America’s unions have had much to celebrate on recent Labor Days. Not this year.
President Donald Trump is trying to strip collective bargaining rights from approximately one million unionized federal workers. Just last week, he signed an executive order affecting union workers at federal agencies, including the National Weather Service and NASA, citing national security concerns. Earlier this year a similar order targeted unions at, among others, the departments of state, defense, justice and health and human services.
And because of the importance of public sector unions to the broader US labor movement, Trump’s moves could deal a massive blow to the union momentum that had been growing under President Joe Biden.
“This is the single largest attack on the labor movement in our history,” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, told CNN in an interview Friday. She said the labor federation fears what is going on with federal workers will expand to corporate America.
“An attack on one sector ripples over to another sector,” she said. “We know the playbook. And, you know, corporations are watching.”
Nearly half of union members nationwide work for different levels of government, not businesses. And the public sector is more unionized than the private sector – about 19% of civilian federal workers outside of the Postal Service belong to a union, compared to only 6% of workers in the private sector.
Labor leaders are concerned the Trump administration’s attack on federal workers and their unions will not only threaten labor’s political influence, but also their ability organize and win contract gains across all types of American employers.
“I think that what he’s doing, he is using the federal sector as a test (case), right?” Everett Kelley, president of American Federation of Government Employees, told CNN. “(It’s a) nod to the private sector, saying, ‘Okay, you go ahead and do the same thing. You know, we got your back.’ I think whether it’s private sector or public sector, you’re going to see more and more of it.”
For years, unions struggled as their economic and political clout waned. Only 10% of US workers now belong to unions, down from 20% in 1983.
But concerns over working conditions during the pandemic increased grassroots support for unions. And a strong job market in the years that followed, with more job openings than job seekers at times, helped embolden workers who might have been nervous otherwise about organizing efforts.
That led to a number of high-profile unionizations at large employers such as Amazon, Starbucks, Apple and Volkswagen’s US factory, breathing new life into the union movement.
While many of these new unions are still fighting for their first contracts, workers did win their first agreement at an Apple store in 2024.
More importantly, some established unions won large contract gains following major strikes over the past few years at Boeing, the East Coast ports, the Big Three Detroit automakers and the nation’s movie and television studios. Even just the threat of a strike scored big contracts at UPS, Costco and many airlines.
Biden was arguably the most pro-union president ever, becoming the first to join a picket line during the auto strike in 2023. His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor relations at most US businesses, issued a number of pro-union decisions while he was in office.
But in 2024, 45% of union households voted for Trump, according to CNN exit polls. Trump has said he supports union members, framing tariffs as a way to force companies to return union jobs back to America from overseas.
However, his policies have been anything but pro-union.
Shortly after taking office in January, the president fired an NLRB member in an unprecedented move, saying she was not doing enough to support employers.
Then in March, Trump signed an executive order stating that the federal government would no longer recognizing the right of wide swaths of federal employees to collective bargaining.
The order not only stripped workers of union protections but also stopped them from automatically deducting union dues from their paychecks. The AFGE has already been forced to cut about a third of its staff due to the financial hit.
Trump has made it clear he’s taking this action in part to weaken federal unions, who have “declared war on President Trump’s agenda” and “block Trump policies,” according to a White House fact sheet issued at that time.
“President Trump refuses to let union obstruction interfere with his efforts to protect Americans and our national interests,” it said.
The White House did not respond to questions about whether it would encourage employers at state and local governments to move to strip their public sector unions of their collective bargaining rights, or if it would encourage private employers to move to no longer collect union dues from workers’ paychecks and forwarding them to their unions or to move to no longer recognize their workers’ union representation.
“President Trump believes that American workers are the heart and soul of our economy, which is why he’s championed an agenda that always puts them first,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “”Under President Trump’s leadership, Republicans are once again the proud party of the American worker.”
He pointed to the Republican tax cut bill and the promises of new investment by businesses since Trump took office as pro-worker moves.
Trump is the not the first president elected with blue collar union support to take action against a federal union.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired the nation’s air traffic controllers when their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), went on strike. He replaced them with new hires.
Until that time, the hiring of replacement workers during strikes, while legal, was rare. But after PATCO, the practice became common practice by American businesses and was a major factor in the weakening of unions overall.
The concern now is that, like the PATCO firings by Reagan, businesses that were already battling unions will pattern themselves after the federal government and take more aggressive steps. But Shuler said the consequences of this latest attack could be far worse for the movement.
“People like to point back to PATCO, and that was a seminal moment. But this dwarfs PATCO,” she said. “If you think about canceling collective bargaining rights for nearly a million people with the stroke of a pen, you know this a problem for the whole movement.”
Federal unions have filed numerous lawsuits contesting Trump’s actions. So far, the rulings have been mixed, and no case has yet reached a final conclusion. The union officials say they continue to fight and predict they’ll prevail.
And union officials say they’re ready to take the fight to the private sector, too, if needed.
If public and private employers “think, ‘It’s open season on unions,’ they should think again,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents a large number of civilian workers in the Defense Department. “Workers in this country are angry. The unions are not going anywhere. We’re becoming stronger.”
This story was updated with a comment from the White House.
