Aviation Administration, with hundreds of employees fired who maintain critical air traffic control, only weeks after a horrific midair collision over Washington, D.C. that killed 67 people. Trump officials also fired more than 300 high level staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, apparently unaware that this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. 

Elon Musk and his DOGE assistants decided to fire as many federal workers as they could without making any effort to find out what these workers actually do, and whether dismissing them might actually make the American public less safe.

Elon Musk and Big Tech CEO’s anti-labor history

The fact that Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual, would be the main agitator for these labor reversals is hardly surprising.  Musk’s own companies have a long history of anti-labor management practices. The Department of Labor has 17 open investigations into Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla assembly workers have accused the company of overwork, speed-up and injuries, sub-standard industry pay, and anti-union harassment.

OSHA has repeatedly fined Musk’s companies for serious safety violations, including exposing Tesla workers to hazardous chemicals and an incident at SpaceX where a worker fell to his death. A judge’s ruling in September 2019 stated Tesla illegally and systematically threatened and retaliated against pro-union workers. At the peak of the COVID pandemic, Musk flouted public health orders, calling California safety officials “fascist.” While the rest of California businesses were only semi-open, Musk fully reopened his Tesla assembly plant and ordered his 10,000 employees back to work, in violation of the law.

Other US tech titans have fallen in line behind the Trump stampede. The CEOs of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI and others, some of them the wealthiest people in the world, all heeded Trump’s demand that they attend his inauguration party and donate a million dollars to his private fund. It was an alarming display of an American oligarchy composed of a handful of tech billionaires wielding dangerous levels of power and influence, just as President Joe Biden had warned in his presidential farewell speech in January. Yet the tech titans all kissed the ring of the new unpredictable and vindictive king whose political strategy threatens retribution to those who displease him.

Germany, Sweden and other EU countries also have had their complaints over Musk’s brash leadership style. Recently IG Metall accused Tesla of withholding salaries of sick workers at its Grünheide assembly plant and intimidating workers over absentee and sickness rates. And in 2023, mechanics at Tesla repair shops in seven Swedish cities walked off the job because Tesla refused to engage in collective bargaining negotiations.

The Trump administration, led by Musk and his DOGE guided by the extreme directives of Project 2025, is waging a scorched-earth campaign against the Department of Labor, affiliated labor agencies, unions and workers that goes well beyond anything Trump did in his first term. Many labor advocates are worried that Trump and Musk will roll back worker standards and labor enforcement that have taken many decades to painstakingly craft. Fortunately, the pushback by Democratic leaders, labor unions and workers has begun. But it is difficult to predict who will prevail in the present and coming battles.