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By the Editorial Board
Trump’s Threat To Labor
Donald Trump’s comeback election is an unprecedented threat to the labor and socialist movements.
In his first term and on January 6, Trump flirted with right wing authoritarian tendencies. But now he is preparing a far more thorough and systematic break with the liberal democratic order. We must be clear that the threat from Trump this term is quite different than from previous Republican administrations.
His attacks on working people will certainly include the typical Republican approach of making it harder for workers to unionize, and passing legislation which economically helps the billionaires and hurts working people. Project 2025 lays out an ambitious plan in this regard, which would cut across protections for marginalized workers, defund pro-worker aspects of the regulatory state, expand misclassification, legalize company unionism, and allow states to exempt themselves from federal minimum standards. A new Republican-majority NLRB is also likely to curtail the rights of graduate workers to secure access to the National Labor Relations Act.
However, this time the typical weakening of workers rights will be paired with a more comprehensive assault on the most radical sections of our movement, as well as a co-optation of the more establishment-adjacent sectors of labor. Repression will be focused on those sections of labor willing to stand up to imperialism, mainly the pro-Palestinian movement within labor, and will be paired with wider assault by way of defunding and mass layoffs of those who seek to use their union power to support pro-social public services, especially teachers unions as well as unions in the civil service. At the same time, Trump will likely seek to bring a section of the labor movement close to him by way of handouts, especially those in the military-industrial complex and those unions with a disproportionately reactionary base, as we have already seen with the Teamsters union.
Divide and Conquer
Trump seeks to divide and conquer the labor movement. If Trump is successful, the result will be a labor movement too divided to launch a serious fightback. But to do so, he needs to win the reactionary wing of US labor, in order to keep the movement as a whole divided.
Trump’s choice of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-Deremer for Secretary of Labor is indicative of this strategy. Chavez-Deremer was one of only three Republicans to back the PRO Act, the main legislative push for labor under Biden which failed to pass. Now she has received this key appointment in the Trump administration with the endorsement of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters.
In reality, Chavez-Deremer is no champion of workers. She has received just a 10 percent voting approval rating from the AFL-CIO, which by our accounting is an F. Indeed, one of Chavez-Deremer’s biggest supporters is Nike, the shoe company long accused of relying on sweatshops in East Asia, and she has also received over $100,000 from AIPAC. Nonetheless, her appointment gives the labor-right a justification for making nice with the Trump administration.
Chavez-Deremer’s appointment follows O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention which, while short of a direct endorsement for Trump, nonetheless enhanced Trump’s pro-worker credentials.
The speech was also useful for O’Brien, helping him resonate with his right leaning members after some 59 percent of respondents in an internal union poll backed Trump. These numbers are not unique, but represent the march of MAGA from the police and border-patrol unions, through the building trades, and into the mainstream of the labor movement.
Trump’s economic-nationalist agenda which favors a revitalization of domestic manufacturing helps to facilitate his courting of labor. Trump’s critique of neoliberal globalist free trade has been a through-line in his politics since 2016, while his push to increase defense spending is a boon for certain unionized industries. Union leaders in these industries face the classic pressure of labor imperialism — more missiles, more airframes, more tanks means more jobs, and more jobs means more dues. Keeping the labor movement divided is an important task for Trump. If Trump can neutralize just a few major national unions, he can use them to disrupt the potential for unified action by the entire AFL-CIO.
Labor and Mass Resistance
Trump can court some sections of labor, but his program is anathema to the majority of the American labor movement and especially to unions in the public sector. Although the routing of the Harris/Walz campaign has left the liberal, labor, and left oppositions to Trump disoriented, it is all but inevitable that mass fightbacks will emerge during Trump’s second term, even if they do not emerge immediately.
Labor must not confine its energies to the fields of new organizing and contract fights, or even to basic defensive fights to hold onto organizing rights and conditions. Rather, the responsibility of the unions is to support popular mass resistance to Trump’s policies, providing symbolic and organizational support to attempts to block Trump’s policy roll outs, and using labor’s direct power to disrupt economic normalcy to materially reinforce the symbolic power of mass resistance. Only this level of resistance can be a threat to the Trump regime itself.
Although the way in which mass resistance develops cannot be pre-figured in advance, it is most likely that mass resistance will develop as a result of either sweeping layoffs in the civil service, attempts by Trump to roll out mass deportations, or an escalation of the US’s involvement in the current war.
During Trump’s first term, we saw the power of taxi drivers and flight attendants to disrupt Trump’s agenda through industrial action and the threat of a general strike. We also saw the largest protest movement in US history with the George Floyd Uprising, and the hope of a positive alternative in Bernie’s 2020 campaign. If such energies can be revived, threaded together, and directed strategically, with labor as a backbone, mass resistance can block Trump’s policies and even bring down his entire administration.
The Role Of Socialists In Labor
Just because mass resistance to Trump’s second regime is in the interests of the labor movement and the wider working class does not mean that it is in the interests of labor leaders. The majority of labor leaders are overwhelmingly bureaucratic in methods, uninspired in political outlook, and risk-averse and self-serving in orientation.
Some labor leaders may take a leading role in resistance on their own initiative, either because such resistance is in the interests of their members, their personal career, or their beliefs. But the majority of labor leaders will only act if pushed in one direction or another, preferring symbolic statements and risk-avoidance to bold material action. We will also quickly find out how large a proportion of the labor movement will be bought off into silence or active support by Trump.
While the spectrum in labor between those more sympathetic towards mass resistance, those caught in the middle, and those more open to accommodation with Trumpism is an objective fact determined by the structural position of the various industries within the capitalist-imperialist system and the balance of power within the unions, that does not mean that the role which the various sections of labor play is determined in advance.
Rather, the extent to which the radical sectors take effective and militant action, the middle layer are more or less brought along, and the reactionary layers remain latent (or vice-versa), is determined by the quality and quantity of our active intervention in the labor movement. If we intervene in the labor movement with a strategy for resistance which seizes on issues with majority support, puts forward effective tactics for their pursuit, and avoids minoritarian isolation, we can alter the degree to which the various sections of labor enter the field of class struggle. This requires socialists to lead and provide examples in the most militant unions, organize within the middling unions to push them towards supporting mass resistance, and block the worst expressions from within the reactionary unions.
Moreover, while DSA lacks unity on exactly how, when, and to what degree we should pursue politics independent from the Democratic Party, it is essential that within labor DSA members push in this direction, championing the idea of the need for a party for working people, and uniting the anti-Trump resistance with the fight for an alternative politics for working people.
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