Unions Need to Mount a Militant Response to Trump’s Assault
Too many unions have responded to Donald Trump’s historic attacks on federal workers with little more than words. To beat back his anti-union assault, organized labor needs to break with decades of timidity.
US president Donald Trump pumps his fist as he boards Air Force One in Miami, Florida, on April 3, 2025. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
In its statement responding to Donald Trump’s deunionization of most federal workers — voiding existing collective bargaining agreements, canceling their right to negotiate new ones, and eliminating automatic deduction of dues from workers’ paychecks — the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades at first seems to pull no punches. “This may be the biggest attack on the Labor Movement in American history,” it declares. Looking back, it faults the labor movement’s inadequate response in 1981 to Ronald Reagan’s firing of striking air traffic controllers. Then it lamely urges workers to “fight back.”
Regrettably, that inadequate reply to Trump’s authoritarian assault is far from uncommon. While objecting to federal deunionization, the statement of the National Nurses Union, which represents members at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, doesn’t even mention Trump. Nor does the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) or the Plumbers and Pipefitters. You would search in vain for a statement from my old union, the Transport Workers Union (TWU). Meanwhile, TWU warned its large New York local not to use Trump’s name in any statement concerning federal policy, such as on cuts in transit funding.
With this cowardice, these unions are apparently leaving themselves room to kiss the ring later on. After all, there were unions in Benito Mussolini’s Italy — they just had to toe the line when the Fascist representative in the workplace or the government ministry snapped their fingers. Or perhaps unions are concerned about upsetting Trump supporters in their ranks. Certainly, unions need to be educating their pro-Trump members, but they can’t do that if they are too afraid to even mention the president’s name.
Other unions’ responses have been only marginally better. The AFL-CIO’s home page blames Trump for attacking federal workers’ bargaining rights but then only proposes that people call Congress to complain. Elsewhere, it writes, “now is the time to be even louder” — but suggests no other action. In a similar vein, AFSCME president Lee Saunders declares that his members “are prepared to fight.” RWDSU will “stand with federal workers . . . and we will not remain silent.” LIUNA members “will rise up together to defend our rights.” The IAM “will fight this attack on our nation’s heroes and continue to uplift our dedicated public servants”; it also boasts of filing two lawsuits. OPEIU “call[s] on Congress to take the action necessary to stymie this unilateral undermining of workers’ rights.” The Steelworkers don’t even offer rhetorical solidarity but merely point out that “this executive order undermines our federal institutions and invites true waste.”
So where is this “fight,” beyond lawsuits? After listening to my complaints about unions’ general lack of mobilization for a mid-March anti-cuts, anti-layoffs demonstration in New York City, one leader of a midsize international union told me most unions will remain firmly on the sidelines until the AFL itself issues a call to participate.
Fight . . . or Capitulate?
As other institutions of liberal democracy continue to shy from a real fight, unions — still the largest organized component of the US working class — are desperately needed. Yet in truth, rallying their members in the streets won’t be enough; for the labor “movement” to actually help stop Trumpism, it needs to be preparing now for political strikes in support of democratic as well as union rights, laws, and norms. Because Trump, Elon Musk, and their corporate and Christian nationalist supporters likely won’t be thwarted by lawsuits. And their first response to hundreds of thousands or even millions in the streets may very well be an even quicker tempo and more repression, not less.
What’s necessary, though, is unfortunately anathema to most American unions. For decades — at least since PATCO, if not before — they have practiced and refined policies of risk aversion. My New York City home is sometimes called a “union town,” but this spring marks the fiftieth anniversary of its municipal unions’ decision to capitulate, rather than fight, the advent of American neoliberalism alongside what David Harvey called “the construction of consent.”
In 1975, Gerald Ford, William Simon, and Alan Greenspan saw the city’s plea for federal loan guarantees as an opportunity to call down the curtain on the New Deal/Great Society era. Faced with austerity, wage freezes, and the layoffs of 20 percent of their members, union leaders meekly complied, setting the stage for similar concessions in auto and steel just a few years later. Then they ran to the state capitol begging for help from their own angry members canceling their union memberships. As one observer put it, forcing disgusted workers to pay dues “will help unions be more objective in dealing with employers and better able to pursue a more responsible course of action. . . . [It] will result in more statesmanship on the part of union leaders who are free from the fear of economic blackmail by their members.”
Undoubtedly those leaders rationalized their risk aversion: the fiscal crisis or the threat of Chrysler bankruptcy was surely just a temporary blip from which their unions would soon recover. Or the danger of a head-on challenge to the state and finance capital was too great. Those arguments prevailed over more militant ones urging a fight when unions were still relatively strong.
Today we know unions made a tragic miscalculation. Then, having chosen this path, they continued to acquiesce to neoliberalism year after year. A conciliatory mode of unionism became habitual, reinforced by structural incentives meant to temper their tone and actions and the power of the law. Unions embraced a culture of safety, passivity, and defensiveness. Even worse, leaders promoted successors with similar views; such was the process of Darwinian natural selection at union halls — in New York and across the country. That has allowed the steady drip, drip, drip of declining union numbers and power. Only a relative handful of unions and union locals have resisted this trend.
Today, with potentially far greater consequences, unions are practicing the policies they know all too well. The rationalizations are easy to make: It’s too bad what is happening to federal workers, but we are too weak to fight Trump. Better to keep our heads down, mitigate risk, minimize our losses, and hope to staunch the pain by electing Democrats in 2026 and 2028.
Or, as some have already, by filing lawsuits. There’s nothing wrong with demanding that Trump obey the law, but this dam is already leaking, and we should expect that soon it will be breached in many places as the Justice Department maneuvers to find friendlier courts. Then what?
A Program for Labor
Given the urgency of the moment, vital organizational tasks need to be pressed forward at the same time as escalating actions. Even well-intentioned top-down edicts will not muster the forces we need to oppose state power. Basic union-building work must proceed at triple time, such as intensive outreach to, education of, and support for, stewards or equivalent shop-floor union reps. That’s critical to spur the kind of discussions in the workplaces that can engage and activate members while neutralizing and then winning over 2024 Trump voters in the unions’ ranks.
This is just Organizing 101. Some unions already know how to do this, while others will hopefully learn, and learn quickly. The real question is volition: whether unions have the will to take the step from bread-and-butter economic issues to anti-Trump political ones, and from indecisiveness to militancy.
Unions need to provide multiple points of entry to political action, which include a way for every worker to step up: some very broad, others more militant, enabling the activist core to provide a spark that can draw others forward. Similarly, more militant or organized unions need to forge ahead, modeling the strategies and tactics that their less organized counterparts will also need to embrace. And more militant branches, locals, and workplaces will need to move faster than moribund national leaders may like, pulling them along and pressuring them to move from lip service to action.
In the present climate, mobilizing members, getting them in the streets in great numbers, and especially preparing for politically oriented walkouts and strikes that the government will deem illegal is very risky. As our activity intensifies, so will state repression. Union assets may be seized, and union leaders may be arrested.
Yet opposition today — immediately, with the resources we can muster, even while seeking to rally our forces to greater efforts — is the least risky course if we hope to preserve real unions and what’s left of American democracy. It’s already clear that to wait for leadership from other major institutional forces is wishful thinking. Unions must provide that leadership; and the more militant and progressive unions must provide leadership to the rest of the labor “movement” — not through press releases, but through deeds that provide an example that others can follow.